The UX Strategy Sprint
Three sessions in which your team creates a UX strategy for the product, or for the big initiative ahead. We go from a shared picture of the current customer experience to a direction and vision for the future. Your team sets the UX goals and metrics that will steer the work after the sessions.
Who this is for
The UX Strategy Sprint is for teams that need to refocus on their customers before a high-stakes project or a complex feature. In practice, the situation usually looks like this.
Your team ships constantly. Whether any of it moves the business is hard to tell. Roadmap decisions get settled by instinct, sales pressure, or the highest-paid opinion in the room, argued in good faith on whatever evidence was nearest: the last angry customer email, a competitor’s screenshot someone saw on LinkedIn.
When a company can build faster than it can decide what to build towards and why, the product development team ends up building guesses. A missed bet costs development time, budget, and team morale. The worst part is how long it can take to realise you were building the wrong thing all along.
The shared picture of the customer experience and the UX goals that would ground those decisions come out of collaborative design work most teams never get the time or the facilitation to do. The UX Strategy Sprint provides both, at speed, even where much of the functional requirements work is already done.
Signs you need the UX Strategy Sprint
If some of these sound familiar, the timing is right
- A large commitment is ahead: a rebuild, a major new capability, a new product area. The business case is settled, but the team has no shared vision yet of how the customer experience should change to make it a success.
- Roadmap priorities get re-argued from zero every quarter, with the same options on the table and no criteria to weigh them. The list that comes out satisfies nobody and lasts only until a big customer demands something else.
- Product, design, and engineering each give a different answer to where the product is going. Every answer sounds reasonable on its own, but together they contradict one another.
- Whenever the product’s direction for the next two or three years comes up, the team answers with a feature list rather than a cohesive vision of how the customer experience will improve. The feature list is not a vision.
How it works
Three facilitated sessions, remote or in person. Your team creates the strategy; KSLV runs the process. The strategy works because the people who will execute it build it themselves. Every shared drive has a graveyard of strategy decks handed over by outside consultants; the plans built inside the team are the ones that get executed. The sessions run on a UX framework that aligns the team and ties customer-centric goals to business objectives.
- Preparation KSLV reviews the customer material you already have and talks with a few of your key stakeholders, so the sessions start from an organised picture of what your company already knows.
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The team builds one shared picture of the relevant aspects of the current customer experience, and marks what it knows from evidence against what it assumes.
Session one:
The current experienceHalf a day
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The team aligns on UX goals: the specific positive shifts in customer experience that the product changes you are planning should produce. Each goal comes with ways to check whether the shift you are aiming for is happening.
Session two:
UX goals and metricsHalf a day
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The team visualises the experience your customers will have once everything you have set out to do is done well. A tangible vision for the whole company to work towards.
Session three:
The visionFull day
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After the final session, KSLV consolidates everything your team agreed into a document your company can act on.
Result:
The UX strategy document
Workshop participants
In most cases a group of six to ten people participates. The right set of participants depends on the scope. For work on one part of the product, a capability or a workflow, that means the product manager, designers, and engineering lead responsible for it, together with your product and design leadership. For rethinking the product’s value proposition as a whole, or working on a wider product vision for the next few years, the CPO and the CEO should be in the room.
Whatever the scope, adding the leads of customer-facing teams (support, sales, customer success) usually makes sense as well. They speak with your customers every day; the sessions need what they hear.
You walk away with a UX strategy your team created and stands behind
The UX strategy document captures everything the sessions settled: the map of the current experience, the UX goals with their metrics, the research gaps that surfaced along the way, and what all of it means for the coming quarters of your roadmap. Use it to design specific solutions and to plan work, from quarters down to single delivery cycles.
Alongside it, the outline of the future experience vision your team has created, and the toolkit: the working formats your team used in the sessions, ready for the next initiative without KSLV.
And because the people who build the product decided the direction together, they are fully aligned on it and can communicate the vision internally with confidence.
What changes afterwards
After the sessions, a few practical things change in how your team runs the initiative we’ve worked on.
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Success criteriaGoals for features and improvements are set in customer-centric terms: do they help your customers succeed? Each major release then comes with success criteria to judge it against, so the team sees what worked and corrects course where it missed.
Everything you ship under this strategy becomes measurable
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IntentionalityThe next quarter is decided against one agreed picture of where the experience is going in the long run. Direction stops being re-guessed every quarter.
Bets get chosen for reasons
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AlignmentThe vision, the direction, and the logic behind them are shared by everyone, from leadership to the people building the product. Everyone knows what customer success looks like and how to measure it, so work at every level reinforces the same goals.
The whole team works from the same picture
If your situation is different
- You need alignment on one initiative, at a smaller scale For a single feature or capability that does not warrant three sessions, the Initiative Kickoff does the essential part in one three-hour session: the team sets customer-centric goals for the initiative and aligns on what its success will look like.
- You need a lasting customer-centric shift across your organisation In the UX Strategy Programme, the team builds a long-term UX strategy while gradually changing its ways of working towards a customer-centric approach.
Let’s talk
Thirty minutes is usually enough to know whether the UX Strategy Sprint fits your situation. If it is the right step, we agree the practical details and go from there.