A podcast from IDEO U with Roger Martin about strategic planning got me to think about what a strategy is. Roger Martin explains strategic planning is influencing uncontrollable things, customers, by planning things that are under the control of the company such as human resources, budget, and real estate. He stresses that strategic planning is used for just planning.
Many teams in companies have either strategy or planning in their name, sometimes both. What does that mean? Are they all dealing with strategy or planning or both?
As a junior in a design strategy team, this podcast made me rethink my team’s role. What is the role of a design strategy team and are we dealing with strategy or planning?
A Design Strategy Team assists executives in making strategic decisions by providing relevant information
Leaderships are busy dealing with immediate challenges and tons of information endlessly coming to their desks. They cannot go over all reports and meeting notes. Still, they must go into the meeting to discuss and make decisions. The design strategy team is the one who assists in this area. The team filters out the design-relevant agendas from the vast amount of information and then guides design leaders in a better direction for them.
Since the role of the team is situated in the very early stage of product development information is often ambiguous and design leaders provide minimal directions and often require immediate response.
Creating design briefs for decision-making on product production design concepts.
The design brief introduces the design concept of the product to the executives to persuade, explain, and get approval on design-related agendas. The design strategy team takes responsibility for creating design briefs in the early concept-building phase of cross-functional production projects.
Align with design leadership on product design concepts
Design brief work is half done when aligned on the design concept of the product with the design management. Aligning with management is important since they are the ones presenting the design brief to the executives. To be on the same page with the leadership, the design strategy team should understand their design philosophy and value by keeping up with the recent words from meetings, daily conversations, and public speeches.
Organize design-related agendas from product development committees
The design strategy team is involved in many committees in the early stages of product development. In this early phase, the product concept is the main agenda. Cross-functional project team persuades and negotiates to take advantage of conditions for their teams such as target market and customer segments, price and target sales, technical specs, design, and more. The design strategy team stands for the design aspect of the product. The team collects the design-related agenda and organizes it into different cases of decisions. Then, share with design leadership to decide what agenda to push harder and what to give up.
Conduct secondary research for design concept reasoning
To win the design advantageous conditions from committee meetings, the design strategy team translates design language into appropriate languages — engineering and business. The team consolidates both internal and external reports on the market, industry, design assessment, socio-cultural changes, and so on to back up the design agendas. It is also the role of the team to manage external research partners such as a big data company to get data and insights into design reasoning for the design brief.
Conducting market and trend research to guide design leadership on design directions for brands and products
Companies with their products in many different regions around the globe need a localized strategy. The design strategy team guides the design leadership on specific information requested on regions as well as informing them of trends and competition situations.
Define the product line-up coverage for the region
As a part of localizing the business to different regions, the line-up of products varies by region. The design strategy team understands the current and near-future product line-up in specific regions from a design aspect. The team analyzes the spectrum of the designs of the products as well as their alignment with the design trend. In some cases, the company decides to have region-specialized products. For these exclusive products, deciding the design concepts in the existing product line-up is also a part of the design strategy team’s role.
Research on the market, consumer, and design trend
Sensing how the customer’s lifestyle changes is important in design. Therefore, the design strategy team senses the design trend in different fields — automotive, products, CMF, concept art — as well as market and industry. This trend gives the design leadership where the design of products as a whole line-up should gradually move on.
Analyze competitors in different regions
Competitors monitoring is important to not have a similar design theme with them which will weaken the brands’ design originality and competency. Analyzing the major competitor’s products, the design strategy team extracts the elements that the brand can have competency over the competition in terms of design. The gap between the products with their competitors is the information that design leadership is often asked from stakeholders and executives. So, being updated with the latest data and putting effort into catching up and going beyond the competitors is key.
Sharing the design vision in/outside the company to show the contribution of design
To get what the design wants in the product development process, it is important to have the design organization keep growing. The design strategy team assists in expanding the influence of design in the company by getting recognition as well as guiding the company to a high design maturity organization.
Share design vision with other divisions
Higher design maturity of the organization leads to a quality decision to design. The design maturity depends on how the staff recognizes the value of design and how the design process works. The design strategy team makes the design vision into easily understandable material and introduces it to many other divisions by having exclusive sessions and putting an agenda in committee meetings. Additionally, getting aligned with the design vision with the executives puts power on the design organization.
Prove the performance of the design
Getting recognition from an independent third party reinforces the importance of the design. Proving the design performance by getting design awards is one of many examples proving the big contribution to the success of the products. The design strategy team collects data that can show the design performance such as sales records, customer feedback, design awards, and more.
I tried to organize myself what the design strategy team does. It is now more clear what the team does. However, some additional questions have emerged.
- Who does the strategy?
Strategy teams seem to assist leaders in making strategies. Does that mean people with authority can only make strategy? - What is the role of a junior in the strategy team?
Information collecting and organizing is the main job of the team. Then, what should be different between juniors and seniors in dealing with information and managing senior stakeholders? - What is the expertise and how will the career unfold?
The role of a strategy team can be applied to different as its main tasks are domain-generic. Then, what expertise can make me unique in the market?