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
"The proof came from delivering the output — stakeholders stopped questioning the process once they saw the quality research."
Catherine BlizzardUsing Integrated Insight to Drive Growth
March 10, 2022
"We had a matter of weeks to pivot from an in-person immersive program to an entirely virtual environment accommodating designers from India to California."
Nicole UmphressDelivering Design Education During a Global Pandemic: Lessons Learned
June 9, 2022
"The best large language model is right under your nose: the human brain with 300,000 years of ancestral development."
Dr. Jamika D. Burge Nick Fine Alexandra Jayeun Lee Greg Nudelman Bo WangHow UX researchers can partner with (and not be replaced by) AI [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
August 31, 2023
"Let’s lead with curiosity, govern with integrity, and courageously transform the landscape of design operations."
Changying (Z) ZhengNavigating Innovation with Integrity
September 25, 2024
"A true design system must have a single source of truth in code."
Dawn ResselFull-Stack User Experiences: A Marriage of Design and Technology
June 9, 2016
"At Stanford’s d.school, we got the religion: design thinking could be bigger than just about products."
Julie BaherCulture Change—My Journey
May 14, 2015
"Design systems are not just components but guidelines, rules, and principles to create consistent experiences."
Abbey Smalley Sylas SouzaScaling UX Past the Size of Your Team
January 8, 2024
"Collaboration without ego is key to building the right product, not just what one's own interests are."
Craig Brookes Andreas Huebner Morgan Quinn"Just Make it Look Good" and Other Ways We're Misunderstood
June 11, 2021
"It didn’t matter how good the design was nor how good the strategy was if the organization delivering the design wasn’t set up to do it well."
Peter MerholzThe Mysterious Case of the Missing UX Career Path
August 25, 2022
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can parallelizing activities like hiring and market discovery speed up time-to-market in new country launches?
What are effective ways to include people with disabilities in generative and usability research?
What does James mean by contrasting doom scrolling with active hope in the context of UX research?