Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2
Gold
Tuesday, December 6, 2022 • Design in Product 2022
Share the love for this talk
Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2
Speakers: Aditi Ruiz , Christian Crumlish and Farid Sabitov
Link:

Summary

We’ve spent a full-day exploring the challenges and opportunities in product/UX collaborations, and looking at those challenges and opportunities not only from a UX perspective, but also from a PM point of view. In this follow-up session, we’ll look back to the morning’s empathy mapping session, and take a beat to reflect those two roles and how they relate to one another.

Key Insights

  • Empathy mapping with large groups can reveal nuanced insights into product managers’ daily realities and pressures.

  • Product managers often compromise on feature usability to meet hard deadlines, intending to iterate later.

  • Cross-functional collaboration challenges for product managers include balancing meetings with execution time.

  • Synthesizing user research insights into accessible formats remains a key challenge for boosting product team decision-making.

  • Visibility and traceability of work via tools like Jira are essential for coordination between UX and product teams.

  • Metrics and impact are high-pressure areas where product managers feel accountability for product success in business terms.

  • Empathy must be thoughtful and evidence-based, acknowledging the limitations of sensory metaphors that can exclude some team members.

  • The relationship between UX and product managers benefits from ongoing dialogue, trust-building, and shared strategic goals.

  • Similar empathy mapping exercises could be extended to engineers and sales teams to foster broader organizational understanding.

  • Organizational leadership should facilitate workflows that enable hybrid vigor, helping diverse roles collaborate productively rather than compete.

Notable Quotes

"Product managers are trying to keep up with deadlines but often launch hard-to-use features hoping to make them better later."

"We put product managers at the center to map what they see, say, do, and also think and feel based on our collective experiences."

"It’s really hard for product managers to find time for actually doing the work because of all the meetings."

"Synthesizing user feedback in a way that’s easy for product managers to consume is one of the hot topics right now."

"Empathy mapping uses sensory metaphors but can exclude people with disabilities if we’re not careful."

"We have to ask how confident we are in our empathy—whether it’s evidence-based or just assumptions."

"Product and UX ought to be allies presenting a united front at the table, not competing for supremacy."

"We each bring different skills, temperaments, and interests, so there’s no one perfect relationship model between roles."

"Taking a pause to reflect on what our counterparts are experiencing can help us partner better, rather than react defensively."

"Leadership needs to design workflows that favor hybrid vigor instead of ambiguous relationships that frustrate everyone."

Ask the Rosenbot
Ashley Cortez
Shifting Toward Community-Led Innovation in Local Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
David Sternberg
Uncovering the hidden forces shaping user behavior
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Leah Buley
Ask Me Anything with Leah Buley and Joe Natoli, co-authors of The User Experience Team of One (2nd edition)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Theresa Neil
Just Build Me a Dashboard!
2019 • Enterprise Community
Michaela Mora
Advanced Concept Testing Approaches To Guide Product Development and Business Decisions
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Smitha Papolu
Theme 3 Discussion
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Peter Merholz
The Mysterious Case of the Missing UX Career Path
2022 • DesignOps Community
Davis Neable
How to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Nathan Curtis
Design Systems for Us: How Many One-Source(s)-of-Truth Are Enough?
2019 • DesignOps Community
Alla Weinberg
Healing Toxic Stress
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Mark Interrante
AI for Prioritization (3rd of 3 seminars)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Sam Proulx
Understanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Nathan Curtis
Discussion
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Jack Moffett
SAFe or Sorry?
2019 • Enterprise Community
Tamara Hale
War Stories LIVE! Tamara Hale
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Emilia Åström
Unlock Your Team’s Intelligence with Collaboration Design
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold

More Videos

Dan Hill

"Soft eyes means zooming between the instance and the system, between the tree and the forest."

Dan Hill

Designing for the infrastructures of everyday life

June 4, 2024

Steve Chaparro

"Don’t tell government teams you’re using design thinking—use their language and let them experience it first."

Steve Chaparro

Bringing Into Alignment Brand, Culture and Space

August 13, 2020

Jeff Ephraim Bander

"Sometimes it is hard to articulate what you looked at, but eye tracking makes it measurable and objective."

Jeff Ephraim Bander Ariane Rahn Philipp Reiter

Eye Tracking Gamechanger: Why Smartphone Eye Tracking will Revolutionize Your UX Research

March 11, 2022

Patrick Commarford

"We automated everything — now we click a button weekly to produce updated staffing and priority alignment scores."

Patrick Commarford

Design Staffing for Impact

January 8, 2024

Dave Hoffer

"Everything is designed around us; recognize that and use it to your advantage."

Dave Hoffer Joanne Weaver

UX Job Search AMA #2 with Joanne Weaver and Dave Hoffer

April 3, 2025

Edward Cupps

"Leadership is not management. It never has been."

Edward Cupps

The Principal Path: Journeying from Management to Individual Contributor

June 11, 2021

Aletheia Delivre

"Our edge isn’t in managing what exists; it’s in architecting new meaning at scale where process becomes infrastructure."

Aletheia Delivre

New Shapes and Emerging Identities for Design Ops

September 11, 2025

Tim Parmee

"Operations alone might be a tough sell in an organization that has traditionally undervalued design."

Tim Parmee

Changing Our Design Pressure Points

October 2, 2023

Brennan Hartich

"Allocating a DPM to a team that didn’t want one caused more confusion and extra headcount."

Brennan Hartich

Communicating and Establishing DesignOps as a New Function

November 7, 2018