Got a deck in my email last week. Subject line: “UX Strategy for [Product Name].”

Opened it. Actually curious to see their thinking. (Also: morbid fascination with how people define “strategy” these days.)

Slide 1: Screenshot of Stripe’s pricing page
Slide 2: Screenshot of Notion’s sidebar navigation
Slide 3: Screenshot of Linear’s command palette
Slide 4: “We want something clean and modern like these”
Slide 5: Dribbble shots under a header that says “Visual Direction”
Slide 6: “Questions?”

Six slides. Five screenshots. One question.

That’s not a UX strategy. That’s a mood board with delusions of grandeur.

And when I replied asking about their target users, their core problem, what success looks like – they said “we can cover that in the kickoff call, but the visual direction is what we need to align on first.”

Translation: We spent 17 minutes Googling competitors, took screenshots, added them to a deck, and now we’re ready for you to design.

(Also: we think “visual direction” comes before “understanding the problem we’re solving.” This will go great.)

I don’t take these projects anymore. Not because I can’t design from inspiration. Because calling screenshots “strategy” means you think UX design is decoration. And I can’t fix that misunderstanding while also designing your product.

What’s Actually Happening Here

You need strategy work but don’t want to pay for it. So you do a DIY version:

• Google “best SaaS dashboard designs”
• Screenshot the top 5 results
• Add them to a deck
• Call it “competitive analysis” or “UX strategy”
• Skip to “let’s design now”

The screenshots tell me what aesthetics you like. They don’t tell me:

• Who you’re actually designing for
• What problem you’re solving that competitors aren’t
• Why users would choose your product
• What success metrics matter
• Whether your assumptions about users are even right

That’s strategy. Screenshots are inspiration. One comes before the other. You did them backwards.

The Four Versions of This

The “Competitive Analysis” That’s Just Screenshots

What you send: “Here’s our competitive analysis. We studied Stripe, Notion, Linear, and Figma. We want to combine the best elements of each.”

What I see: You took screenshots. You didn’t analyze anything.

Real competitive analysis asks:

• What are they optimizing for?
• What trade-offs did they make?
• Who are they targeting vs who are you targeting?
• Where are the gaps we could fill?

Your deck shows me which companies you admire. It doesn’t show me you understand why they made their design decisions or whether those decisions would work for your different user base, different problem, different market position.

“We Know Our Users Already”

The claim: “We don’t need research or strategy work. We’ve been talking to customers for months. We just need the designs.”

The reality: You’ve been talking to customers about features they want. Not about why they’d choose you, what jobs they’re hiring your product to do, where your current experience breaks down, what metrics matter.

“We know our users” usually means “the founder talks to three customers sometimes and they all said nice things.” That’s not the same as systematic user research as part of product strategy.

And when I ask “who specifically are we designing for,” the answer is usually some version of “B2B SaaS companies” or “product teams.”

That’s not a user. That’s a category containing 47,000 different user types with different needs, different contexts, different problems. Might as well say “humans with computers.”

The Frankenbriefing

What happens: “We want Stripe’s pricing page structure, but Notion’s sidebar navigation, Linear’s keyboard shortcuts, and Figma’s collaborative features. Make it cohesive.”

The problem: You’re asking me to stitch together four different products built for four different user bases with four different core problems and four different strategic approaches.

Stripe optimizes for trust and clarity for financial transactions.
Notion optimizes for flexibility and customization for knowledge workers.
Linear optimizes for speed for developers who hate friction.
Figma optimizes for real-time collaboration for design teams.

Those are four different strategies serving four different audiences with four different priorities. I can’t combine them into one “cohesive” product any more than you can combine a sports car, a minivan, a pickup truck, and a motorcycle into one vehicle.

You need YOUR strategy first. Then we can do UI/UX design for that. But “all the good parts of everything” isn’t a strategy.

The Post-Hoc “Strategy”

The sequence: Week 1: “Let’s start designing, we can figure out strategy as we go.”
Week 4: Designs are 50% done based on your screenshot mood board.
Week 7: “Actually, can we define our UX strategy now? These designs don’t feel right.”

You built first, strategized later. Now you’re asking me to retrofit strategy onto designs that were based on “I liked how Stripe looked” not “this solves our users’ core problem.”

That’s backwards. And expensive. We’re redesigning work we already did because we skipped the thinking part.

It’s like building a house, realizing you don’t like where the bathroom is, and then hiring an architect to explain why the bathroom should have been somewhere else. Sure, they can tell you. But the bathroom is already built.

What “User Research” Looks Like When Strategy Is Screenshots

Let me show you what happens when companies skip real strategy and wing it.

This is a composite. Fictional. But I’ve seen every single piece of this across different projects.

Week 1: The “Research” Phase

Founder: “We did extensive user research.”

Me: “Great, can I see it?”

Founder: [Sends Google Doc titled “User Insights”]

Contents:

• “Users want it to be intuitive”
• “Users don’t like complicated interfaces”
• “Users want it to feel modern but professional”
• “Users mentioned they like Notion’s simplicity”

Me: “How many users did you interview?”

Founder: “We talked to 12 potential customers at a conference.”

Me: “What questions did you ask?”

Founder: “We showed them the concept and asked what they thought.”

That’s not research. That’s a focus group where you asked people to validate your idea. And they were polite because they were at a conference and you were standing right there.

Week 2: The “Competitive Analysis”

Me: “What makes your approach different from competitors?”

Founder: “We’re going to take the best parts of each. Stripe’s pricing clarity, Notion’s flexibility, Linear’s speed.”

Me: “Those are three different strategic approaches. Which one are you?”

Founder: “All of them.”

Me: “That’s not a strategy. That’s a wish list.”

Founder: “But users said they want all those things.”

Right. And users also say they want cheaper prices, more features, and enterprise-level security – all while keeping it simple. Somehow.

Week 3: The “Design Principles”

Founder: [Sends document titled “Design Principles”]

Contents:

• Clean and modern
• Simple but powerful
• Professional yet friendly
• Fast but not overwhelming
• Flexible but opinionated

These aren’t principles. These are contradiction pairs. Every single one means “we haven’t decided what we actually stand for.”

A real design principle makes decisions. “Speed over polish” means something. “Trust over delight” means something. “Flexible over opinionated” is an actual choice.

“Clean AND modern” doesn’t mean anything. “Simple BUT powerful” is what every SaaS company claims. “Professional YET friendly” tells me nothing about what you’d prioritize when those conflict.

Week 4: The “User Persona”

Founder: [Sends PDF titled “User Persona – Primary Audience”]

Meet Sarah:

• Age: 28-45 (17-year range, very specific)
• Job: Product Manager or Team Lead (or several other roles)
• Goals: Wants to be more productive, streamline workflows, reduce busywork
• Frustrations: Too many tools, context switching, inefficient processes
• Tools: Uses Slack, Notion, Linear, Figma, Google Workspace

Me: “This describes approximately 40% of people working at tech companies. Can you be more specific?”

Founder: “That’s our target market.”

That’s not a persona. That’s a demographic census. Sarah at a 8-person startup has different problems than Sarah at a 600-person enterprise. Sarah the PM who codes has different workflows than Sarah the PM who came from marketing. Sarah with two direct reports has different needs than Sarah with twelve.

But sure, let’s design for all of them simultaneously. That always works great. (It never works great.)

Week 6: The Realization

Founder: “I’m looking at the designs and something feels off. They look great but I’m not sure they solve the right problem.”

Finally.

Me: “What problem are we solving?”

Founder: “That’s what I’m realizing I’m not sure about anymore.”

And there it is. Six weeks in, we’re discovering that screenshots plus “users want intuitive interfaces” isn’t actually strategy.

Who could have predicted this? (Everyone. Everyone could have predicted this.)

Why This Keeps Happening

Strategy feels abstract, screenshots feel concrete

You can look at a screenshot and point at it. “See? Like this.”

Strategy is invisible. It’s thinking, frameworks, decisions. You can’t point at it in a deck. So it feels optional, theoretical, less “real” than aesthetic inspiration.

But strategy is what makes the aesthetics work for your specific users, solving your specific problem. Without it, you’re just copying other companies’ homework and hoping it fits.

Screenshots are free, strategy costs money

Googling competitors and taking screenshots: $0, 17 minutes.

Actual UX strategy work (research, user interviews, competitive analysis beyond aesthetics, problem definition): $12K-20K, 4-6 weeks.

Easy to convince yourself the free version is “good enough.” Until you build the wrong thing and realize it wasn’t. Then you spend $30K fixing what $15K of upfront strategy would have prevented.

(The math never seems to math until after the mistake. Funny how that works.)

You don’t know what strategy looks like

This isn’t criticism. Most founders haven’t seen real product design strategy work. They’ve seen design outputs (interfaces, prototypes) and they’ve seen inspiration (Dribbble, competitor screenshots).

Strategy happens between those two. It’s the “why” that informs the “what.” But if you’ve never seen it done, it’s easy to think screenshots = strategic thinking.

(Same way companies think redesigning will fix retention problems that started when they changed pricing. They’re solving the wrong problem because they didn’t diagnose properly first.)

What Changed for Me

I stopped taking projects where the “strategy work” is screenshots plus vibes.

Same way I learned to spot companies who can’t explain what they actually do. Same way I figured out that 17 stakeholders means nobody can make decisions.

Now when someone sends me a “strategy deck,” I check what’s actually in it.

Is this aesthetic inspiration or strategic thinking?

Aesthetic inspiration: Screenshots, color palettes, typography examples, visual references.
Strategic thinking: User segments (with actual specificity), problem definition, success metrics tied to business goals, competitive positioning (where you’re different, not where you’re copying), design principles that make real trade-off decisions.

If it’s all aesthetic, we need to do strategy work first. That costs time and money. If you’re not ready for that investment, you’re not ready for design work yet.

(Though you are very ready for more screenshots. Those are free and take 11 minutes.)

Who are we designing for, specifically?

Not “SaaS companies” or “product managers” or “teams that want to be more productive.”

Name three specific people. What do they do daily? What frustrates them? Why would they choose your product over doing nothing (which is your real competitor 80% of the time)?

If you can’t answer this without saying “well, it depends” or “various types,” your strategy isn’t done. You have a market hypothesis. Not a strategy.

What does success look like?

“Users love it” isn’t an answer. What metric changes if this works? Activation rate? Time to first value? Feature adoption? Support ticket reduction?

If you don’t know what we’re optimizing for, I can’t design for it. I’ll just make something that looks like your screenshots and hope it works.

Have you validated any of this?

If your entire strategy is based on what you think users want, informed by looking at competitors and imagining your product is similar, that’s not strategy. That’s untested assumptions with visual inspiration.

Real strategy includes validation. Talking to actual users. Testing assumptions. Learning what they actually care about vs what you think they care about.

Look

I’m not here to lecture you about how product strategy should work. You’ll figure that out or you won’t.

But if you’re sending designers screenshot decks and expecting them to design strategy for you on the fly, just know what you’re actually asking for.

You’re asking them to guess at:

• Your user segments
• Your value proposition
• Your competitive positioning
• Your success metrics
• Your design principles

And then blame them when the guesses are wrong.

Or you’re asking them to do $15K of strategy work for free, buried in the “design” budget, hoping they won’t notice or won’t say anything because they need the project.

Either way, experienced designers will spot it. And most will pass.

Not because we can’t design from inspiration. Because we’ve learned that designing without strategy means redesigning later when you finally figure out what you should have been solving.

The screenshots tell me what you like. They don’t tell me what you need. And I can’t deliver what you need if we never define it.

Do the strategy work first. Or budget for me to do it with you. But don’t Google competitor screenshots for 17 minutes, call it “strategy,” and expect professional design work to follow from that.

The companies that skip strategy and jump to design based on aesthetics they liked? They figure this out around week 7. When nothing feels right and they can’t articulate why. When the designs look great in screenshots but somehow don’t solve anything.

(By then we’ve spent 7 weeks and $18K designing the wrong thing. And the screenshot deck is still in the folder, now titled “Inspo_OLD_v3_FINAL_archive_2024.pdf” because nobody has the heart to delete it.)