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Building know-how from the ITX team blog

Is Your Product Strategy a ‘Word Salad’?

Frameworks, however flawed, are critical tools for leaders. Having a system to help you think clearly, segment activities, and create priorities, will help you create momentum and scale thinking through those you lead. It will help you achieve better strategic and tactical outcomes. The higher up you go in an organization, the more important it is to be able to share ideas and structure thinking in a memorable way.

Useful Frameworks

A useful framework will serve to order the thinking of your teams in ways that will align them, promote project confidence, and elicit intrinsically motivated, authentic commitment. It will reduce the collective cognitive load associated with strategy and prioritization and allow your teams and the people on them to spend more time creating and working toward your shared strategic goals. Analogies, metaphors, and contextual models, in the form of a framework, help us scale our leadership through others. When teams are using the same language and shared context, through metaphors, outcomes will improve.

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An Advocacy Strategy is Nutrition for a Healthy Culture

I travel a lot. I could always choose the cheapest airline, or the most convenient, or I could look for the airline with the most comfortable seats. I don’t. I always start with Delta airlines. Why? Because I believe that they run a responsible business that cares about the people it serves. My family recently traveled and had a bag come open somewhere in transit. I’ll spare you the details of what was lost, but I will tell you that it was something very important to our trip. Delta made us feel as though they mobilized, what felt like, a small army of people searching across the baggage claim systems of three airports until our problem was solved. More importantly, they kept us looped in, by text and phone, on the progress as they worked it out. Even though the device was forever lost, we actually felt good about our relationship with the airline in the end.

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The Calculus of Trust

Many of my friends distrust their internet providers. The cable company I subscribe to for internet services, for example, has clearly demonstrated that they don’t care about my family. To fix a recent bandwidth issue, we had to call several times, explain our problem to several people and ask to speak to a manager to finally get a technician to visit our home to troubleshoot the recurring latency issues. Their gross demonstration of incompetence and lack of concern for me led me to have deep feelings of distrust for the firm. Even though the technician who ultimately resolved the issue was competent and clearly wanted to do a good job, the corporate bureaucracy, incompetence, and clear placement of profits over people broke any trust I had down. While my family is still paying for the service, the moment a better alternative comes along, what do you think we will be doing? I assure you, based on many conversations that I have had since the incident, that I am not alone.

If we take the time to break trust down and describe it mathematically, it will help us to be more purposeful with our language when we speak about it and when we use it to lead others. It will also help us to brainstorm and craft our tactical approach to earning more trust in more powerful ways with our teams.

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The Product Manager’s Dilemma: For Which Jobs Is Jobs-To-Be-Done Best Suited?

Demystifying Task Analysis of the JTBD Strategy

When I first waded into the JTBD pool a decade ago, I found myself conflicted. I was enamored with this theoretical approach to making disruptive strategies into executable roadmaps to solve customers’ needs, but I was simultaneously confused by the cottage industry terms that cropped up around the JTBD community.

The ancestry of the JTBD theory can be directly traced back at least 25 years to Tony Ulwick’s book, Business Strategy Formulation, and later codified in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution. Before these, dozens of marketing and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) works reference many forms of Task Analysis, which closely resemble Jobs processes.

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Key Takeaways from the 2021 Design + Diversity Conference

Embedding inclusive design and user accessibility into our everyday ways of working starts with us designers. At ITX, we walk the talk and take our commitments seriously. So when we learned about the 2021 Design + Diversity Conference, we made a point to show up – in force.

The 3-day, virtual event featured a diverse set of speakers and attendees. Conference keynotes addressed the following topics, each fundamental to the growth and acceptance of inclusive design…

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Why Adopting a Diverse and Inclusive Mindset Matters in Your Product Development Process

Whether you’re building products for hundreds, thousands, or millions of individuals, design that provides as many points of access as you have users is no longer a nice-to-have. For reasons based not only in social responsibility but in sound business management, inclusive design is a must. And embedding it into our everyday ways of working begins with the designers and design teams whose duty it is to carry the banner forward.

Over the past few years, the UX design team at ITX started thinking about adopting a more inclusive lens in our work and soon came to realize why it was so important to us as designers, but also as human beings.

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How We Championed a Product Inclusion Mindset

If the mission of User Experience is to design experiences that improve the lives of others, how can we allow the process we use to conceive these experiences, and ultimately the product or service themselves, to exclude whole segments of people? That is precisely what happens when we allow irresponsible design practices to deliver harm through the experiences we’ve helped create.

To begin to address these flaws, designers need education around inclusion, awareness of what inclusive design looks like, and a pathway to action that embeds inclusive practices into the design and development process.

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Why Client Advocates Are the New Currency in the Age of Digital Disruption

The sooner business leaders turn their attention from Profit to Advocacy as the primary measure of success, the sooner they will see growth in both. Profit offers a snapshot of success, but Advocacy is predictive of future success. As long you as continue its care and feeding, Advocacy will remain the gift that keeps on giving.

Building a client base of advocates gives you a big leg up on the competition. It means that you’re surfing the wave of digital disruption instead of being dragged along the jagged reef below. It may even mean that you are the disruptor – not only of competitors in your space, but of yourself too. That’s a good thing. And advocates help you do both.

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Prioritizing Stakeholders Drives Targeted, Impactful Outcomes

Why Treating Every Client As #1 Gets Us In Trouble

Clarifying Our Vision Through Strategic Stakeholder Prioritization

In any thriving business, possessing a clear, mutually understood vision of whom your organization serves stands as the hallmark of robust strategy and compelling leadership. This understanding becomes particularly critical as organizations expand, necessitating that leadership teams grasp and effectively communicate the complexities of stakeholder hierarchies. These hierarchies guide more informed, effective decision-making that aligns with the organization’s long-term objectives.

However, misconceptions or misalignments within these hierarchies can lead to significant strategic missteps, often manifesting as widespread confusion about the primary focus of service. This blog proposes a structured approach to dissecting and prioritizing stakeholders to ensure targeted, impactful engagements.

Several years ago, I collaborated with a major corporation grappling with a technology crisis. To make a long story short, market criticisms about security vulnerabilities within their key software precipitated a hasty decision to overhaul and re-platform the application. Driven by a reactive concern for market perceptions – primarily focused on stock price impact – the corporation’s leadership mandated a rapid redevelopment cycle. This rush sidelined potential incremental improvements, aiming instead for feature parity with the legacy system.

Upon release, the new version (while technically superior) failed to meet user expectations. This led to market backlash and a tarnished brand reputation. While totally understandable, this scenario exemplifies a breakdown in understanding service hierarchies, where the focus skewed too heavily toward investor concerns at the expense of user satisfaction.

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Could IT Legacy Modernization Have Kept the Lights on in Texas?

Consider the recent weather-related tragedies in Texas. Most seem ready to pin the blame on Texas’ near-total isolation from the rest of the U.S. power grid. And they’d be right – but only in part. The Lone Star State’s grid independence actually got its start nearly 100 years ago as a way to avoid federal regulators.

Still, that piece of trivia ignores what many are calling leaders’ longstanding indifference to IT infrastructure problems that, when examined critically, could bear responsibility for the widespread power outages, extensive property damage, and tragic loss of life throughout Texas.

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