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
"Accessibility and inclusivity are not afterthoughts; they must be baked into the design from the start."
Uday GajendarTheme 1: Introduction
June 9, 2021
"We must recognize multi-track career and multi-level skill sets, avoiding the single-track start-over model."
Mackenzie GuinonM.C. Escher’s UX Research Career Ladder
March 9, 2022
"Sponsor sessions at our conferences are often so good that people ask for recordings — that’s unusual."
Louis Rosenfeld Christian CrumlishOpening Remarks
November 29, 2023
"Testing with a screen reader is fine for QA, but user research must be with actual screen reader users."
Samuel ProulxDesigning beyond caricatures: Embracing real, diverse user needs
December 4, 2024
"I believe there's really no such thing as a boring place at the state of mind."
Ana Maria Montero Barrantes Aditi Dhar Michelle Kaplan Nate Osborne Matt LaurenceThe Authentic UX Talent Show
January 8, 2024
"How might we statements are small but mighty questions that let us reframe insights into opportunity areas."
Billy CarlsonIdeation tips for Product Managers
December 6, 2022
"My job wasn’t to do good IA, it was figuring out how to be allowed to do good IA."
Sarah BarrettThe "How" of Enterprise Information Architecture
June 6, 2023
"AI models hallucinate when they fail, they fail unpredictably."
Anupama DhareshwarFrom blueprint to bot: Designing resilient AI-powered services
November 19, 2025
"The value of real exposure holds true in UX, it’s replaceable and helps you understand real user problems."
Roy Opata OlendeHow Zapier Uses ‘All Hands Research’ to Increase Exposure to Users
August 6, 2020
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can UX practitioners build influence within healthcare organizations where clinical outcomes dominate decision-making?
What practices help maintain continuous learning and feedback loops after initial research coaching?
How does healthcare UX balance creativity with strict regulatory compliance and safety requirements?