There is often a gap between strategy and reality.
I’ve seen this happen in lots of organisations: there is a clear idea of what they want to achieve and who it is for, the product or service proposition feels coherent, the rationale makes sense, and the plan feels well thought through.
And then you speak to actual users, and things become less tidy.
Some assumptions hold. Others don’t. Priorities turn out to be slightly off. The language that felt clear internally does not quite connect externally. Problems that seemed central matter less than expected, while other issues, often more practical, emotional or contextual, were barely on the page.
This is often treated as an execution problem, where the campaign needs tweaking, the product needs iterating, or the messaging needs refining.
Sometimes that is true, and the work really is about improving what already exists. But often, the problem started earlier.
Strategy is usually built from valuable ingredients: organisational knowledge, leadership judgement, previous experience and market context. The risk is not that these inputs are wrong, but that they can be incomplete without direct contact with users.
User research then comes later, once something already exists: a campaign, a product, a service, a proposition, a rebrand. By that point, the organisation is already invested. Timelines have been agreed. Budgets have been allocated. People have begun to defend the direction, sometimes without even realising it.
So instead of asking, “Have we understood this properly?”, the question becomes, “How do we make this work?”
That distinction matters, because it changes the role research is allowed to play.
From my experience, user research is most valuable when it helps shape strategy from the start, rather than being brought in at the end to validate decisions that have already been made. And it should not only arrive in the form of reports.
Reading a summary of research is not the same as hearing someone struggle to use your product or service. It is not the same as watching them hesitate, seeing where they get frustrated, or hearing them describe, in their own words, what they actually need. That kind of exposure has a different effect, because it makes the abstract concrete in a way that is much harder to smooth over.
User research is a team sport. The people making strategic decisions need to be close to it. Not all the time, not performatively, and not in a way that slows everything down, but close enough that users are not reduced to segments, personas or bullet points.
Even ten real conversations can shift a room, because they give people something concrete to react to, challenge assumptions in a way that is harder to dismiss, and introduce the texture, contradiction and context that often gets lost when research is kept too far away from decision-making.
There is a useful example of this in the early reset of Universal Credit, captured in Public Digital’s Radical How. Not because Universal Credit was, or is, a simple success story, but because the reset showed how different the work becomes when teams are able to learn directly from the people who will use the service.
After three years, the programme had spent £425 million, gone through five Senior Responsible Owners, and still had not delivered a working service to a single claimant. The turnaround began with a different approach: a small, multi-disciplinary team was set up outside the existing programme structure, bringing together policy, product, operations, service design, user research and technology. Rather than simply being asked to implement a pre-defined solution, the team was given an outcome to pursue and the space to work out how best to achieve it.
The important shift was in how they learned. Instead of trying to design the whole system up front, they tested Universal Credit as an end-to-end service with just 100 claimants in one postcode area in Sutton. That small test surfaced issues that would have been easy to miss from a distance, including how payment information was displayed to claimants, and how something that might appear straightforward in policy terms, such as the definition of a “couple”, could have real consequences once translated into a working service.
That is what getting closer to reality can do. It turns abstract assumptions into visible, practical problems, shows where policy, service design and operational detail collide, and gives teams a better chance of changing direction while the work is still small enough to change.
So the point is not that strategy should simply be handed over to users. It should not. Strategy still requires judgement, prioritisation and choices.
But better strategy starts with better contact with the world it is trying to influence.
Get closer to reality sooner. Not after the fact, and not once the big decisions have already been made, but at the start, when the direction is still open enough to change.