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
"Iteration is the golden rule of design, including iterating on your design system rules themselves."
Jaime CreixemsBest Practices when Creating and Maintaining a Design System
June 7, 2023
"Hiring team members with lived experience was key for authentic engagement and facilitating workshops."
Alexia Cohen Adriane AckermanIncreasing Health Equity and Improving the Service Experience for Under-Served Latine Communities in Arizona
December 4, 2024
"Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions."
Meghan Hellstern Joanne DongThe Next 100 Years of Civic Design: How Might We Better Rise to Meet the Challenges of Today and Tomorrow?
December 10, 2021
"Setting up research ops raised team morale and retention because researchers felt valued and supported."
Saskia LiebenbergStart Small for Big Impact
May 15, 2019
"Organizational change management requires as much care and effort as executing good research."
Dr. Jamika D. Burge Robert Fabricant Peter Merholz Noam Segal Teresa TorresA Genuine Conversation about the Future of UX Research
March 20, 2024
"One in five people in the UK have a disability; it's about 1 in four in the US and 1 in 5 in Australia."
Rebecca ToppsPlanning and conducting remote usability studies for accessibility
September 10, 2020
"We took a little bit more of an editorial approach and kind of trimmed down the tools to keep it legible and usable."
JP Allen Holly HoldenNavigating the UX Tools Landscape
October 1, 2021
"If you think about things this way, that’s when you actually become the CEO of the experience."
How to Identify and Increase your "Experience Quotient"
June 15, 2018
"AI development is often uninformed and hurried, resulting in deployments that don’t operate well in the real world."
Joel BranchHumanizing AI: Filling the Gaps with Multi-faceted Research
March 11, 2021
