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
Renee Bouwens
Landing Product Impact: Aligning Research as a Foundational Driver for Delivering the World’s Best Products
2023 • QuantQual Interest Group
Taylor Klassman
Shaping the Next Era of UX Research: Collaborative Forum
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Bassel Deeb
Do More With Less: Equip and Lead Design Orgs Through Adversity
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Robin Beers
Beyond Insights: Researchers as Organizational Change Catalysts
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Toby Haug
Discussion
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Megan Blocker
Panel: Excellence in Impact
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Victor Udoewa
Radical Participatory Design: Decolonizing Participatory Design Processes
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Kate Kalcevich
Designing inclusively with AI
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Jayne Engle
Civic Design for the Next Seven Generations—A Discussion on Sacred Civics
2022 • Civic Design Community
Chloe Amos-Edkins
A Cultural Approach: Research in the Context of Glocalisation
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Rebecca Topps
Planning and conducting remote usability studies for accessibility
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Uday Gajendar
From AI to Zeitgeist: Theory as the design antidote to AI hype
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Jon Fukuda
Theme One Intro
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Uday Gajendar
The Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Iram Shah
Closing Keynote: The View from the Top
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Bria Alexander
Charting the future of DesignOps: A community workshop
2024 • DesignOps Community

More Videos

Deanna Mitchell

"We made a taxonomy of streaming participants using food metaphors: snacks, main meal, side dish."

Deanna Mitchell

Designing with culture: Unlocking impactful insights for Product and UX

March 12, 2025

Kristin Skinner

"Only one in 10 companies have quantifiable measurement for their design leaders."

Kristin Skinner Kamdyn Moore

8 Types of Measures in Design Operations

April 16, 2020

Nick Lewis

"Designing sustainable doesn’t mean removing everything fun from the web."

Nick Lewis

Designing and building low-carbon websites independently

November 18, 2025

Gillian Salerno-Rebic

"This tool is not an easy button; it enhances what we do by giving us confidence faster, not replacing human insight."

Gillian Salerno-Rebic Mark Micheli

From Insight to Impact: How JourneySpark Used WEVO Pulse + Pro to Drive a 50% Lift in Ad Engagement

June 11, 2025

Tricia Wang

"You have to ask who the 'we' is in the room, because often the communities you're designing for aren't represented or understood there."

Tricia Wang

The most popular design thinking strategy is BS

January 27, 2022

Indi Young

"Purpose is a super important word—understanding what a person is trying to get done, not just their behavior."

Indi Young

Paying Better Attention to the Problem with Indi Young

December 12, 2019

Amy Paris

"Change in government moves slowly, but we can pilot and iterate to serve evolving needs more quickly."

Amy Paris Danielle Thierry

Delivering Equity: Government Services for All Ages, Languages, Sexual Orientations, and Gender Identities

December 9, 2021

Jen Briselli

"Complex systems are not chaos but non-deterministic due to interdependencies and autonomy within the system."

Jen Briselli

Learning is the north star: service design for adaptive capacity

November 19, 2025

Janelle Estes

"When I first started, I felt like I had this little superpower that nobody else really knew about."

Janelle Estes

UX Research Trends

January 28, 2021