UX product strategy: 6 ways to invent or refine products in 2025

Building digital products isn’t just challenging—it’s chaotic.

Luckily, a strong UX strategy can transform that chaos into clarity, and help your team create a product that truly addresses users’ needs.

In this article, we reveal 6 ways defined by Jaime Levy, a renowned UX strategist, in his bestselling “UX Strategy” to invent or refine your product for maximum user satisfaction and market success.

Why is UX strategy important

Building digital products isn’t just challenging—it’s chaotic. 

The market moves at lightning speed, competition is fierce, and as a founder, you need to throw everything you’ve got into the mix to even stand a chance. 

Whether you’re just launching or scaling an existing product, your focus must be razor-sharp on doing the right things, not just staying busy.

But here’s the catch: it’s easy for your team to lose its way without a clear roadmap. With endless frameworks, articles, and opinions flooding the internet, it’s a quick path down the rabbit hole. Suddenly, time and energy are being spent on things that don’t move the needle.

That’s where “UX Strategy” by Jaime Levy comes in. Levy’s book bridges the gap between product design and business strategy, offering actionable techniques to help you either invent a new product or refine an existing one. As your product evolves, revisiting your strategy becomes essential—whether it’s identifying new customer segments, unlocking fresh marketing channels, or uncovering untapped revenue streams.

What is UX strategy?

UX strategy = Product strategy

At its core, UX strategy (now more commonly known as product strategy) defines

• Who your customers are,
• How your product fits into the market, and
• How you’ll achieve both business goals and user satisfaction.

When chaos inevitably hits, a solid strategy is the lifeline that keeps your team aligned and focused on a shared vision-which is building products that people want.

The 4 tenets of UX strategy by Jamie Levy

A strong UX strategy is built on four key pillars: Business Strategy, Value Innovation, Validated User Research, and Frictionless UX. 

These elements don’t work in isolation—they interact, overlap, and fuel each other. 

For instance, user research is pointless if it doesn’t inform value innovation, and frictionless UX isn’t achievable without deep insights from research.

1. Business strategy

At its core, business strategy is the guiding vision for how your company will succeed in a competitive market. It defines how you’ll position yourself to meet your goals and outshine the competition. 

But here’s the truth: in today’s digital landscape, you can’t win by slashing prices. Instead, success comes from differentiation—offering something so unique that customers are willing to pay a premium for it.

To get a bird’s-eye view of your business, tools like the Business Model Canvas or Lean Canvas can be game-changers. They help you visualize the relationships between your company’s key components, allowing you to spot gaps and opportunities more clearly.

2. Value innovation

Value innovation is about creating a new mental model for your users—changing how they think and interact with your product. 

Take Spotify, for example. Instead of buying individual albums or songs, Spotify introduced a new model where users pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to a vast music library. That’s value innovation: blending UX with a business model to deliver something that’s valuable to both users and the company.

For founders, the takeaway is simple: value innovation happens when you think beyond your product’s features and focus on how it truly transforms the user experience.

3. Validated user research

Validated user research ensures that your product delivers real value to the right audience. 

It’s easy to get lost in assumptions about what customers want, falling into the “build it and they will come” mindset. 

But every product is a risk, and the only way to minimize that risk is to continuously test your assumptions with real customers.

Engaging with your users early and often helps you avoid wasting time and money on ideas that don’t resonate. This constant feedback loop lets you refine your strategy, uncover new opportunities, keep your stakeholders engaged, and discover value innovations that can shift your business.

Understanding user behavior is a cornerstone of validated research. It allows you to move beyond surface-level preferences to predict how users will interact with your product in real-world scenarios. For a deeper dive into leveraging data and insights to anticipate user actions, check out our guide on how to predict user behavior. This will help you align your research efforts with practical strategies that drive results.

4. Frictionless UX

Frictionless UX design plays a critical role in user acquisition, retention, and monetization. 

The goal is simple: remove obstacles and make every interaction seamless so that users feel in control and delighted by your product. A product that’s intuitive, easy to use, and enjoyable will naturally outperform one that’s confusing or frustrating.

A frictionless experience is what keeps users coming back and helps your product stand out in a crowded market.

How to create a UX strategy? 6 activities

This section outlines six core activities that will help your design team build products and services that users truly value.

1. Define your initial value proposition

Your value proposition is the core promise that tells customers why they should choose your product or service. It’s a concise statement summarizing the unique benefits you offer. 

Whether you’re defining a new value proposition or refining an existing one, these five steps will help you zero in on what really matters to your target audience:

1. Define your primary customer segment. Start by identifying a small, focused group of people who truly need your solution. If you’ve already validated your product with one segment and are ready to scale, define a new segment and validate that they genuinely need your product before investing in further development or marketing efforts.
2. Identify your customer segment’s biggest problem. Pinpoint a specific problem your target customers are facing, and frame it in a clear problem statement. This initial problem statement is based on your assumptions and will be validated later, but having it in writing helps keep the team open to ideating on solutions, rather than getting fixated on one.
3. Create provisional personas based on your assumptions. Provisional personas are a starting point—representations of your ideal customer based on what you think you know. The goal is to refine these into validated personas through customer discovery. Focus on their needs and how they currently solve the problem, rather than on broad demographic details.
4. Conduct customer discovery to validate or refine your personas and problem statement. The aim of customer discovery is to find out if your product actually solves a real problem for an identifiable group of people. This is best done through interviews with individuals who match your provisional persona. Start small—just five interviews can reveal whether your assumptions hold up. Use a screener to make sure you’re talking to the right people, and ask open-ended, non-leading questions to get honest insights.
5. Reassess your initial value proposition based on your findings. After gathering feedback, you’ll land in one of three places: either you’ve validated your assumptions, partially validated them, or found that you were off base. If your assumptions don’t hold up, it’s time to revisit your persona or problem statement and pivot. If they’re validated, continue testing with more interviews and explore new segments.

By the end of this process, you’ll have a solid problem statement and a validated initial value proposition—backed by evidence that your product addresses a real need. This ensures you’re solving the right problem before diving into costly development.

2. Conduct competitive research

Before diving headfirst into development, it’s crucial to conduct competitive research. 

This process answers a simple but vital question: Who else is solving this problem, and how are they doing it? Understanding your competitors’ successes and failures can reveal valuable insights that shape your own strategy.

Although discovering that your product idea isn’t entirely unique might be disheartening, it’s better to face this reality early. Armed with the right information, you can refine your approach or pivot before you invest significant time and resources.

Step 1: Identify Your Competition

Start by identifying companies or products that serve your target audience and solve the same problem. A great way to do this is by searching relevant tags and keywords that your customers might use. Compile your findings in a spreadsheet, listing key details such as:

• Company name
• Website URL
• Value proposition
• Founding details (year, location)
• Revenue streams
• Traffic and user base
• Competitive advantage
• Key features or unique selling points
  

Step 2: Benchmark Competitors and Spot Industry Trends

Once you’ve gathered the data, it’s time to analyze it.

Use color coding in your spreadsheet to make it easier to compare attributes across competitors. For example, you can group apps with similar features or business models, or highlight trends like pricing strategies or UX patterns that are emerging in the industry.

Then, take it a step further by performing a heuristic evaluation and a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) for each competitor. This will help you understand where they excel, where they fall short, and where gaps in the market may exist.

Step 3: Assess and Adjust Your Vision

At the end of this process, you’ll have a clearer picture of whether your product vision has the potential to stand out or if it faces significant challenges. This is where you decide if a pivot is necessary—whether it’s tweaking your value proposition, refining your features, or shifting your market focus.

By conducting thorough competitive research, you gain an understanding of the landscape you’re entering and can make strategic decisions that improve your chances of success.

3. Storyboard Your Value Proposition

To keep your team laser-focused on identifying and amplifying your product’s potential, consider creating a storyboard. 

A storyboard visualizes the moment when your validated persona uses your product to solve a specific problem and achieve their goal. It’s an excellent way to accelerate your team’s thinking and uncover value innovation opportunities. Here’s how to create one:

3.1. Outline the Customer Journey

Start by writing down the key steps in the customer journey, making sure to capture both the broader context and any offline interactions. Keep it concise—around 5 to 9 steps. The first step should focus on the problem or need, followed by the key features of your proposed solution, and finally, the outcome or value the customer receives.

3.2. Gather or Create Visual Elements

Next, choose a form of visual discovery that works for you. This could be simple drawings, wireframes, or even screenshots from other apps that inspire you. The goal is to make sure the problem, key features, and value proposition are clearly communicated.

3.3. Lay Out the Storyboard on a Canvas

Once you have your steps and visuals, organize them on a canvas. Add relevant captions for each part of the story, ensuring that your team and stakeholders can easily follow along.

With a storyboard in hand, you’ve mapped out your product’s key features in a way that’s easy to understand and visually compelling. This makes it far easier to align your team around a shared vision and pitch your idea to stakeholders, helping them clearly see the value your product offers.

4. Create Prototypes for Rapid Experiments

Running experiments on your product early is crucial, and the best part is—you don’t need a fully developed app to see if your target audience is interested. 

Prototypes allow you to test your ideas quickly and gather feedback long before you start writing code. 

Using digital tools like Figma, Sketch, or Balsamiq, you can create mockups that simulate the user experience, connected in a seamless flow. Or… you can create fully functional UI prototypes with AI.

Remember, your prototype doesn’t need to be a polished, pixel-perfect interface. In fact, it’s better if it isn’t—this way, you can easily adjust layouts and test new ideas without investing too much time in fine details.

Focus on Key Features

Your prototype should spotlight the core features that deliver your value proposition.

This is where your storyboard becomes incredibly useful as a foundation. Start with a home screen and include all the necessary screens that showcase the key features. Don’t forget to include a screen that highlights the outcome or benefit your product provides, and if relevant, you can add a pricing screen to gauge interest in your pricing model.

Testing and Validation

With a prototype in hand, you can begin testing to answer critical questions, such as:

• Does the solution actually solve the problem?
• Do customers find the key features valuable?
• Would your target audience be willing to pay for the product?

Prototypes let you validate your assumptions and get real feedback, helping you refine your product vision and reduce risk before diving into development.

5. Conduct Online User Research

With the rise of remote work during the COVID era, people quickly adapted to platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Discord for virtual meetings. This shift extended to user research as well, where researchers discovered they could gather high-quality insights without the logistical challenges of in-person sessions. If done right, online user research—such as usability testing—can save time, simplify scheduling, and make it easier to record and analyze interactions.

Here’s how you can effectively conduct online user research and gain valuable insights into your product:

5.1. Plan Your Research

As with any research, the process begins with thorough planning.

This phase involves defining your hypotheses, preparing interview questions, and recruiting participants. Write your hypotheses as clear, measurable assumptions, framed as cause-and-effect statements (e.g., “Users will do X because of Y”). The goal is to test these assumptions through usability tasks and questions during the research sessions.

When recruiting participants, use online platforms where your target audience is likely to be, and offer compensation for their time—it not only helps attract participants but shows respect for their contribution. Craft a screener survey to ensure you’re selecting participants who fit your provisional personas and align with your research goals.

5.2. Conduct the Interviews

Before conducting any online interviews or usability tests, make sure the tech setup works smoothly—test your microphone, internet connection, and recording tools ahead of time. During the session, keep an open mind. Ask follow-up questions to dive deeper into participant responses, and be comfortable with moments of silence—they often lead to insightful answers.

Crucially, avoid pitching your product. If participants don’t immediately see the value in your solution, resist the urge to convince them otherwise. Doing so can lead to biased feedback, as participants may agree with you just to avoid disagreement. Instead, focus on observing and gathering genuine insights. Recording the session (with consent) allows you to fully engage in the conversation without worrying about taking detailed notes in real time.

5.3. Analyze Your Findings

After the interviews, move on to the analysis phase. The key here is to determine whether your user research validates or invalidates your hypotheses. A helpful technique is color-coding responses and using binary questions to evaluate each key feature, such as “Did the participant find value in Feature 1? (Yes or No)”.

If your hypotheses are validated, great—you’re on the right track. But if participants don’t see the value in your solution, it’s time to revisit your initial value proposition and iterate on your prototype or research approach. Don’t hesitate to run more experiments until you discover the right solution for your users.

By conducting online user research with careful preparation and thoughtful analysis, you can gather crucial insights that will inform your product development, all while saving time and resources.

6. Landing page experiment

Landing page experiments are a powerful tool for validating your value proposition, testing hypotheses, and gauging engagement from your target audience. A landing page is a simple website that users are directed to after clicking on an ad or a link. Typically, its goal is to prompt visitors to take an action, like signing up for a waitlist or downloading an app.

Here’s how it works: you create an ad on platforms like Facebook or Google, which leads users to your landing page. Once there, they’re invited to join a waitlist, download something, or take another step that helps you measure interest.

These metrics allow you to see if your value proposition resonates enough for people to click the ad, and how many are willing to take the next step—like sharing their email for early access or beta testing.

The beauty of this experiment is its flexibility. You can test different elements, such as ad copy, images, and audience targeting, as well as tweak the landing page itself by experimenting with different headlines, descriptions, or calls to action. Each adjustment offers valuable insights, helping you refine your approach and determine whether there’s real demand for your product.

Build your UX strategy. Key Takeaways

In today’s competitive digital landscape, a strong UX strategy is the bridge that connects product design with business goals. By focusing on four core pillars—Business Strategy, Value Innovation, Validated User Research, and Frictionless UX—companies can craft digital products that truly resonate with users.

Ultimately, a well-executed UX strategy isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a critical factor in turning a product idea into a business success.