Guide #015: How to build digital products that bridge the gap between business goals and user goals

Product, UX and Engineering teams are responsible for a process of translating business goals into features or products. Ultimately business goals are the primary driver; however, during this process, business goals become the foundation upon which a user behavior or sequence of behaviors is concepted. The Product team, consisting of Product Managers, Engineers and UX professionals should share responsibility in determining what metrics are most important and what analytics should be collected. Other collaborators like Marketing or Sales should be encouraged to contribute to an end-to-end user journey to identify what conversion points are most meaningful to the business.

User behavior, or rather a hypothesis of a user behavior should be used to form the basis for a list of questions that the team can collect data around. If you have UX researchers on your team, these are a great resource to help create a list of questions to ask your user base. When producing this list, the team must switch their perspective from the business to empathize with users' primary goals and ask the question, what are users trying to accomplish with your feature or product? Structure your research around gathering data to answer this question, or to gain confidence in your hypothesis.

At a certain point, designing additional variations of an experience without informed user insights can become ineffective and delay timelines. Put your design, or multiple designs, out into the world for A/B testing and user feedback. Use customer sentiment feedback to gauge positive and negative signals from your user base. You’ll need to dig deeper by using methods like user interviews to understand how people respond to and use your product. Correlate user feedback to the team’s learning objectives to bridge the gap between business goals and user goals.

The team should be aware of the best-in-class experiences that exist for the particular user behavior they’re trying to drive. Sometimes this exists outside of the industry which the team operates in. However, time as well as UX Researcher expertise should be allotted to understanding what established behaviors exist, and where users are happy or dissatisfied with a particular execution.