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
Bria Alexander
Theme 1 Intro
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Billy Carlson
Ideation tips for Product Managers
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Josh Clark
Sentient Design: New Design Patterns for New Experiences (3rd of 3 seminars)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Leisa Reichelt
Opening Keynote: Operating in Context
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Sam Proulx
To Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Jamika Burge
Embracing change: Navigating shifting landscapes with compassion and agency
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Adel Du Toit
Get Your CFO To Say: 'Our Strategic Goal is User Obsession'
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Teresa Swingler
Look, Up in the Sky! UX/UI for Aerospace
2022 • Enterprise Community
Peter Merholz
The Trials and Tribulations of Directors of UX
2023 • Enterprise Community
Frances Yllana
The Big Question about Impact: A Panel Discussion
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Mitchell Bernstein
Organizing Chaos: How IBM is Defining Design Systems with Sketch for an Ever-Changing AI Landscape
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Jake Burghardt
Stop wasting research: Unlock more value from research insights
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Magdalena Zadara
Zero Hour: How to Get Far Quickly When Starting Your Digital Service Unit Late
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Jess Greco
Claiming your power: Practical tools for amplifying your unique voice
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Mark Boulton
Ops without Designers
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Steve Portigal
War Stories LIVE! Q&A-Discussion
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold

More Videos

Nathan Curtis

"A pattern library is not a design system. Relying on documentation alone leads to inconsistency and erosion over time."

Nathan Curtis Nalini P. Kotamraju Jack Moffett Dawn Ressel

Discussion

June 9, 2016

Nick Cochran

"Sense-making is a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections and act effectively."

Nick Cochran

Growing in Enterprise Design through Making Connections

June 3, 2019

Bria Alexander

"Automation frees us up to do more for the organization, but if overdone, it can strip away the human aspect critical to culture."

Bria Alexander Meredith Black Tim Gilligan

State of DesignOps Panel

October 1, 2021

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

George Abraham

"Final versions often do not look exactly like the original design, so we want to invest our time in process improvement, not arguing over pixels."

George Abraham Stefan Ivanov

Design Systems To-Go: Introducing a Starter Design System, and Indigo.Design Overview (Part 1)

September 30, 2021

Samuel Proulx

"Early touchscreen technology was considered useless and suffered from gorilla arm fatigue."

Samuel Proulx

Designing for Disability, Innovating for Everyone

March 11, 2025

Prayag Narula

"Your primary function as a research team is to build a culture of research, not just react to project requests."

Prayag Narula

How to Empower Your Designers to Do Good Research – And Why You Want To

June 10, 2022

Lisanne Norman

"The best job I ever had was with those two female VPs who believed in me and gave me a chance."

Lisanne Norman

Why I Left Research

March 27, 2023

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW

"Sometimes the threat or fear of an event creates the same neurobiological trauma response as the event itself."

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW Uday Gajendar Dr. Dawn Emerick Dawn E. Shedrick, LCSW

Leading through the long tail of trauma

July 13, 2022