Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2
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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"The electric toothbrush started as an accessibility solution but became better for everyone."
Sam ProulxAccessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
November 16, 2022
"You have to ask yourself, are you ready for the messiness, the hard choices, and the chaos that come with change?"
Maria GiudiceRemaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience
June 9, 2016
"In a large organization, processes must become more centralized and rigid to scale, though flexibility and team needs still matter."
Sarah Sgarlato Pierini Kevin NewtonFrom Passion to Execution: A Story of Evolving Research Maturity at LinkedIn
September 9, 2022
"I’m adopting a mindset of vulnerability and openness to failure because the worst outcome won’t shut the servers down or fire people."
Steve Baty Richard Dalton Maria Giudice Harry MaxDiscussion
June 9, 2016
"Changing low leverage points in a system produces fine tuning, but shifting high leverage points can cause radical disruption."
Erin Hoffman-JohnThis Game is Never Done: Design Leadership Techniques from the Video Game World
November 6, 2017
"Middle schoolers might ask you tough questions about release forms and how their data will be used."
Mila Kuznetsova Lucy DentonHow Lessons Learned from Our Youngest Users Can Help Us Evolve our Practices
March 9, 2022
"The focus isn’t on head to head competition, but on specialization and differentiation in the Italian market."
Tamara KartoziiaThink global, adapt local: how service design accelerated B2B market entry by 6 months
November 20, 2025
"Lived experiences like poverty or homelessness bring a richer, deeper lens than a textbook study ever could."
Zariah CameronStreamlining an Inclusive Design Practice
October 3, 2023
"Retrieval augmented generation is just adding results from a search into the model’s context to make it more grounded."
Peter Van DijckDesigning AI-first products on top of a rapidly evolving technology
June 10, 2025
