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 treat the design system like a software product with a backlog, QA, and a product owner prioritizing feature requests."
David Cronin Uday Gajendar Peter Morville Kendra ShimmellDiscussion
May 13, 2015
"We’ve seen self-service tool usage grow from hundreds to millions of veterans served monthly after launching a unified VA platform."
Shawna Hein Kevin HoffmanCreate a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
November 17, 2022
"Project leadership can be at any level; the right discipline leads, not necessarily the most senior person."
Catherine BlizzardUsing Integrated Insight to Drive Growth
March 10, 2022
"Teams testing components in real-world contexts early can catch issues before products are even built."
Gabriela BarnevaOperationalizing Inclusive Design in Design Ops
September 11, 2025
"The COP became the beating heart of our project, enabling quick credibility and community excitement."
Alexia Cohen Adriane AckermanIncreasing Health Equity and Improving the Service Experience for Under-Served Latine Communities in Arizona
December 4, 2024
"SAFe often turns UX into just digital or visual designers, which is wasteful and marginalizes valuable skills."
Christian CrumlishAMA with Christian Crumlish, author of Product Management for UX People
March 24, 2022
"We were educated to minimize the value of our own practice and just reproduce what was done elsewhere."
Verónica Urzúa Jorge MontielThe B-side of the Research Impact
March 12, 2021
"Economic opportunity puts pressure on design to justify its impact on the bottom line, which art school never prepared us for."
John Maeda Alison RandAbout Design Organizations
May 13, 2019
"Make a note when something about your design process doesn't feel right—discomfort is a guide to curiosity and improvement."
Tricia WangThe most popular design thinking strategy is BS
January 27, 2022