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
"Digital identity cards had a bad reputation, but when we explored further, we realized the card itself is a valuable existing asset."
Magdalena ZadaraZero Hour: How to Get Far Quickly When Starting Your Digital Service Unit Late
November 16, 2022
"We need to focus on what people can do, not just what they have done."
Joseph Williams Nepani Birondo Matt Readman Allison NgoUnlocking impact and influence through inclusive hiring in research
December 16, 2021
"Our super strength comes from partnerships and scalable, repeatable processes."
Kate Koch Jean-Claire FitschenFlex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
September 29, 2021
"Hope locates itself in the spaciousness of uncertainty and the belief that what we do matters even if outcomes are unknown."
Frances YllanaDesignOps–Leading the Path to Parity
April 27, 2023
"Moving from thoughts to things is one of the key tools in UX influence."
Ovetta SampsonTurning UX Passion into Real Product Influence
June 7, 2023
"Design ops should coordinate initiatives, measure impact, and advocate for designer happiness as a business metric - Peter Bosma."
Bria Alexander Patrizia Bertini Peter Boersma Jon Fukuda Dave Malouf Theresa Slate Changying (Z) ZhengCharting the future of DesignOps: A community workshop
April 18, 2024
"There is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives."
Angelos ArnisNavigating the Rapid Shifts in Tech's Turbulent Terrain
October 2, 2023
"Processes are never perfect, but thoughtful testing limits disruption for your team."
Deanna SmithLeading Change with Confidence: Strategies for Optimizing Your Process
September 23, 2024
"If we avoid how we work together, we create disjointed experiences and cause confusion and frustration for riders."
Kristin TaylorBuilding Bridges Across Organizational Silos
November 18, 2022