Key Insights

• •

  Empathy mapping product managers helps align teams by walking in their shoes and understanding their external pressures.

• •

  Product managers often struggle with balancing executive goals and competing priorities without formal authority.

• •

  Framing product managers as pressured caretakers rather than blockers improves team dynamics.

• •

  Using live collaborative tools like Big Jump and Speak Jam enhances engagement during empathy exercises.

• •

  Capturing direct quotes for empathy maps—even assumed ones—adds specificity and clarity to personas.

• •

  Prioritization conflicts frequently arise because everyone wants something on the roadmap without considering trade-offs.

• •

  Segmenting planned work into exploratory research, validation, and small fixes helps manage risk and resource allocation.

• •

  Mapping what product managers see, say, do, and feel reveals tensions often invisible to their teams.

• •

  Incremental affinity mapping after sessions allows synthesis of collective insights for better decision-making.

• •

  Explicitly acknowledging the difficulty for product managers to influence without authority helps build empathy and collaboration.

Notable Quotes