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
"Websites and digital spaces should be government, not just provide information about government."
Irina Tikhonova Kari DietrichSmall Wins, Big Impact: Leveraging and Elevating User Engagement
December 9, 2021
"Working in enterprise can feel like chaos with unclear directions and siloed information."
Nick CochranGrowing in Enterprise Design through Making Connections
June 3, 2019
"I applied my unique skills in UX strategy, behavior design, and innovation facilitation to help climate tech reduce adoption barriers."
Sara ConklinA UXer’s 12-Month Journey from Climate Concern to Climate Credibility
June 26, 2025
"Always approach from a place of kindness and think about the experience you want people to have as the water that keeps trees bendable."
Bria Alexander Laura Gatewood Corey Long Daniel Orbach Laine Prokay Deanna SmithThe Big Question about Resilience: A panel discussion
September 23, 2024
"AI behaves like an alien intern because it’s not capable of making sense of some things easy for us."
Yulya Besplemennova[Demo] Stress-testing GenAI in user research synthesis
June 4, 2024
"Sometimes, right, you feel like you’re about to be run over by the delivery train, and that pressure shapes how research is received."
Rebecca BuckMission: Keep Talent in Research Roles!
March 10, 2021
"Design review is simply the act of designers collaborating to increase quality and craft."
Erika Kincaid Brenna Heaps Jessica TsukimuraConnecting the Dots: How to Foster Collaboration and Build a Strong Design Review Culture
June 8, 2022
"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
"Sometimes it is hard to articulate what you looked at, but eye tracking makes it measurable and objective."
Jeff Ephraim Bander Ariane Rahn Philipp ReiterEye Tracking Gamechanger: Why Smartphone Eye Tracking will Revolutionize Your UX Research
March 11, 2022
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What evidence exists that service design contributes to business outcomes such as customer retention and digital transformation success?
What are the four archetypes of AI behaviors identified in this talk and how do they help alignment?
What does the mandala metaphor tell us about the temporary nature of service design artifacts?