UX Strategy 

Goal: Create a UX strategy and approach for a start up
Role: UX Strategy, UX Architecture
Scope: User research, customer journeys, roadmap and prioritization

The problem

We were a brand new start up with a lot of fun and exciting ideas. The ideas ranged from relatively easy "low hanging fruit" to grandiose solutions to huge problems. We needed a way to decide what to tackle and a systematic approach to making these decisions. The leap from idea to fully functioning product seemed huge and insurmountable. 

Our Approach

Working closely with the CXO, we engaged the co-founders and other team members in a series of working sessions to define the start-up's approach towards building a final product. We worked lean and fast, pivoting and iterating as needed.

Broadly speaking, the work we undertook fell into three phases:

1. Learning
2. Thinking
3. Planning

Learning
The first phase of work was focused on learning what we could about the space in which we were working. The learning phase focused on learning about products and learning about people. 

We conducted a thorough review of the competitive landscape and analogous solutions in other domains. We sought to learn: what makes these companies special and what can we glean from their experiences.

Primary and secondary research was done on potential users to understand their current financial product journeys and how we could best help them achieve their goals.

The outcome of this phase included: customer journeys, customer profiles, competitive reviews and learning documents.

Thinking
Armed with the research, the team defined the vision for the organization and the goals it hoped to achieve. What were the opportunities we could pursue? What did we want the product to achieve? What did we want the organization to achieve? Who could our users be? Who could benefit the most from what we built?

Through a series of working sessions, we started roughing out answers to these questions. These stakes in the ground were integral to being able to propel the business forward - but we knew that as a start-up we needed to work under the assumption that many of these answers may (and inevitably did) change.

We decided the first users were wanted to help were people who recently entered the workforce and were most likely facing big changes in their financial decision making. We named them the "new nesters". We created a profile for this user type based on primary and secondary research - this profile was validated through additional research and was used in future decision making.

Planning

Once we had defined who we were helping and what we were building to help them, we needed to create a plan on how to tackle the incredible scope of the problem space.

We created a customer journey for our initial users based on the medium term goals we wanted to help them achieve. Using the journey, the research, and our business goals, we prioritized our list of ideas - continually asking ourselves "we are nothing if we cannot X". We distilled the list of ideas and concepts to a list of "must-haves" and "should-haves" - the "nice-to-haves" were deferred for the future, and planning focused on the "must-haves".

Please note: most aspects the outcomes of this process are covered under a non-disclosure agreement, but I happy to discuss the process and approach IRL.