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
"Silos are inevitable but as enterprise designers, we find ways to work across them to get our job done."
Janaki KumarInnovate with Purpose
June 14, 2018
"Most of the work on accessible prototyping for screen readers is still in early or mid research stages but is improving rapidly."
Sam ProulxPrototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You
October 1, 2021
"Helen will bridge AI/ML towards engaging with data scientists to augment humanity with complex data."
Uday GajendarTheme Four Intro
June 6, 2023
"Have a majority of the research team members experienced a sustained and sustainable shift in power?"
Victor UdoewaRadical Participatory Research: Decolonizing Participatory Processes
March 9, 2022
"Ecological validity means the test must happen in an environment as close to reality as possible."
Maria SkaadenContinuous Design: One eye on the horizon and the other on the next wave
November 8, 2018
"At DTA, distributed teams and lack of local diversity meant everyone was out in the field a lot to get diverse input."
Leisa ReicheltOpening Keynote: Operating in Context
November 7, 2018
"The introvert’s edge is that they research, plan, and have a strategy for meaningful conversations."
Dave Hoffer Joanne WeaverUX Job Search AMA #2 with Joanne Weaver and Dave Hoffer
May 21, 2025
"The issue is not research ops being more organized researchers — the problems and scale are very different."
Kate TowseyThe State of ResearchOps: More Than Just Theory
June 20, 2019
"You know you’ve succeeded as a coach when you put yourself out of a job by giving away the role."
Alissa BriggsHow to Coach Enterprise Experimentation
May 14, 2015
