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
"With great power comes great responsibility; we shouldn’t abandon using motivation techniques, or others will use them poorly."
Cheryl PlatzEmbrace Your Fun Factor: Game Development Best Practices for Product Design
January 9, 2026
"If you want to work with Hilton, you have to bring accessibility to the table like security and privacy."
Nicole Bergstrom Anna Cook Kate Kalcevich Saara Kamppari-MillerAccessibilityOps: Moving beyond “nice to have”
September 19, 2024
"The COO isn’t paying attention to ops silos—COOs focus on longer term strategic enablement beyond today’s operational teams."
Jon Fukuda Jake Burghardt Jose Coronado Natalie Dunbar Denise TillesAll the Ops: Successful cross-functional collaboration
September 10, 2025
"Excel is a little bit outdated; more advanced cloud tools help us co-create and collaborate in real time."
Scott StephensThe Next Generation in DesignOps Toolsets
July 28, 2022
"Finding allies within an enterprise and demonstrating success is how you get a foothold for experimentation culture."
Steve Sanderson Alissa Briggs Jeff Gothelf Bill ScottDiscussion
May 14, 2015
"These systems aren’t stable like old software; they change as data and models evolve."
Carol SmithOperationalizing Responsible, Human-Centered AI
June 7, 2023
"Design managers make things go; they’re the GPS of the design organization."
Kristin SkinnerOpening Keynote: Org Design for Design Orgs
November 6, 2017
"Sometimes the loudest voices dominate, but asynchronous collaboration helps give quieter voices a chance to speak."
Jerome “Axle” BrownHow to Use Self-Directed Learning to Ensure Your Research Insights are Heard and Acted Upon
March 11, 2021
"We emphasize collaboration, not individual work, to build teams and collective knowledge."
Victor M. GonzalezPracticing Learners and Learning Practitioners
March 10, 2021
