Be More Strategic

After a lively debate, one person finally asked the right questions: What’s the overall goal here? What information is essential? What do we need to do with it once we’ve collected it? He pulled us out of the weeds and helped us to see the bigger picture, enabling us to make smarter, more informed decisions. Understanding the users’ needs and the goals for the flow helped the designer make it as efficient and enjoyable as possible.
Tackling a new research problem is exciting and invites creative, critical thinking. But it’s all too easy to jump in and get caught up in the details of crafting just the right wording for an elusive question or cultivating the perfect crescendo of questions. Remember to take a step back and consider the larger picture and the core goals for your research project. Why are you doing this research? What do you hope to get out of it?
Once you’ve collected abundant, rich data from your qualitative research sessions, you’ll need to sift through your data to identify the valuable insights that address your main goals. But don’t be tricked by fool’s gold! At first, it might be painful to disregard much of your data, but this is necessary to gain clarity.
Our stakeholders wanted to focus on the usability issues because we had the most control over them, but we weren’t sure that fixing the usability issues would address the larger awareness and adoption issues. We raised this issue, asking our stakeholders to clarify our key goals for the research—improving adoption or improving usability? Only once our team had agreed upon our main goal could I start planning appropriately targeted research.
Without adequate focus on your goals, your research will tend to take on a life of its own and morph into an ill-formed morass. In addition to delineating your research goals up front, it can be helpful to define the expected outcomes of your research. These could be anything from developing a journey map, to better understanding users’ mental models of a feature, to making a decision about the future of a product offering. By pausing to define the desired outcomes at the beginning of your research, you can stay more focused on your goals.
Work with your stakeholders to carefully craft your research goals. Once you’ve established them, they should be the North Star that guides you as you plan, moderate, analyze, and present your research.
You always need to come back to why you’re doing your research. What do you want to learn? What’s the bigger picture? What are some assumptions you may be taking for granted? What are you ultimately trying to get out of this research?
Sometimes we throw ourselves into planning and executing our user research, getting caught up in the details, until someone barges in and asks a simple question: Why?
The key to duplicating yourself is duplicating the systems and processes that allow for quality of work to remain high. For most, this is the biggest step back. You see margins drop and your time expenditure temporarily increases. It is predictably more chaotic and uncomfortable.
Often, people get caught up in the minutia of a task and overlook the impact. Take time to assess the outcome or results of your work, not just the actions you’ve taken. “What was the challenge I addressed? What specific benefits did my contribution have for my firm?” When you see you’ve had a positive effect and can label your accomplishment, you may be able to stop overanalyzing and move on.
Take some time every quarter or six months to evaluate where you are right now.
Instead of burdening yourself with speed, start asking yourself — “What do I need to stop?” How did I perform? How do I compare to my own standards? What’s a new experience you can add to your life or career?
Like everything, strategic thinking takes practice. If you don’t prioritise it, you’ll drop it in favour of tasks that might seem urgent, but that won’t get you where you want to be. If you make it a habit, it will become the best time you’ll ever spend.
When things are busy, but limited tangible progress is being made towards your end goal, you should take a step back and assess why.
Whenever you find yourself trying to make a big decision, move forward with some area of your life, overcome a challenge or obstacle or just feel like things aren’t where you want them to be, it’s important to take a step back, look at the big picture and identify what you really want before you move forward. When you step back from your life, your career, your path and look from a bit of a distance, you see things from a different perspective.
Reflect on the activities that helped you move ahead or wasted your time. Reflection time each day allows you to ask yourself if you what you learned and how to stay on track with your goals. This is where inspiration and creativity have a chance to grow and be seen.
“How do I make sure I’m thinking about the big picture, when I’m always working on a lot of small things that seem to take up all my time?”
But the transition from tactical leadership to strategic leadership calls on you to ask questions rather than answer them, to focus on your highest value work rather than “block and tackle,” to chart new paths rather than continue to operate within and execute the status quo.
Nurturing a relationship, such as one that could provide unique insight into a supplier, a customer or a competitor can be highly strategic.
The tactical mindset is about getting things done, putting out fires and being the expert. The strategic mindset is about aligning with organizational objectives, discovering the unknowns and being a facilitator between ideas, people and plans.
With the larger goals of the organization top of mind, they look for connections they can make across functional teams, departments and even operations. They put as much value in building relationships with peers as they do coaching their teams and building a leadership pipeline.
When you first get promoted to a senior leadership position, one of the hardest parts of the transition is getting out of the weeds. Let’s face it: every potential use of your time is not equally important. You have to prioritize and focus on the things that need your attention.
We often find that leaders make assumptions about the skills, capabilities and motivation levels of others by applying a one-size-fits all delegation approach. Instead, good leaders need to asses each individual’s will and skill level in order to determine who can be trusted to handle what, and how much direction vs. support each individual needs. The ultimate goal is to need to provide less hands-on direction and more support.
As a senior leader, highest value activities often include:
Coaching direct reports to build a leadership pipeline and improve retention
Nurturing strategic relationships with peers and brokering connections to break down silos and foster greater collaboration
Bringing the big picture view to your teams that are focused necessarily on their specific tasks and goals, by creating a climate that sets them up for success
Challenging the status quo to spark innovation
Creating a culture that supports the vision and values of the organization
Expanding your perspective also involves actively seeking information outside your sphere: both within your organization and outside it. Developing stronger connections with peers, both internally and externally, as well as with customers through regular conversation will improve insight into current situations
Without time for reflection, decision making becomes reflexive and based on past experience rather than a clear perspective on the current situation and potential opportunities. To come up with new, innovative approaches and to be able to gauge the likelihood of success, you need to devote some serious time to thinking.
Many clients know what they don’t want but aren’t as clear on what they do want. You need to be clear on what you want before you can effectively move forward.
Others know to some extent what they want, but it’s not nearly specific enough for them to go out and get it. Saying “I want a new job” is really different than saying “I want a part-time job where I can be surrounded by like-minded people in sports entertainment.”
Merely fantasizing about your goal is de-motivating–it actually tricks the brain into thinking you already have achieved it.
During analysis of your research findings, it’s important to focus on your participants’ deeper needs and wants, not simply accept their initial suggestions. For example, if a participant says she wants color-coded communications, dig deeper to find out why she wants this. Does she need quick visual cues to aid in skimming content, or does she just want more color in her life? Her answer will have significant design and product implications.
Make sure you don’t make assumptions based on what research participants say. Instead continue questioning participants until you fully understand their deeper needs. If you find a user has suggested color coding to help her categorize and scan communications more quickly, you can consider other options that would also aid quick skimming—such as clearer subject lines or having a consistent structure across all communications. As a researcher, you need to thoroughly understand the users’ problem and leave their solutions to product, design, and development.
If you’ve ever received feedback that you “need to be more strategic,” you know how frustrating it can feel. To add insult to injury, the feedback rarely comes with any concrete guidance on what to do about it.
Be proactive about connecting with peers both in your organization and in your industry to understand their observations of the marketplace. Then, share your findings across your network.
Common obstacles for leaders
- “I’m not very organized with my time…”
- “I don’t feel like I am adding value if I am not ‘doing’…”
- “I don’t delegate to my team members as much as I should…”
- “I don’t really know how to step back…”
If strategic thinking is your goal, you must master your ability to break free periodically from the day-to-day in order to think more broadly, beyond your functional area and onto the bigger picture. When he was running Microsoft, Bill Gates was known to take entire weeks off to ruthlessly prioritize and ponder solutions, not deal with problems.
Many managers find themselves in this trap – they are still so attached to the day-to-day execution of tasks that they have no brain space to do the strategic work necessary to advance themselves and their teams