Summary
Curated from community-contributions, these brief video clips feature winning submissions from industry pros sharing their most important lessons on navigating the intersection of UX/Product.
Key Insights
-
•
User experience and product management naturally maintain a healthy tension balancing ideal UX and business priorities.
-
•
Mistakes in early product roles can serve as valuable lessons on prioritization and feasibility.
-
•
Weekly Wednesday watch parties create ongoing live user research that increases team empathy and cross-disciplinary conversations.
-
•
Having client sessions easily accessible near engineering and product spaces boosts attendance and collaboration.
-
•
Offering incentives like candy stickers and virtual options helps increase participation in research sessions.
-
•
Making research live and visible reduces recruiter workload and increases product team exposure to users.
-
•
Designers transitioning from agencies to product roles often feel under-equipped but already have key skills and mindsets.
-
•
Articulating design value through connecting user outcomes to business outcomes shifts UX from craft to measurable impact.
-
•
Framing design hypotheses and focusing on metrics aligned with user outcomes reduces fear of data measurement in UX.
-
•
Embracing data enables UX professionals to speak the language of business stakeholders, gaining influence over product strategy.
Notable Quotes
"Even if you had designed it, I wouldn’t have prioritized it."
"At best, user experience and product management work together in a healthy tension."
"Weekly Wednesday watch parties have become very compelling for the entire and extended product, UX, and development teams."
"We’ve observed conversations that don’t always happen, like an engineering director talking to a content strategist in the same room."
"Having clients always on has enabled us to take the heat off our recruiters by recruiting every other week."
"UX practitioners already have the mindset and toolkit needed to drive a product discussion forward."
"It comes down to confidence and comfort in articulating why something has value and being comfortable with scrutiny."
"By intentionally connecting user outcomes with business outcomes via a structured hypothesis, designers start considering business impact."
"Data can be our friend when we can argue for or against design decisions with real numbers."
"UX folks are empowered to make clear and confident impact decisions to the product strategy."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"I wish I could tell my 22-year-old self what to stop doing and what to embrace to be a better designer."
Adam Cutler Karen Pascoe Ian Swinson Susan WorthmanDiscussion
June 8, 2016
"Sometimes the director is the most senior design person in the org and ends up playing the executive role without the title or support."
Peter MerholzThe Trials and Tribulations of Directors of UX (Videoconference)
July 13, 2023
"Everything that has been put online, someone like us made and put there; we bake our own biases into it."
Lisa WelchmanCleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
June 14, 2018
"Policy change is the backbone of effective climate strategies in urban areas."
Vincent BrathwaiteOpener: Past, Present, and Future—Closing the Racial Divide in Design Teams
October 22, 2020
"OKRs are a tool for each of us to tidy our house and focus on what’s important."
Brenna FallonLearning Over Outcomes
October 24, 2019
"It’s human infrastructure—community organizing, unions, activists—that saves the day when other infrastructures break down."
Tricia WangSpatial Collapse: Designing for Emergent Culture
January 8, 2024
"Proto personas created by cross-department participants helped us build unbiased, relevant survey questions."
Edgar Anzaldua MorenoUsing Research to Determine Unique Value Proposition
March 11, 2021
"Our brains are terrible at operating only on one type of information, whether object-oriented or context-oriented."
Designing Systems at Scale
November 7, 2018
"Most product teams work linearly, but systems thinking captures the real-world complexity of moving forward and sometimes stepping back."
Erin WeigelGet Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact
July 24, 2024