Aligning the user experience with business goals is crucial for gaining stakeholder support. Stakeholders aim to boost product and service sales, and achieving alignment often involves setting clear, overarching objectives and goals. Setting the right goals is the hardest but most important part of creating the right UX Strategy.

A social media company might set its goal to be “increasing time spent on user engagement.” The clarity of identifying which metrics are directly related to the company’s goals simplifies developing a UX Strategy that meets both user needs and business objectives in order to foster a unified direction for the organization. In this example, social media companies make business by selling ads to advertisers. The more a user engages with the platform, the more they are likely to spend time on it, thus more eyes on ads. That is why such a goal makes sense to them.

Compare that to the goal of “Saving 100 million lives.” While a noble goal, if I am selling a SaaS product that may eventually help those who use the product to save lives, how can I directly contribute to the goal? Furthermore, if I am a UX Designer, how do I translate that into my day-to-day work when I am designing features or conducting UX research?

Identify an Actionable Company Goal

It is common for companies to confuse the company’s mission or vision with the goal. In the second example, while a great goal, there is no clarity in what I can directly do as a Product Manager or a UX Leader to contribute to inching closer to achieving it. There are many frameworks for setting goals. Two of my favorites are Jim Collins’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) and North Star Goals.

In the early days of Amazon, the BHAG for the company was “Every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.” I love this goal because it was specific and had something for everyone in the organization to check their effort against. If a project reduced the number of books, then it is not aligned with the rest of the organization. If engineering efforts increase the time to find the book, it is not helpful.

Spotify’s North Star Goal of “Time Spent Listening” is a good example of a simple and easy-to-measure and align-to goal. It is also clear how it contributes to the success of the company. Time spent listening tells us whether users enjoy the product and content and contributes to Spotify’s business model. Does your organization’s goal give you the clarity to take action or help you set clear smaller goals and metrics? If the answer is no, there may be more work to do.

For our purpose, we are going to assume that the organization has already identified a clear goal. Let’s assume we are working with a North Star Goal.

Understanding Users

The UX strategy should focus on aligning user needs with business goals. Happy users stay users. Use different research methods to identify user pain points, needs, goals, and opportunities. There are many tools like surveys, interviews, and usability testing, etc.

It is also important, especially for enterprise products, to know the difference between customers and users. For most consumer products, most of the time they are one and the same, but in enterprise SaaS products many times the buyer is not the same as the user. This situation often causes a conflict between the business goals and the user’s needs. For many customers in this scenario, they may not feel the pain users are experiencing and may not give priority to addressing them. Internal teams such as sales, and product may be focused more on the customer needs to increase sales and ignore the needs of users. It is important to understand the need of both and find a balance to serve them.

In this process, also gather feedback from other groups in the organization like product management, sales, marketing, and other customer-facing teams. The goal is not to commit to any effort, rather to gain an understanding of what everyone thinks the current pain points, needs, and opportunities are. Project prioritization will be done with Product Management; the goal is to identify the strategy.

Align UX Objectives with Business Goals

Translate your North Star Goal into specific UX objectives. For instance, if your North Star Goal is “To empower businesses to achieve seamless operational efficiency,” your UX objectives might include simplifying or automating complex processes, enabling easy integration with other tools, or providing actionable insights through analytics. Each UX objective should be a stepping stone toward achieving the North Star Goal.

It is likely that research is going to lead to identifying many areas to improve. Use the North Star Goal along with the research to prioritize features, improvements, and initiatives.

From our objectives, we can identify the metrics to measure whether the strategy is inching us closer to our North Star Goal. The metrics may be unique by organization, team, or product. Whatever your team ends up identifying, it should align with the goal. As an example, Spotify could focus on gaining a new type of audience by introducing new content. By increasing the audience size, they can increase the time spent listening. In this case, the goal may be the number of users listening to this new genre of content.

Communicate the Vision

Continuously communicate the North Star Goal and how the UX strategy supports it, both within your team and to the broader organization. This keeps everyone aligned and motivated, ensuring that day-to-day decisions reinforce the long-term vision.

The UX Strategy along with the business goals will help other teams make decisions. If the UX objectives include to improve navigation and task efficiency, engineering may need to hire different talent such as more experience Front-End Engineers to help achieve the goal. If the goal is to provide better analytics, then it may require to hire a new team with the appropriate experience or work with a vendor to deliver advance reporting capabilities.