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
"Diversity at the bottom without diversity at the top means narrowing perspective from the top down."
Joi FreemanA New Vantage Point: Building a Pipeline for Multifaceted Research(ers)
March 30, 2020
"Performance is about how effectively we translate experience into new understanding and turn that into wiser action."
Jen BriselliLearning is the north star: service design for adaptive capacity
November 19, 2025
"Stakeholders are users too; the product we’re sharing is the research and learnings for their decision-making."
Sara LogelYour Colleagues are Your Users Too
March 29, 2023
"Three quarters of users who fail their mission don’t come back, risking lost revenue and market share."
Andrew Custage Michael MallettThe Digital Journey: Research on Consumer Frustration and Loyalty
March 29, 2023
"Find a mentor—an AI, a person, or a project—and use community resources like Open Austin to learn and grow."
Bryce Benton[Demo] AI-powered UX enhancement: Aligning GitHub documentation with USWDS at Austin Public Library
June 4, 2024
"The tasks left for humans after automation will be strategic, multifaceted, creative, and complex."
Janaki KumarInnovate with Purpose
June 14, 2018
"Inclusive design and accessibility need to move to the forefront with much more intentionality in how we work."
Dave Malouf Patrizia Bertini Jon FukudaThe Past, Present, and Future of DesignOps: a 2-part DesignOps Community Call (Part 2)
April 28, 2022
"Military training focuses on strength and protecting others, not admitting vulnerabilities or asking for help."
Megan Nipe Lyndsay BoothHuman-Centered Design for Engagement: Maturing from Newsletterville to Personalized, One-to-One Messaging
December 8, 2021
"Critique is an opportunity to build a culture of trust upon grounded reality while developing your craft. - Chris"
Erika Kincaid Brenna Heaps Jessica TsukimuraConnecting the Dots: How to Foster Collaboration and Build a Strong Design Review Culture
June 8, 2022
