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
"Ownership of VOC is a hot potato, so we built a coalition with a facilitator to keep it collaborative and effective."
Shipra KayanHow we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up
September 30, 2021
"If AI makes building trivial, the challenge shifts to figure out who’s best to decide what to make."
Erin MaloneUnderstanding the past to prepare for the future
July 19, 2024
"It’s better to run lots of quick, cheap experiments to remove doubt than to wait for the perfect, statistically significant test."
Alissa BriggsHow to Coach Enterprise Experimentation
May 14, 2015
"Language matters—make your OKRs user-centric and customer-focused to avoid them feeling like overhead."
Bria Alexander Benson Low Natalya Pemberton Stephanie GoldthorpeOKRs—Helpful or Harmful?
January 20, 2022
"There was a feeling at Brex that research was sometimes conducted for the sake of research, not resulting in impactful insights."
Ned Dwyer Emily Stewart James WallisThe Intersection of Design and ResearchOps
September 24, 2024
"Research is actually a sales role – you have to show off a little to get buy-in from the top."
Clemens Janssen Jane DavisEfficiently Scaling Research as a Team of One
March 28, 2023
"FIC data delivers stories and stories become very important for strategy."
Kelly GotoEmotion Economy: Ethnography as Corporate Strategy
May 13, 2015
"If you want to prove someone wrong, you’re actually not seeing the person in front of you."
Lin NieWhen Thought-worlds Collide: Collaborating Between Research and Practice
March 10, 2021
"It’s so much harder to not practice transformation outside and then suddenly switch gears at work."
Victor UdoewaTheme One Intro
March 27, 2023