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
"Put all product screenshots together to clearly show that different products look different and must feel like one company."
Prerna MakanawalaAchieving Balanced Design Consistency
June 9, 2021
"It’s about empowering a maker culture where the collective ‘we’ accomplishes something far beyond what any individual imagined."
Uday GajendarThe Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX
May 13, 2015
"We need to start thinking about fluidity in identity because there is no 'this' anymore; people are multiracial, fluid in sexual identity, neurodiversity, and more."
Dave Malouf Meredith Black Farid SabitovThe Past, Present, and Future of DesignOps: a 2-part DesignOps Community Call (Part 1)
February 17, 2022
"The biggest learning is it’s about understanding the people and organization beyond just the design team."
Nora Tejeda Giovanna AlonsoScaling Design Capabilities at BBVA Through a Self-service Design Model
June 10, 2021
"That holiday party in Medina was eye-opening—tech execs talking about vacation homes, and I thought, I want that world."
Chelsey GlassonExit Interview #3: Same as It Ever Was: What Leaving Tech Taught Me About Change
December 17, 2025
"When I have just one idea, I’ll defend it because it’s the only one I have, even if it’s not a great idea."
Steve BatyBreaking Out of Ruts: Tips for Overcoming the Fear of Change
June 9, 2016
"Global mindset training includes simple things like teaching when to use email versus Slack given time zone differences."
Brennan HartichCommunicating and Establishing DesignOps as a New Function
November 7, 2018
"Statistics is another tool in our toolbox, part of a hierarchy of evidence that includes qualitative and quantitative methods."
Caroline Jarrett Erin WeigelHave fun with statistics?
December 12, 2024
"Give a s**t about your topic. If you’re not trying to change something, why are you on stage?"
Louis Rosenfeld Jemma Ahmed Christian Crumlish Uday Gajendar Chris GeisonCoffee with Lou #3: What Makes for a Successful UX Conference Presentation?
May 2, 2024
