Behavioral Strategy Process — Overview

Behavioral Strategy is an open, interdisciplinary field integrating behavioral science into strategic decision-making. By identifying validated user problems, behaviors, and solutions from the outset, teams improve the likelihood of achieving sustainable outcomes.

Key Insight

Across sectors such as tech, healthcare, and finance, projects that embed behavioral evidence during planning consistently outperform intuition-driven strategies.

These performance gains appear repeatedly in published case studies and practitioner reports.

The Behavioral Strategy Hierarchy

Behavioral Strategy defines four foundational “fits”:

  1. Problem Market Fit: Ensuring users actively seek solutions to clearly defined problems.

  2. Behavior Market Fit: Matching user behaviors precisely to validated problems.
    It represents the evidence-backed alignment between target behaviors and real-world problems.

  3. Solution Market Fit: Identifying solutions—whether products, services, or interventions—that effectively enable desired behaviors.

  4. Product Market Fit (optional): Specifically validating market-ready products as effective and sustainable solutions.

This sequence is central to various frameworks and remains free for anyone to adapt.

Heuristic: Verify Problem Market Fit, then Behavior Market Fit, and finally Solution Market Fit (or Product Market Fit if specifically applicable).

Why Behavioral Strategy Matters

Most initiatives fail due to misalignment with real user behaviors. Behavioral Strategy ensures alignment between user problems, achievable behaviors, and solutions, dramatically improving strategic outcomes.

Note on licensing

Behavioral Strategy is intentionally open. Core concepts on this site are shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Practical Steps

  1. Define measurable objectives.
  2. Identify your target user. (See Target User Definition)
  3. Conduct behavioral research. (Explore Behavioral Research)
  4. Prioritize behaviors by impact and feasibility. (Review Behavior Ranking)
  5. Select and embed behaviors strategically (see available playbooks, e.g., the DRIVE framework).

Available playbooks include:

Know a case study? Email us.

Deep-dive: DRIVE Framework →