How Can Product Managers and UXers Help Each Other (and Why are Product Folks so Annoying Sometimes)?
Summary
Product managers and UXers do adjacent but different jobs. We'll talk about scope, celebrating successes, and understanding each other better. Stick around to join the conversation and ask Rich your questions during our post-session Q+A, moderated by Christian Crumlish.
Key Insights
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UX teams largely lack direct representation at the executive decision-making table compared to product management.
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Product managers serve as crucial advocates translating UX work into business language executives understand.
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Executives mostly care about outcomes tied to revenue or measurable business impact, not detailed processes.
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Stakeholder demand often exceeds team capacity by 20 to 30 times, forcing product managers to reject most requests.
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Pie charts effectively communicate trade-offs to executives, highlighting resource allocation dilemmas.
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Product managers juggle numerous distractions and interruptions, which can make them appear scattered or annoyed.
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Collaborative research involving product, UX, and engineering fosters shared understanding and stronger team cohesion.
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UX must learn to speak the language of money and metrics to raise visibility and gain budget support.
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Consumer-facing companies tend to prioritize UX more highly than complex enterprise organizations.
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Assuming good intent between product managers, UX, and stakeholders prevents adversarial dynamics and improves collaboration.
Notable Quotes
"If you really want to make things happen, you need to be in the room where it happens."
"UX really doesn’t have a seat at the table yet and that has some implications for us."
"Executives don’t care about process or how we got there, they care about what happened and why it matters."
"Product managers are going to have to say no to roughly 95% of everything that comes in."
"If you want to make one slice bigger you have to make another slice smaller — executives hate the exclusive or concept."
"Product managers learn to attach at the end of every sentence something about money — no money, no attention."
"We try to figure out who needs to be in the room to hear it — research is how we build team cohesion."
"Most product managers are wide, most UX and engineers are deep — that’s just the nature of the roles."
"Assume good intent, start with empathy — we’re all doing hard things we can't do well alone."
"Roadmap amnesia is real — every new thing wipes out weeks of priorities from stakeholders’ minds."
Or choose a question:
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