User experience (UX) strategy lies at the intersection of UX design and business strategy, but until now, there hasn't been an easy-to-apply framework for executing it. This hands-on guide introduces lightweight product strategy tools and techniques to help you and your team devise innovative digital solutions that people want. Author Jaime Levy shows UX/UI designers, product managers, entrepreneurs, and aspiring strategists simple to advanced methods that can be applied right away. You'll gain valuable perspective through business cases and historical context. This second edition includes new real-world examples, updated techniques, and a chapter on conducting qualitative online user research.Define value propositions and validate target users through provisional personas and customer discovery techniquesExplore marketplace opportunities by conducting competitive research and analysisDesign experiments using rapid prototypes that are focused on the business modelConduct online user research to gain valuable insights quickly on any budgetTest business ideas and validate marketing channels by running online advertising and landing page campaignsWho Should Read This Book?The book has 10 chapters. Chapter 1 establishes what UX strategy and product strategy are. Chapter 2 introduces the UX strategy framework that will shape all the tools and techniques in this book. Chapters 3 through 9 teach you how to perform product strategy techniques. And finally, Chapter 10 wraps everything up with a brief conclusion.This book addresses the large knowledge gap between product design and business strategy. It was written with the following types of product makers in mind. Product/UX strategist, product manager/owner, entrepreneur, or member of a corporate innovation teamYou want to lead your team—designers, developers, marketers, and so on—to craft a successful product with a frictionless UX. However, there are limitations on your time, cash, and other resources, and that means focusing your team’s efforts on efficient product strategy techniques. You understand Lean Startup principles and want to cut corners on research and evaluation, but you also know that you need to make decisions based on a sound strategy. This book will provide you and your team with the necessary lightweight tools for testing business ideas, conducting competitive research, and validating marketing channels. Product designer, UX/UI designer, or UX researcherYou’re frustrated. You feel like you are a cog in the wheel making design or research deliverables. You want your work to be more innovative and holistic, but you aren’t involved with product definition at a strategic level. You fear that you are hitting a career wall because you don’t have a business degree or marketing expertise. This book will teach you how to push back when you find yourself in the following situations:- You’re assigned to create user flows and wireframes for a product that you believe is just a rip-off of an existing one. You don’t want to spend the next six months reinventing the wheel. This book will show you how to be innovative by systematically cherry-picking functionality from your competitors and influencers and integrating them with a less-is-more approach.- You have a stakeholder who is 100% certain that their product vision is right, and you are told to implement it as is. You want to do market research to help them deviate from their original vision, but they won’t give you or your team the budget. This book will demonstrate different options for being intrapreneurial and collecting evidence regardless of the situation.- You have an existing product and are told to come up with new features that will help acquire new customers and increase engagement. This book will show you how to design experiments using rapid prototypes for validating concepts through online user research studies and landing page smoke tests.