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
"It’s difficult to break the rules when they’re not very clear or even there."
Neema MahdaviOperationalizing DesignOps
November 7, 2018
"Selma Blair partnered with Guide Beauty to design makeup easier to use for people with tremors."
Lija HoganPractical Principles of Inclusive Research
March 27, 2023
"It’s important to reflect on our work and careers to shape what comes next."
Kara KaneTheme One Intro
November 16, 2022
"If you don’t invest in retention, you get the leaky bucket syndrome where diverse talent keeps leaving."
Anna Avrekh Amy Jiménez Márquez Morgan C. Ramsey Catarina TsangDiversity In and For Design: Building Conscious Diversity in Design and Research
June 9, 2021
"We don’t use yesterday’s retail playbook to solve problems for today — that’s impossible."
Sara Asche Anderson Jamie KaspszakNot Your Ordinary Re-Brand: Design's Path to Driving Customer Obsession at Best Buy
January 8, 2024
"If you want to make one slice bigger you have to make another slice smaller — executives hate the exclusive or concept."
Rich MironovHow Can Product Managers and UXers Help Each Other (and Why are Product Folks so Annoying Sometimes)?
December 6, 2022
"After a year of D for D, nothing had changed. The initiative looked like just another check box."
Kaaren HansonStop Talking, Start Doing
June 9, 2017
"It’s important to establish feedback loops so each organizational layer learns from the others continuously."
Anupama DhareshwarFrom blueprint to bot: Designing resilient AI-powered services
November 19, 2025
"I’m regularly pleasantly surprised by not having to explain a lot of the foundational concepts of design when working with others inside government."
Ariel KennanTheme Two Intro
November 17, 2022