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 learned that hiring for the specific design team’s needs works better than a one-size-fits-all DPM approach."
Brennan HartichCommunicating and Establishing DesignOps as a New Function
November 7, 2018
"Teams openly said they didn’t know how to ask questions before and discovered research is cool afterwards."
Dagmara KukawkaTiny team, moonshot impact: Democratizing research across continents
March 10, 2026
"Program managers are the unsung heroes who can back up design ops work in many organizations."
Gina Mendolia Jasmine ToyCoordinated collaboration: a Service Design & DesignOps love story
November 19, 2025
"We’re always designing for ourselves, even on days when we don’t have full physical capabilities."
Lija HoganPractical Principles of Inclusive Research
March 27, 2023
"You probably have messed up. You probably will mess up. It’s inevitable and it’s okay."
Steve PortigalWar Stories LIVE! Steve Portigal
March 30, 2020
"Focus groups reveal subconscious behaviors and non-verbal cues that individual interviews might miss."
Taiye Akin-AkinyosoyeAmplifying voices and enhancing user research through group interviews
March 12, 2025
"External vendors are overwhelmed with tax technical documents, emails, calendar invites, and tasks before even starting."
Michele WongHelping Them Help Us
January 8, 2024
"We’re all in this together and figuring it out — making it up as we go along."
Dave GrayGroup Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps
November 7, 2017
"Keeping something cloud-based accessible is the most complicated because of hundreds of releases per day in continuous integration."
Sheri Byrne-HaberAccessibility at Scale
June 9, 2021
