Strategy
Just as a navigational North Star leads travellers toward their destination, a well-defined UX strategy helps teams stay focused and serves as the foundation to build the right product.
Where are we going?
When building a product, the first step is to define the North Star. This is a simple and clear end goal, a summary of how success looks like. If we get there, the project was successful.
For example, when mobile payment methods were created, their North Star was “people can pay without their wallets”. An end goal that was easy to understand and be excited about. This was a big leap, however, and wasn’t achievable in one step, but it was a clear direction where they were going.
How do we get there?
To get closer to the North Star, we need smaller, achievable steps. Staying with the mobile payment example – to allow people to pay without their wallets – required a lot of smaller, meaningful features to enable that, like storing your payment cards in a digital wallet, securely protecting this, and a payment process between mobile and card machines. These were the milestones towards their North Star.
Did we get there?
Milestones are achievable steps, but more importantly, measurable steps. Key performance indicators (KPIs) linked to these milestones are used to track performance and progress towards them. Whether it’s customer retention, Net Promoter Score (NPS), or task completion rates, consistent measurement of these metrics will show how well you’re progressing towards your North Star. Is your strategy working or does it need adjustment?
It’s a team effort
It’s crucial that everyone involved is on board. By ensuring all departments understand and work toward the same North Star, they can rapidly implement changes that reflect the unified vision, even in the short term.
Usability
I believe excellent usability is the primary focus throughout the entire product development process. It’s essential to hit KPI’s in the short term, and keep your users coming back for more in the long run.
Learn & understand
Which are the areas for improvement? Look into existing data and feedback! Sometimes it is also beneficial to conduct a fresh audit of the existing customer experience to understand where the gaps are in the journey. Capture requirements, data and assumptions.
Fill knowledge gaps through research. This can involve surveys, usability testing and further user research methods to identify pain points or areas for improvement.
AI tools offer features that can help streamline data collected through the audit and ensure focus on the right areas during research.
Prioritize quick wins
Next step is to prioritise areas that can be improved quickly with minimal effort but deliver noticeable business impact.
For example, fixing a frustrating UI element, streamlining a common task, or addressing recurring customer service issues.
Don’t forget about the bigger, more complex customer problems. These could help you better understand and clarify the milestones you’re working towards in your product strategy.
Explore and build prototypes
One day, AI tools might allow us to abandon conventional design practices. Until that, they can reduce time spent on design exploration, encourages rapid iteration, and accelerate product development, all while keeping the focus on user needs and business goals.
As design time reduces rapidly, there is more opportunity on conceptualizing, testing and ultimately building a better thing for the customer.
Validate & iterate
Prototype the most promising concepts. Use them to gather input from users, stakeholders. This is the time to fail fast and highlights areas for improvement.
Iterate based on feedback. Enhance functionality, aesthetics, address usability concerns.
By adopting this step, the prototype gains a greater likelihood of solving the problems more effectively.
Applying the steps above will bring you closer to your milestones and ultimately to your North Star.
Check out how this works in practice.
Growth
You slowly transition from quick wins and first steps to scaling and embedding the vision into the organization’s DNA.
Build a backlog
Not all battles can be fought immediately. Take notes instead, build a backlog and track the tasks that require attention.
Capture feedback
Use the data and feedback to build your backlog. Not all will be significant or worth your team’s time. But it’s important to capture them to track what will your team say yes and not to.
Ruthlessly prioritize
Maintain your focus on the improvements that have significant value for the customer and align with your strategy. If something lives on the bottom of your list, it may not be as significant as previously thought.
Build Systems, not features
Just as a coherent story maintains a logical and easy-to-follow arc, a user journey should also be consistent, both visually and in terms of usability, and should provide a seamless experience for the user.
A design system provides a unified approach to design and development that ensures consistency, accelerates workflows, and enhances collaboration—all of which are essential for maintaining high-quality, scalable products.
Atomic principles
Atomic design structures design systems artifacts – starting with foundations like color, typography, and spacing. It then builds interfaces through a hierarchy of reusable components—atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages.
Reusable components
It streamlines the design and development process by providing reusable components, templates, and guidelines. Teams focus on solving unique problems and reducing repetitive tasks.
Scalability
Scales easily as projects grow, providing a consistent foundation for adding new features and pages. Teams can update or extend the system without disrupting the user experience.
Boosted collaboration
Promotes better collaboration by providing a shared language and guidelines, ensuring everyone is on the same page and reducing misunderstandings.
Easy handovers & onboarding
New team members can quickly learn by referencing the design system, which acts as a reference guide and facilitates smoother knowledge transfer.
Cost effectiveness
All things above result ultimately a huge cost savings for the organization.
The missing link between design and development – with the help of AI
AI tools – like Cursor’s and Figma’s MCP servers – can integrate with existing design systems. Prompt-coding tools like Cursor then connect to these servers, analyse and understand design tokens, components and other system artefacts. From this point they can implement front-end designs straight from Figma, or prompt-engineer new features with the use of your design system.
A classic product design workflow normally took months from multiple teams to prototype and implement a new feature – this reduces this time to weeks or less.
Do you have a design system?
If you have one, that’s a great start! I will ensure that further improvements align with your existing system.
I’ve worked with few and created some from ground up in the past few years.
If you don’t have one yet, it’s worth to consider it. The benefits for scalability, consistency and efficiency are easily measurable.
Also, creating and maintaining one became much easier recently, thanks to automated systems and the help of AI.
Document your changes
Documentation is essential, it helps to use and maintain your system. Is it possible to assemble a furniture without proper instructions? – probably yes, but nobody should.
A great documentation is important, not only to provide guidance, but to track and understand decisions and allow further improvements.
Rationale
It ensures everyone involved in the project understands the rationale behind each design decision.
Transparency
Documenting the reasoning behind each change creates accountability and transparency
Knowledge
Teams can analyze past decisions, learn from them, and build on them for future improvements.
Compliance
From 2025, digital products have to comply with accessibility standards in the EU (EAA). Considerations and rationale behind design decisions are required for compliance or legal purposes.
Revisit and evolve your Strategy
As your product and customer experience evolve, your strategy should adapt. Regularly reassess if the original vision still holds or if it needs refinement based on changes in customer needs, market trends, or business goals. As you scale, new challenges and opportunities will arise. Be prepared to adapt your strategy.
Transform your business
Finally, here are some principles to maintain growth by embedding UX into the organization’s DNA
Align cross-functional teams
Ensure alignment between product, design, engineering, marketing, and other teams. This may involve structured workshops or regular syncs, so everybody work toward the same customer experience goals.
Embed UX and CX into product development
Ensure UX is integrated into every product lifecycle stage, from ideation to post-launch evaluations. UX and CX represents the voice of the customer – just as important as any other stakeholder.
Create a user-centric mindset
Encourage a culture where feedback, both internal and external, is always welcomed and acted upon. This can be achieved by regular user and stakeholder interviews, engagement with customer-facing teams.
Foster a culture of continuous improvement
Empower teams to experiment with new ideas that may not be part of the initial plan but have the potential to significantly enhance the customer experience. Create safe spaces for innovation, where failures are seen as learning opportunities rather than setbacks.