I mostly post about strategy, and found my penny-drop moment about the state of UX in a podcast by strategy guru Roger Martin. It explains a lot.
Martin says he wasn't "allowed" to teach the content of his books at business schools, because there's an inexplicable rejection of Michael Porter. Porter developed the basic ideas that I think of as "strategy", and Martin's work is based on Porter.
Porter's definition of strategy can be summed up as: "what can we profitably offer, which customers need, and which competitors can't easily imitate?"
You need three pieces of information to answer that:
- reliable intel on what customers need
- reliable understanding of our own capabilities
- reliable knowledge of why customers choose competitors, and those competitors' capabilities
From that, Martin developed the core strategy question of "what would have to be true to make this a winning idea?" - in other words, research questions.
Martin says they now just teach the Resource Based View, which looks at 'VRIN' or inimitable capabilities. This is important for answering that competitor question, but ignores the positioning part of Porter - who needs it, why, and why is it it important?
If "resources" is all people think about, it's not hard to see the link to the underpants-gnomes attitude of product-led organisations - we build the stuff, and somehow people buy it.
They've never even been taught that meeting user needs vs competitors might be important!
When I think that a lot of managers don't seem to know what they're doing, they literally don't. If they have had a proper business education, including Porter, they will insist on experienced market analysts and UX researchers because they know they can't run a business without them.
It's interesting that 'entrepreneurship' is traditionally a module slapped onto the end of an MBA - it was never supposed to replace it.
Design Thinking and Lean UX were supposed to help big, established companies go faster - ones that already have mature research and design functions. In mature companies, they're only used on low-stakes supplementary products - no serious company would accept the business risk of making major decisions based on lightweight tests by amateurs! Design Thinking is led by Design.
"Customer-Centricity" is another term that most people get wrong. It's a business development term related to customer lifetime value, or the predicted lifetime spend of each customer type, calculated after enlisting professionals to conduct high quality consumer research to determine each segment's habits and behaviours - you have to have the right data or the numbers will be wrong.
The UX Civil War is what happens when managers don't know how to run a business.
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(Here's the podcast - I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but Roger Martin's always worth hearing: https://youtu.be/y7SN4FK8noY?si=HoJldyJe8SpmIXZx )
