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Increase revenuesDecrease costsIncrease new business (e.g. revenue coming from new sources, like new customers, new funding sources)Increase existing business (more revenue from existing sources)Increase long term sustainability (also called shareholder value)
revenues go upcosts come downnew business go up (e.g. will this bring us new customers?)existing business go up (e.g. will current customers continue to pay subscriptions?)long term sustainability go up (e.g. will this give us a competitive edge on the marketplace? Will it be a market changer?)
by letting customers take picture by themselves, the company can use less photographers (decrease costs);by improving the claim experience, you can get more long term sustainability;since customers are happier, they will be advocate for the company when they hear somebody complain about their own insurance company (increasing new business)
Selling Our Vision: Build Strong Executive Support For Great UX
Role power and leadership power.
In organisations there are two types of power: role power and leadership power.
Management is role power: someone is appointed and put by the organisation in a role that gives them power.
Leaders are not appointed: they become leaders the moment they have a follower. In order to be a leader you need to have persuasion, and vision is a tool for leadership. Vision is something that makes people what want to follow you. What leaders do is putting a vision forward and ask people if they want to join.
In organisational politics, a great vision can help compromise a lot: your vision will not be shipped this quarter, but there are pieces of it that can be. Can we work together to identify the baby steps that we can take so that I’m working towards my vision while you are “delivering something this”?
Hidden champions
If we have a vision of how to fix problems, and numbers to support them, we must find the people in the organisation that are interested in those numbers: hidden champions, people that are not in our line of management. They are in a different part of the organisation, they may know nothing about UX, or who we are, and we may not know who they are, but if we can find them and identify them, and tell them that we have a way to fix a problem that causes money to be spent from their budget, then we get their support, and in turn they can drive more support. This way we get leadership power.
This way we can get senior executives to follow us, to say “This is good idea, this is how we should do things”.
About senior executives
There are five things that senior executives can care about
These five things are pretty much the agenda of every senior executive, because it’s their fiscal obligation towards the organisation. Everything else they mention as a priority is a subsidiary of one of those things (e.g. employees happiness decreases cost from turn over).
So, in the process of making the vision come true, we have to see either:
Revenues and business are split because in a business not all revenues come from customers (e.g. sponsors).
So, once we have done our research, and have our vision, we have to connect the dots so that the executives can see it not just as a cool idea, but as a cool idea that hits at least some of those priorities, if not all of them.
You get support by top executives by understanding the agenda that they have (which is very similar in all organisations, because of the way economy works) and tying the distance between today’s experience, the vision and how traversing that distance is going to actually help them get their priorities done. Even if it’s baby step after baby step, we’re going to be able to get the vision supported. They will then use the vision to help push their agenda, and that will get us to the point where we have an experience vision with people at the center of it, used to drive the important priorities of the business.
This is all also valid for non commercial businesses like NGOs, universities, governments, etc.
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