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
"We created recruitment events for underrepresented groups because it was harder for them to get permission and sign up in time otherwise."
Kara KaneCommunities of Practice for Civic Design
April 7, 2022
"Service design was originally formulated as the alternative to product thinking, but digital products are actually mostly service experiences."
Lavrans Løvlie Ben ReasonAsk me anything – Authors of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
November 19, 2025
"You are more beautiful in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded ruse of any destination you could reach."
Marc RettigThe Urge to Migrate
June 4, 2026
"Ethnography inside companies is about living in France and caring to learn French."
Christian MadsbjergInfluencing Strategy
March 31, 2020
"We have to go from shipping a minimal viable product to creating a minimal lovable experience."
Maria GiudiceRemaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience
June 9, 2016
"Double screening combined with a quick pre-session call is my go-to method to verify participants are genuine."
Roberta Dombrowski Lianna Aduana5 Reasons to Bring your Recruiting in House
September 30, 2021
"When you get lonely, battle that loneliness by identifying allies and people you can trust in your organization and the design ops community."
Jackie AjouxLeveling-Up: A Single-Player’s Guide to the DesignOps Team-of-One
January 8, 2024
"Civic design is relatively new and spans all kinds of government agencies from federal and national down to tribal and local."
Louis Rosenfeld Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
November 16, 2022
"No bee micromanages another; they have different roles and contribute independently but in sync."
Mariesa LenzWhat Beekeeping Taught me about Product Teams
October 29, 2025
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What role do psychological safety and coalition-building play in surfacing invisible workplace issues?
What tips did Julia provide for building AI-powered research tools using Replit and vibe coding?
How did AI factor into Rachel’s feelings about leaving the workforce and her current creative processes?