Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2
Summary
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
"AI learns from the world, sometimes from untrusted sources, so it needs continual ethical iteration."
Jay BustamanteNavigating the Ethical Frontier: DesignOps Strategies for Responsible AI Innovation
October 2, 2023
"Most people’s fears about AI are actually fears about capitalism."
Sheryl Cababa Ethan Marcotte Milena PribicDay 2 Panel
June 5, 2024
"Using AI tools like Cursor to create React components from a well-documented Figma file helps close the gap between design and code."
Ryan Matthew Alex KurchevDesignOps without Boundaries: Building More with What You Have
September 10, 2025
"We’re very careful about PII and only the lead researcher and research ops managers have access to sensitive data."
Tracy McGoldrickIBM User Experience Program—The What, Why and How
October 15, 2021
"Designers who come out of US tech need to pivot quickly toward broader inclusion or risk being outpaced by other markets."
Dantley DavisLeadership & Diversity—A Fireside Chat with Dantley Davis
September 17, 2020
"There is a tension between moving faster and going deeper, and the way through is tapping into the huge reservoir of creative capital in organizations."
Wendy Johansson Surya VankaDesign at Scale: Behind the Scenes
April 29, 2021
"We seldom question whose table we want a seat at or why we don’t rebuild the entire table altogether."
Megan Blocker Lada Gorlenko Fatimah Richmond Molly StevensWhat UX research maturity looks like and how we get there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
November 9, 2023
"Simplicity rarely loses to complexity in the public square—it’s about meeting people where they are."
Steve ChaparroBringing Into Alignment Brand, Culture and Space
August 13, 2020
"Collaboration with another researcher was seamless because we speak the same methodology language and aligned on goals."
Joanna Vodopivec Prabhas PokharelOne Research Team for All - Influence Without Authority
March 9, 2022
