Key Takeaways:

• You’ll learn what business strategy is and where it impacts your work and opportunities.
• You’ll understand where your research skills provide much needed-missing value in the strategic process (and makes you more valuable to your organization).
• You’ll learn how qualitative and quantitative value merge and how to frame what’s missing to business peers that often don’t know the difference (or only value the latter).

The dirty little secret in the strategy world is that, aside from being expensive and slow, it is just plan sloppy. (Get a strategist alone and drunk sometime and they’ll admit it.)

The traditional tools of business strategy are the result of wishful thinking and oversimplification. Both conspire to identify the wrong opportunities, position the company inadequately, and set the company on a weak course. Designers, engineers, and even product managers, are often left to make the most of what they instantly understand as the wrong offering.

Designers and producers of all types should be leading and participating in business strategy, helping to set the direction of the company as well as its business model. Only then are their product briefs in-line with the opportunities they see in the field.

Even if you don’t know the traditional strategy tools (SWOT, positioning templates, etc.), this workshop will introduce you to a new, better process that leads to better outcomes for your customers, clients, users, and other stakeholders. Whether you’re invited into “the room” where and when strategy is set, you will better understand how to impact those conversations so that your job better aligns with the organization’s success. Don’t wait 25 years to be invited into this process! Start practicing it now, regardless of your role.

Being proficient in strategy helps designers better demonstrate their value to the rest of the organization—particularly to an organization’s (or client’s) leaders.