Zone to win and UX (Productivity Zone)

In my previous blog, I covered the Performance Zone of Geoffrey Moore’s framework. In this blog, I am covering the Productivity Zone and how it impacts the UX strategy within that zone.

Productivity Zone

The Productivity Zone contains all functions that don’t have any direct accountability for any revenue (finance, legal, HR, tech support, etc.). The goal of the Productivity Zone is to make sure all the other zones can work efficiently (“doing things right”) and effectively (“doing the right things”). The time horizon in this zone is short and aligns with the Performance Zone, i.e. next fiscal year.

If the company’s overall strategy is growth (expanding into new markets or offering new products/services), the Productivity Zone has to develop new programs to handle the change. This mean they might need to reallocate resources as well as allow more flexibility in processes (they might for example need to loosen up rules regarding approved software).

If the company primarily tries to protect their current market shares, the Productivity Zone’s primary objective is to keep costs down so resources can be distributed to the other zones. This means that the Productivity Zone should focus on reengineer and streamline processes (centralize, standardize, optimize). It can even mean the company will outsource parts in the Productivity Zone to keep costs down.

There are not as many UX professionals working in the Productivity Zone since the zone doesn’t generate any revenue stream for the company. However, the UX effort also depends on the different type of functions (customer facing, supplier facing, or internally facing). Within the Productivity Zone, the customer facing functions tend to have a larger concentration of UX staff than the other two (supplier facing, and internally facing). The reason for this is that even if it is not directly impacting the revenue, the customer facing functions still have an impact on the customers and the sales. Just think about customer support and how it can be important for future purchases. For the internal systems and the supplier facing systems, the UX is often a low priority and the focus is on making the systems efficient enough (“able to complete a task fast”).

Independently if the company is going through growth or trying to protect their market share, a beneficial way to provide UX expertise is through an agency model. This agency can be internal, external, or some type of hybrid. The agency model would allow UX expertise at the same time as the agency can manage work fluctuations from the different groups and, if needed, contract out to external resources.

If the company is in growth mode, the agency would need to manage a lot of external resources and make sure they can deliver a “good enough” solution. An internal agency should take on high priority projects themselves and outsource the less important projects.

If the company primarily tries to protect their market share, the main goal from the Productivity Zone is to keep costs down. This can result in a lot of layoffs among the UX agency team and the company might even go to a model in which UX design is completely outsourced.

In my next blog post, I will cover the Incubation Zone

© David Juhlin and www.davidjuhlin.com, 2017