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
"Defining anti-patterns helps us quickly identify and remedy issues like ineffective meetings or misaligned priorities."
Kate Koch Jean-Claire FitschenFlex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
September 29, 2021
"Focused, uninterrupted work is declining across every sector where AI tools are adopted."
Angelos ArnisOur Fragmented Identity
June 12, 2026
"Check out our digital swag bag—our sponsors put a lot of effort into making compelling offers for all of you here today."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
September 29, 2021
"We took all the leadership admins to a call center for a week to make them feel what customers go through."
Panel Discussion: Communicating the Value of DesignOps
November 7, 2018
"I’m going to need to bring my A game."
Randolph Duke IIWar Stories LIVE! Randy Duke II
March 30, 2020
"Any sufficiently advanced neglect is indistinguishable from Alice."
Sha HwangThe Lost Year
June 11, 2021
"Providing immediate tactical value is the big one for just-in-time curation."
Matt DuignanAtomizing Research: Trend or Trap
March 30, 2020
"73% of users are willing to choose a more sustainable browsing option even if image quality decreases."
Ned Gartside Mike Gifford Zoe Lopez-Latorre Tzviya SiegmanNavigating accessibility and climate
April 17, 2024
"Agile needs a brain, and that brain is the continuous customer feedback loop."
Bill ScottLean Engineering: Engineering for Learning and Experimentation in the Enterprise
May 14, 2015