The story of this Playbook started in late 2012 when I was a design leader at a large software company leading the centralized design group responsible for the user experience (UX) design for most of the company’s leading products. At that point, I had spent close to six years in UX design leadership in two separate organizations, starting as associate UX manager before being promoted to managing director of design.

As part of my career planning conversation with my manager, the topic of aspirations came up. I was itching to transition my role from design leadership into business leadership, where I felt that I could make a more holistic impact in the organization. As a result of this conversation, the company sponsored me to attend Harvard Business School’s famed General Management Program, an executive education program designed for senior leaders to get an end‐to‐end management training. The program was a transformational experience for me, as I was surrounded by more than 100 accomplished leaders who had achieved a lot and were now in the similar pursuit of gaining more formal business learning.

There were two key takeaways for me here: First, I learned the power of frameworks; the professors would consistently iterate and set up simple frameworks that students could understand, teach, and replicate. From SWOT analysis, to the “Five P’s of Marketing,” to the Balanced Scorecard, I built an appreciation for the power of frameworks and have used the same approach as we share the plays later in the book.

Second, as I engaged with each of my peers, I recognized that the designer’s toolkit I had been exposed to could solve a multitude of business problems. Rapid experiments, a cornerstone to a designer’s toolkit, could be adapted to increase innovation. Journey mapping users and their processes could help an organization unlock efficiency. And conducting user research could validate product‐market fit.

My thoughts were overflowing with possibilities. Interestingly, most of my fellow students would never have considered engaging a “designer” like me to solve their business problems. This was primarily because all the designers (marketing, interior, industrial, graphic, or UI) they had previously worked with were skills‐based contributors.

At the end of the program, I had made up my mind that I was going to double down on continuing on the design leadership path. I knew that I—and the larger design profession—still had a lot of impact to make.

My inspiration in this pursuit was an accounting professor in Chicago by the name of James McKinsey, who in 1926 founded a small firm with a similar vision that the accounting practice could be a key factor in creating business value. The rest is history, as he went on to generate significant value for every company that engaged his firm. As part of his body of work, McKinsey is credited with establishing budget planning as a management framework that is still used in business today.

I spent the next year and a half looking at ways to elevate design as a business driver; however, it was easier said than done. I still remember a conversation I had with one of the general managers who was responsible for a product suite that generated more than half a billion dollars in revenue. I shared my opinion that good design is good business and that we should invest more effort on design to make the product suite more usable and seamless. The candid answer I got was, “Why would I do that? I can put that $1 in sales (boots on the ground) and it will give me $10 back.”

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a rebuttal for his insight, because I couldn’t really articulate how $1 in design could deliver value in return. While I believed in the power of design, I struggled to show its impact in a consistent manner. There was always something getting in the way: Sometimes it was the organizational priorities, sometimes it was the designers’ capabilities, sometimes it was lack of tools and processes; there were myriad reasons.

On further analysis, I could root the challenge in four key areas: the attitudes (mindsets), the people (or lack of), the process (or lack of), and the organizational environment. This was a much deeper problem than I had anticipated.

I subsequently decided to spend the next phase of my career trying to get back to the drawing board and look at it afresh through an “experimental medium” we called UXReactor. Fundamentally, we focused on the four key variables (mindsets, people, process, and environment) that we wanted to experiment with. For the next seven years, we hypothesized, experimented, iterated, and evolved our learning into an internal playbook called the PragmaticUX™ Playbook.

Over this time, we had built more than 100 frameworks (plays) around practitioner intents, such as how to plan strategic investments, how to prepare for a design kickoff, how to ensure the whole organization has deep empathy for the user, how to conduct a design interview, and even how to summarize the weekly status as a report. We had frameworks for everything. Everything that could be codified with better ways to handle the mindsets, people, processes, and environment—we studied them all.

With this Playbook as our backbone, UXReactor has grown and helped our client partners create millions of dollars in value and impact. At the same time, we’ve gained recognition for our work, including the 2019 FastCompany Innovation by Design Award, as well as being named the fastest‐growing specialized user experience firm in the US on the esteemed Inc. 5000 list for two consecutive years.

As we engaged within various contexts and client‐partners, we got better at updating and evolving the plays in the Playbook. Soon, we were fielding inquiries from prospective clients about the Playbook itself, in addition to our consulting services. Interestingly the alumni (ex‐teammates) of UXReactor would also report back that they were adding way more value in their new organizations than peers with twice their experience because they were trained by our Playbook. Universities also started approaching us to include our plays as part of their graduate‐level curriculum.

We realized that it was time to publish this to the wider world so that more business and design leaders and practitioners could leverage these plays to help fuel their own business growth.

Writing this book was, in itself, a user experience design process. Our intent is that it becomes a reference and an accelerator for anyone who intends to drive their business by leveraging the power of experience design.

It was not an easy task, because we had to solve four specific design problems in order to produce the book that you’re now engaging with:

• First and foremost, we had to find how to make it easy for the reader (you) to read and navigate. This is why we use a lot of illustrations for ease of scanning, remembering, and leveraging. The book is written so you can jump among the various plays and themes if you choose. If you don’t read it cover to cover, that’s okay.
• Second, we had to figure out how we can teach you to “fish” without giving specific recommendations that may not be relevant to you and your business context. We did this by introducing the Mindful Canvas that is common across all the plays. Our aim is that it will help you be mindful about the variables in the context of the problem you are looking to solve with the play.
• Third we had to envision how might we make it useful and desirable, while keeping five different reader personas in mind. We were advised to cut down the number of personas—but that was a difficult ask because it truly takes the full ecosystem to make an impact, and for that we needed each persona in the system to take away something relevant. Chapter 12 is the fastest way for you to know which plays to focus on based on the persona you identify with.
• Fourth, we had to address how might we make it relatable to you. We did this by including ample anecdotes, examples, and case studies. In Part 3 of this book, we also share various game plans where we bring the various plays together in a simulated (inspired from real life) context for each reader persona.

I am confident that we’ve taken a solid stab at solving these four problems. Like everything user‐centered, the user’s input is essential. So I and my team would love to hear from you—please do not hesitate to connect with me through the resources available to you at www.UXDPlaybook.com. It’s also important to note that as my team and I put this Playbook together, we have taken great care to uphold the confidentiality of our clients and/or situations that we have been privy to. We have done this by using fictitious company names, by changing names of individuals, or adjusting the context of the data. We did this while ensuring that the relevant facts and insights were not lost.

Finally, I hope that this book will provide you with the mindset, the mindfulness, and the tools to create 10X value in every organization that you are part of. I can wish nothing but the best as you pursue a goal of making the world a better place—one experience at a time.