Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2
Gold
Tuesday, December 6, 2022 • Design in Product 2022
Share the love for this talk
Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2
Speakers: Aditi Ruiz , Christian Crumlish and Farid Sabitov
Link:

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."

Ask the Rosenbot
Ovetta Sampson
Research in the Automated Future
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Brigette Metzler
Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Chui Chui Tan
Global insights: Embracing international and intercultural research for innovation
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Sol Mesz
Hands or Brains? How to Hire for Strategy, Strategically
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Sarah Brooks
Theme 3 Intro
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Julie Gitlin
Design as an Agent of Digital Transformation at JPMC
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Michelle Morrison
Practice What You Preach
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Sam Yen
Driving Organizational Change Through Design? Do more of this and less of that
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Matt Webb
Context Window: Five Futures for AI
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Milan Guenther
A Shared Language for Co-Creating Ambitious Endeavours
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Simon Wardley
Maps and Topographical Intelligence
2019 • Enterprise Community
Matt Duignan
Atomizing Research: Trend or Trap
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Ryan Matthew
Bridging Design and Code: AI-Powered Design System Integration
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Jack Moffett
SAFe or Sorry?
2019 • Enterprise Community
Matt LeMay
You Don’t “Get” Anyone to Do Anything
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
George Abraham
Design Systems To-Go: Indigo.Design Overview and Exploring the Developer Workflow (Part 3)
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold

More Videos

Irina Tikhonova

"Websites and digital spaces should be government, not just provide information about government."

Irina Tikhonova Kari Dietrich

Small Wins, Big Impact: Leveraging and Elevating User Engagement

December 9, 2021

Nick Cochran

"Working in enterprise can feel like chaos with unclear directions and siloed information."

Nick Cochran

Growing in Enterprise Design through Making Connections

June 3, 2019

Sara Conklin

"I applied my unique skills in UX strategy, behavior design, and innovation facilitation to help climate tech reduce adoption barriers."

Sara Conklin

A UXer’s 12-Month Journey from Climate Concern to Climate Credibility

June 26, 2025

Bria Alexander

"Always approach from a place of kindness and think about the experience you want people to have as the water that keeps trees bendable."

Bria Alexander Laura Gatewood Corey Long Daniel Orbach Laine Prokay Deanna Smith

The Big Question about Resilience: A panel discussion

September 23, 2024

Yulya Besplemennova

"AI behaves like an alien intern because it’s not capable of making sense of some things easy for us."

Yulya Besplemennova

[Demo] Stress-testing GenAI in user research synthesis

June 4, 2024

Rebecca Buck

"Sometimes, right, you feel like you’re about to be run over by the delivery train, and that pressure shapes how research is received."

Rebecca Buck

Mission: Keep Talent in Research Roles!

March 10, 2021

Erika Kincaid

"Design review is simply the act of designers collaborating to increase quality and craft."

Erika Kincaid Brenna Heaps Jessica Tsukimura

Connecting the Dots: How to Foster Collaboration and Build a Strong Design Review Culture

June 8, 2022

Alla Weinberg

"Our brain doesn’t know the difference between a tiger trying to eat us or an angry email from our manager."

Alla Weinberg

How to Build and Scale Team Safety

January 8, 2024

Jeff Ephraim Bander

"Sometimes it is hard to articulate what you looked at, but eye tracking makes it measurable and objective."

Jeff Ephraim Bander Ariane Rahn Philipp Reiter

Eye Tracking Gamechanger: Why Smartphone Eye Tracking will Revolutionize Your UX Research

March 11, 2022