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
"Jazz soloists draw from a lifetime of patterns, sometimes quoting TV theme songs like the Muppets or Sanford and Son."
Jim KalbachJazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
November 6, 2017
"A seat at the table versus building the table means setting routines where all the right partners come together regularly."
Frank DuranPartnership Playbook: Lessons Learned in Effective Partnership
January 8, 2024
"The more payment providers you offer, the higher the chance everyone can pick what works best for them."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
March 28, 2023
"We shifted from an output mindset of how much work we do to an outcome mindset of the impact our work delivers."
Jen Cardello Jennifer OttoLearning Velocity—The Insights Speedometer
September 16, 2021
"Think of a creative professional as an ideas athlete or a creativity Olympian."
Dr. Karl JeffriesThe Science of Creativity for DesignOps
January 8, 2024
"The town of Carlsgo wasn't consciously disadvantaging women, they were just following a best practice that ignored different experiences."
Kaitlin TaskerFast and Fearless Inclusive Research
March 27, 2023
"Sometimes you need to view your career like an investor, where you invest your time for the kind of impact you want."
Max Gadney Andrea Petrucci Joshua Stehr Hannah WickesAssessing UX jobs for impact in climate
August 14, 2024
"Craft isn't gonna help you feel more fulfilled, influential or powerful. It cannot meet that need."
Jess GrecoClaiming your power: Practical tools for amplifying your unique voice
March 13, 2025
"Public data has a life of its own; it is sometimes one thing, sometimes another, depending on context and display."
Bryce Benton[Demo] AI-powered UX enhancement: Aligning GitHub documentation with USWDS at Austin Public Library
June 4, 2024
