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
"We need to find the narrative, not just use a narrative; sometimes it’s hidden and must be dug out."
Maish NichaniSparking a Service Excellence Mindset at a Government Agency
December 9, 2021
"We try to keep things as consistent as possible in terms of the API but document where platforms need to deviate to be good citizens of their environment."
PJ Buddhari Nate BaldwinMeet Spectrum, Adobe’s Design System
June 9, 2021
"A Facebook group became a primary communication channel where parents post both praise and complaints."
Sarah AuslanderIncremental Steps to Drive Radical Innovation in Policy Design
November 18, 2022
"People often forget what they wrote and then want to check their prompt again before refining it."
Savannah CarlinDon't botch the bot: Designing interactions for AI
June 4, 2024
"If you’re recruiting for research projects, look critically at your job descriptions for embedded barriers to diverse candidates."
Joi FreemanA New Vantage Point: Building a Pipeline for Multifaceted Research(ers)
March 30, 2020
"To motivate people to populate the repository, be annoyingly persistent and sometimes create the template for them."
Maria Rosala Shivanjali M.Research Repositories
March 12, 2026
"Figma files are no longer just a collection of visual elements; designers actively shape product features now."
Ryan Matthew Alex KurchevBridging Design and Code: AI-Powered Design System Integration
September 11, 2025
"These war stories give you permission slips for your inevitable failures to come."
Steve PortigalWar Stories LIVE! Steve Portigal
March 30, 2020
"Being open and flexible to what's most helpful for the team at that moment is key."
Janelle EstesUX Research Trends
January 28, 2021
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How do organizations integrate customer feedback, survey data, and interview transcripts into a single research repository?
Why is the timeline important when creating a product vision, and what is a realistic timeframe?
How effective are AI-generated follow-up questions in usability testing compared to human moderators?