Summary
Product managers and UXers do adjacent but different jobs. We'll talk about scope, celebrating successes, and understanding each other better. Stick around to join the conversation and ask Rich your questions during our post-session Q+A, moderated by Christian Crumlish.
Key Insights
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Despite increased product management visibility at the executive level, UX still often lacks a direct seat at the table.
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Executives prioritize outcomes tied to financial or customer value over processes or detailed methodologies.
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Product managers operate under intense stakeholder pressure from multiple departments, forcing them to reject roughly 95% of requests.
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Balancing feature development with essential technical maintenance and UX validation work is critical but difficult to communicate upward.
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Sales teams in enterprise settings can escalate urgent unplanned work, disrupting planned roadmaps and adding more pressure on product managers.
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Empathy and assuming good intent help soften conflicts between product, UX, and stakeholders.
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UX teams need to work with product to 'merchandise' their wins using simple language and quantified financial impact.
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Democratizing research requires assigning responsibility based on team members’ skills rather than defaulting all work to product managers.
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Including product, UX, and engineering together in customer discovery sessions builds stronger shared understanding and emotional buy-in.
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In consumer-facing companies, UX is more likely to have executive representation, but in enterprise software companies, gaining a seat at the table is a long-term challenge.
Notable Quotes
"Given the choice between three designs, I will always choose the least optimal or the worst. That’s a guarantee."
"If you really want to make things happen, you need to be in the room where it happens."
"Executives don’t care about process—they want a 30 to 45 second update usually with some dollars attached."
"Show, not tell: a short video clip or a bar chart showing a 45% improvement speaks louder than explaining the design process."
"The combination of stakeholder requests is often 20x or 35x what the team can deliver, meaning product managers have to say no 95% of the time."
"Pie charts are useful to show that making one slice bigger means making another slice smaller—something executives hate but need to face."
"Enterprise salespeople are paid to close deals, even if that means escalating to the CEO and undermining the roadmap."
"Product managers learn to attach money to every sentence because if you don’t speak the language of executives, they don’t hear you."
"If there’s a new urgent request, product managers see 'roadmap amnesia' where previous priorities are forgotten."
"We build team cohesion when product managers, designers, and engineers hear customer problems firsthand together—it can’t be done secondhand."
Or choose a question:
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