Dear readers & friends,

It’s been a while, and I’m sorry for that. I’ve been suffering from a mild case of writer’s block for the better part of the past year. But I’ve managed to turn things around and could finally finish my five-part article series on how to develop a comprehensive strategy for a design team.

“Crafting a vision that inspires” has just been published by The UX Collective. Again, sorry to have kept you waiting for so long.

In this fifth and final article, I explain how our product design team at BestSecret added the last piece of the puzzle to their mission, objectives, values, and principles. We did so using a four-step approach in workshops with the entire team: ① Crafting “stories from the future”; ② Extracting the essence of those stories; ③ Formulating individual vision statements; and ④ Crafting a collective vision that brings it all together.

Besides that, another exciting thing happened:

“Smart Green Nudging: Reducing Product Returns Through Digital Footprints and Causal Machine Learning” has been published in Marketing Science, one of the premier journals for research in marketing.

Moritz von Zahn, Kevin Bauer, Cristina Mihale-Wilson, Johanna Jagow, Oliver Hinz, and I co-authored this paper. We investigated how e-commerce retailers can leverage a sustainability message on their cart page to reduce returns (-2.6%) while not negatively impacting sales and how machine learning can help to show this message only to the users where it has the greatest impact.

And, as usual, if my own articles are not enough reading material for you, here are my reading and tool recommendations. Today’s topics are writer’s block (fittingly), strategy (also fittingly), and AI (still).

Reading Recommendations

📖 The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block” by Dennis Upper was published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis in 1974.

📖 How to be Strategic by Julie Zhuo does a really nice job explaining in understandable terms what “strategy”—this elusive, mysterious thing—is and, more importantly, what it isn’t (spoiler: it’s not just setting metrics and goals).

Tool Recommendations

🛠️ Claude is an AI assistant developed by Anthropic and the one I’m using by far the most frequently now. In my subjective perception, their latest model, combined with the possibility to upload documents, is just really good, and I’m barely using Bing Chat (now Copilot) or ChatGPT anymore.

🛠️ HuggingFace is an open-source platform providing a library of pre-trained AI models, a model hub, and tools for natural language processing. It also provides HuggingChat, the conversational AI I now usually turn to when I need a web search feature.

Enjoy reading, and until next time. As always, I welcome your feedback and comments on my articles and this newsletter. Simply reply to this email to share your thoughts.

Cheers,
Max

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