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
Sara Logel
Your Colleagues are Your Users Too
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Ashley Cortez
Shifting Toward Community-Led Innovation in Local Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Deanna Smith
Leading Change with Confidence: Strategies for Optimizing Your Process
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Samuel Proulx
From Standards to Innovation: Why Inclusive Design Wins
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Bilan Hashi
The Tension Between Story Collecting and Story Telling in Research
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Eduardo Ortiz
Day 3 Theme Panel
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Victor M. Gonzalez
Practicing Learners and Learning Practitioners
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Jeff Gothelf
Who does what by how much?
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Billy Carlson
Ideation tips for Product Managers
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Niko Laitinen
Adaptable Org Design for Resilient Times
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Sarah Kinkade
Design Management Models in the Face of Transformation
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Jenny Price
From Tradition to Transformation: Unlocking Startup Agility in a Legacy Enterprise
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Kristin Skinner
8 Types of Measures in Design Operations
2020 • DesignOps Community
Shreya Dhawan
Making service tangible: the fastest path to higher performance
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Melinda Belcher
Bridging the Gap: Making the Most of the Differences Between Agency and Enterprise
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Sarah Alvarado
How to make UX research leadership more effective [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2023 • Advancing Research Community

More Videos

Scott Stephens

"Even as a designer, I was able to learn how to build formulas and automations — the tools are quite accessible."

Scott Stephens

The Next Generation in DesignOps Toolsets

July 28, 2022

Jon Fukuda

"The heart of the storyteller is actually the heart of the story."

Jon Fukuda

Storytelling for DesignOps

August 17, 2023

Cheryl Platz

"With great power comes great responsibility; we shouldn’t abandon using motivation techniques, or others will use them poorly."

Cheryl Platz

Embrace Your Fun Factor: Game Development Best Practices for Product Design

January 9, 2026

Dawn Ressel

"Designers’ medium is code; until your great design is in production code, your design is a figment of your imagination."

Dawn Ressel

Full-Stack User Experiences: A Marriage of Design and Technology

June 9, 2016

Sharon Bautista

"About 7% of our daily active users print from the browser, which in raw numbers is about 6 million people."

Sharon Bautista

Time to Make the Donuts: How User Research Helped Bridge Disparate Teams

January 8, 2024

Julie Norvaisas

"Rigor doesn’t mean rigid; there needs to be some creativity allowed there too."

Julie Norvaisas Pert Eilers Mina Jonsson

Back to basics, or start from scratch?

March 12, 2025

George Abraham

"Design systems has always been a beginning, like a seed, and design ops basically serves as the nurture."

George Abraham Stefan Ivanov

Design Systems To-Go: Introducing a Starter Design System, and Indigo.Design Overview (Part 1)

September 30, 2021

Sara Conklin

"What I realized is you need to add one word to the climate Venn diagram: specific, what specific work needs doing."

Sara Conklin

A UXer’s 12-Month Journey from Climate Concern to Climate Credibility

June 26, 2025

Bria Alexander

"If you want to take part in the gifs, laughs, jokes, questions, and links to resources, join us on #deogenerall Slack channel."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

September 30, 2021