Design Strategy is a term used to describe the relationship between corporate strategy and design ideas. Corporate Strategy is a traditional method used by enterprises and other entities to plan and achieve their long-term goals. Design Thinking is a method to solve problems by attracting end users to provide solutions based methods.

01/What is strategic thinking?

People tend to confuse strategic thinking with strategic planning, but there are great differences between them. Strategic planning involves collecting data and determining the path that a business or project will take to achieve its goals.

Strategic thinking involves everyone at all levels of the organization/design team, who needs to constantly find solutions for the enterprise in organizational activities. It requires team members to think strategically about macro goals, form a clear strategy, and then take action. In this process, each team member should participate in the formulation of strategies.

Strategic designers will ask themselves the following key questions:
• What is our current state?
• What goals do we need to achieve?
• What means do we need to achieve our goals?

Having strategic thinking is the key to achieving a reliable design strategy. When we think strategically, we focus more on solving problems, formulating clearer strategies, promoting positive behaviors, and establishing stronger ties with employees who feel more engaged and competent.

02/Applying strategic thinking to design strategies

For designers, it is very important to develop strategic thinking and cooperate with internal stakeholders. In this way, designers can better understand business goals and user goals, and can translate these requirements into meaningful design solutions.

Strategy and design can jointly create a better experience for customers. From the perspective of design, strategic thinking encourages designers to regard the design process as a mechanism to solve problems. First, identify problems, and then work with customers and teams to solve them.

03/How to implement strategic thinking in design

Formulating and implementing strategies is both an art and a science. It is very similar to design. As time goes by, strategic thinking has been practiced and improved. The following summarizes the framework for implementing strategic thinking in design:

• Assess -Understand the project in a holistic manner, including analyzing constraints, opportunities and achieving a holistic view through business perspective.

• Understand -Understand the project in terms of design and business objectives. Link project outcomes to business objectives and show key outcomes that contribute to achieving these objectives (e.g. KPI and OKR development).

• Learn -Formulate the elements of the strategy by planning the tasks and milestones that directly support the core goals (disassemble OKR), and raise deeper strategic questions (for example, who do we design the product for).

• Execute -Take action according to the strategy and ensure that the whole team reaches agreement on the way. The team can achieve a unified strategic thinking to ensure efficient collaboration.

• Check -After completing the task in the design process, it is better to reassess its effectiveness in achieving the expected goals and results.

Strategic thinking has a certain durability. It can establish a stronger connection between the customer and the design team, and show the value of design in a new way.

04/Benefits of Strategic Thinking in Design

• Efficiency - When we apply strategic thinking to design, the project will better meet customer needs, which will lead to fewer revisions and repetitive work in the design process, and reduce the time wasted by ineffective design.

• cooperation -Strategic thinking can help the whole team achieve a common goal, which means that the whole team will drive the design activities with a more long-term goal and bring about better collaboration.
• Better customer relationship -Strategic thinking will integrate the final design more closely with the business goals, which makes the goals between the design team and the customer consistent.
• Long term development -Strategic thinking can promote the continuous optimization and iteration of design strategies, thus leading to the continuous improvement of the design team's ability and the establishment of lasting cooperation with customers.

05/Examples of strategic thinking in design

A customer asked a designer for help and said that they needed a new landing page because the current landing page was outdated and could not help attract potential customers. At this point, the requirements given by the customer are vague and the goal is unclear (for example, I want a more fashionable or cleaner interface).

According to the traditional design process, the design team will accept the design requirements at this time. The design team will issue standard questionnaires to customers to collect requirements. After the form returns, the design team will start user research (such as competitive product analysis), and then the team will continue to promote the design of the project.

During this design process, the design team will repeatedly make iterative changes until the output results reach a level acceptable to the customer.

But what happens when we assume that the design team uses strategic thinking to execute the same project?

At this time, the designer will work with the team to evaluate the customer's requirements, solve any restrictions they may encounter at present (time, progress, personnel, etc.), and decide to continue the project.

The design team will no longer issue standard questionnaires to customers, but communicate closely with customers. They asked customers more targeted questions, such as "Why do you need a new website?" and "What is the proportion of your products sold through the website?", "What kind of sales growth do you want to see after the redesign?"

Through this discussion, the design team and the customer identified and agreed on a specific set of tasks that can achieve the customer's business goals. At the same time, they will mark the goals of the design task as quantifiable outcome indicators.

Therefore, the whole design team will focus on tasks and goals in the process of advancing tasks, which will help the team to cooperate and reduce communication friction with customers.

The strategic idea in the design can be implemented through a thoughtful strategic design process.

By formulating design strategies based on tactical methods, designers have completed the transformation from product implementers to product strategy makers, and they will work with customers to find problems that need to be solved. The strategic designer will no longer only consider the deliverables in the design process, but will consider whether the business goals can be successfully achieved.

There is no doubt that understanding the actual problems of customers and solving them in a pragmatic way will greatly improve the design efficiency and optimize the design target results.

06/Skills for improving strategic thinking

• Observe - Observe business goals and look for trends around them. Understand what customers care most about. Pay attention to the problems raised by the customer during the whole design process, and communicate with everyone in the team.
• Ask questions - As a designer with strategic thinking, you need to ask more questions and listen more to the views of others, so as to dig deeper into user needs.
• Unified strategic goal - a unified strategic goal can enable the team to focus on the realization of core goals, improve collaboration, and optimize efficiency.

Successful implementation of design strategies requires a strategic thinking mode, which enables us to focus more on solving problems and improve our ability to keep business goals consistent.