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
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Empathy maps centered on product managers reveal their daily struggles with prioritization, planning, and cross-functional coordination.
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Product managers often feel pressured to launch imperfect features to meet deadlines, relying on iterative improvements later.
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UX practitioners gained increased empowerment to elevate UX to strategic roles through shared understanding with product managers.
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Limitations of traditional empathy mapping include potentially exclusionary sensory language that can marginalize people with disabilities.
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Synthesizing user research insights into accessible formats remains a high priority to support product decisions.
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High meeting loads for product managers reduce their available time to do focused work, impacting collaboration quality.
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Trust, visibility, and communication are critical but challenging facets of the product-UX partnership.
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The mapping exercise can be adapted for other teams (engineers, sales) to improve cross-functional empathy.
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Continued conversations and transparent surfacing of assumptions are necessary for improving product and UX collaboration.
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No single ideal model exists for product-UX relationships; customization based on individual strengths is key.
Notable Quotes
"As launches a hard-to-use feature to hit deadline things will iterate to make it better easier later."
"Product managers have a lot of meetings and it’s really hard to find time for actually doing the work."
"If we ever do get a seat at the table, we ought to be sitting next to each other and presenting a united front."
"We have UX superpowers designed to solve complex workflow problems and make things that don’t work work better."
"We have to actually face these problems together and articulate them and then design solutions to them."
"It’s possible to get stuck in a defensive crouch believing others are blocking you and that doesn’t empower you."
"There’s frustration working with people who don’t understand your value and your work and that’s real."
"This isn’t something you have to figure out on your own; everybody in the industry struggles with it."
"The affinity diagram is a quick way to access the mindset of product managers when struggling with something specific."
"Traditional empathy mapping language—seeing, hearing—can exclude people with disabilities, so we need to evolve it."
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