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
"Sharing your skills and teaching others can boost your confidence and professional development."
Kathleen AsjesResearch Democratization: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
March 10, 2022
"You can’t begin a design process already with the end solution in your head—let the process inspire new insights."
Steve ChaparroBringing Into Alignment Brand, Culture and Space
August 13, 2020
"How might we unlock the full capabilities of our most valuable resource, our people, their skills, their knowledge and their potential?"
Frances YllanaTheme 2 Intro
September 24, 2024
"Culture eats strategy for breakfast—integrating cultures is the hardest and most critical part of mergers."
Jorge ArangoMeeting of the Waters: Designing for Successful Inorganic Growth
August 12, 2021
"Mergers and acquisitions require us to carefully avoid pitfalls when unifying user experiences."
Uday GajendarTheme 1: Introduction
June 9, 2021
"If we do things with the least amount of friction, resiliency isn’t the problem anymore, efficiency is."
Dave MaloufTheme 3: Introduction and Provocation
January 8, 2024
"The shift from a production to consumption mindset means my job is not done till my customer’s job is done."
Maish NichaniSparking a Service Excellence Mindset at a Government Agency
December 9, 2021
"Hosting is being a light presence to help the group see and listen without judgment, moving attention from me to us."
Marc RettigThe Urge to Migrate
June 4, 2026
"If you’re in tech, you are in social change, whether you realize it or not."
Sandra CamachoCreating More Bias-Proof Designs
January 22, 2025
