Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2
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 growth of design as a critical business function has made it necessary for specialized design ops roles to support scale."
Jose Coronado Julie Gitlin Lawrence LipkinPeople First - Design at JP Morgan
June 10, 2021
"The pyramid has gotten so much larger; the number of people feeling special at the bottom is growing."
Chris Geison Dr. Jamika D. Burge Jemma AhmedWhat's Next for Research?
June 17, 2021
"We are not just trying to get a seat at the table, we want to get a voice at the table."
Anna Poznyakov Richa PrajapatiGet The Most Out Of Stakeholder Collaboration—and Maximize Your Research Impact
March 12, 2021
"We implemented a routine practice of concise storytelling to capture key milestones that otherwise might be overlooked."
Sean Baker Sara RomanoskiWeaving Knowledge Management into the Fabric of Our Design Practice
September 11, 2025
"Ethics and power in design are changing and need to continue evolving over the next decade."
Kara KaneTheme One Intro
November 16, 2022
"Our value of connection is brought to life through team offsites and weekly meetings with intentional moments to build connection."
Kim Holt Emma Wylds Pearl Koppenhaver Maisee XiongA Salesforce Panel Discussion on Values-Driven DesignOps
September 8, 2022
"Shadow AI usage is a huge security risk in public companies and should be managed by IT and leadership."
Mike OrenImproving Democratized Research with CustomGPTs and Gems
February 25, 2026
"Mapping jobs gives a view into behaviors and needs that may or may not include your solution."
Sean Fitzell Sarah Han Kayla FarrellCraft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps
March 12, 2021
"Developers are protective of their code, so AI coding tools naturally landed with them first."
Allan LowsonRehashing the Double Diamond: Collaborating across functions with AI-assisted prototyping
June 9, 2026
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can I describe my professional value without relying on traditional design job titles?
What are practical approaches to balance rapid AI-driven prototyping with maintaining brand and design system consistency?
Is there a plan to integrate third-party UX content or futures thinking into Rosenverse?