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
Sohit Karol
Designing Delightful Listening Experiences: Mixed Methods Research in the Age of Machine Learning
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Giff Constable
Financial fluency for product leaders: AMA with Giff Constable
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Jaskiran Kang
Why Community is Key to Professionalizing Design
2022 • Civic Design Community
Sharbani Dhar
Breathing Room for Delight
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Hands on AI #3: Claude Code for UX people
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Mark Interrante
AI for Prioritization (3rd of 3 seminars)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Caitlyn Hampton
Compass 101: Growing Your Career In A Startup World
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Matt Duignan
HITS, Microsoft's internal human insight system: From research library to living body of knowledge
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Jorge Arango
Meeting of the Waters: Designing for Successful Inorganic Growth
2021 • Enterprise Community
Rebecca Topps
Planning and conducting remote usability studies for accessibility
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Jorge Arango
AI as Thought Partner: How to Use LLMs to Transform Your Notes (3rd of 3 seminars)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Kevin Bethune
Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Kritika Yadav
Optimizing AI Conversations: A Case Study on Personalized Shopping Assistance Frameworks
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Dave Hora
Advice for Establishing Research
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Rittika Basu
Age and Interfaces: Equipping Older Adults with Technological Tools
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Michele Marut
Research Repositories Reconsidered
2019 • DesignOps Community

More Videos

Mark Interrante

"Assume positive intent from their point of view — they’re trying to have a good day, not work against you."

Mark Interrante

Collaboration Flows in Product Development

June 9, 2017

Jackie Ho

"The conversation is about how much is this team costing the organization and whether that cost will be worth it in the future."

Jackie Ho

Lead Effectively While Preserving Team Autonomy with Growth Boards

January 8, 2024

Louis Rosenfeld

"If you talk about the conference in social, please use the eUX 2023 hashtag and help us spread the word."

Louis Rosenfeld

Welcome / Housekeeping

June 7, 2023

Sandra Camacho

"Designers need to reflect on who their default user is and how power influences what is prioritized."

Sandra Camacho

Creating More Bias-Proof Designs

January 22, 2025

Iulia Cornigeanu

"The cultural context can dramatically change how long data remains relevant or when it expires."

Iulia Cornigeanu

QuantQual Book Club: Small Data

March 8, 2024

Carol Scott

"Trauma changes the brain—it rewires the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus forever."

Carol Scott Melissa Eggleston

Avoid Harming Your Team and Users: Promoting Care and Brand Reputation with Trauma-Informed UX Practices

February 5, 2025

Louis Rosenfeld

"This is absolutely not the time for us to be throwing our hands up in the air and giving up on Research."

Louis Rosenfeld Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

March 27, 2023

Bria Alexander

"Please be sure to make sure you change your conference itinerary to your local time zone."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

March 29, 2023

Andrea Gallagher

"The hardest thing with hypotheses is looking for the disconfirming evidence, not just the confirmatory."

Andrea Gallagher

The Problem Space

May 16, 2019