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
"If you say you won’t use AI, that’s even more reason to use it so you can debate the ethics intelligently."
Tom Armitage Carla Diana Kanene Ayo HolderDay 2 Panel: Looking ahead: Designing with AI in 2026
June 11, 2025
"You should always have your research questions first before deciding to use eye tracking."
Jeff Ephraim Bander Ariane Rahn Philipp ReiterEye Tracking Gamechanger: Why Smartphone Eye Tracking will Revolutionize Your UX Research
March 11, 2022
"Language matters so does money. The way it connects with the business is how you get those resources."
Andy Polaine Lavrans LøvlieWhat is the role of service design in product-led organizations?
December 3, 2024
"Model companies are students in a classroom wanting good points—they’re happy to run external expert evals to improve."
Peter Van DijckHands-on AI #2: Understanding evals: LLM as a Judge
October 15, 2025
"If you build accessible shopping with these four keys, compliance with legal standards like WCAG will naturally fall into place."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
October 3, 2023
"Embracing AI’s weirdness can turn unpredictable outputs into experience assets rather than liabilities."
Josh Clark Veronika KindredSentient Design: New Postures for AI-Mediated Experiences (2nd of 3 seminars)
January 29, 2025
"If you can follow the simple steps of preparing, aligning, and delivering, you can shift the focus and impact of your team."
Mac SmithMeasuring Up: Using Product Research for Organizational Impact
March 12, 2021
"Asking stupid questions can lead experts to reframe their thinking and improve the work."
Dem Gerolemou Alexis Oh Neef RehmanClimate technology fundamentals
May 15, 2024
"Retention went up because designers had more time to do what they loved: design."
Brennan HartichCommunicating and Establishing DesignOps as a New Function
November 7, 2018
