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
"Our community would not be what it is without you."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
October 1, 2021
"Through DP&M, designers get more contextual detail than what might be captured in a Jira ticket."
Jon Fukuda Ellie KryslDesign Planning and Management Support
October 3, 2023
"Nearly 85% of user researchers have suffered mental health issues, and 70% say it affected their work."
Jane Reid Janice HannawaySelf-care in User Research
April 2, 2020
"If you don’t feel connected and you’re standing alone, the challenge looks much bigger."
Marc Fonteijn Ru ButlerIncrease your confidence, influence, and impact (through a Professional Community)
December 3, 2024
"There’s a lot of pressure on ops people and managers to make everything perfect all the time for staff."
Tess DixonC'mon Get Happy
September 29, 2021
"We have these four pillars—purpose, people, process, and progress—that ground our thinking about UX research's future."
Taylor KlassmanShaping the Next Era of UX Research: Collaborative Forum
March 11, 2025
"Our brain doesn’t know the difference between a tiger trying to eat us or an angry email from our manager."
Alla WeinbergHow to Build and Scale Team Safety
January 8, 2024
"We treat our shared tooling and design system as a product with a dedicated team maintaining reusable components and governance."
Shawna Hein Kevin HoffmanCreate a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
November 17, 2022
"Every job is a climate job. Wherever we are, the climate needs us to address it in our role."
Sara ConklinA UXer’s 12-Month Journey from Climate Concern to Climate Credibility
June 26, 2025
