Introduction
Product managers (also known as product owners in organizations following the Agile Scrum methodology) are responsible for driving a product strategy that delivers value to the business and users. Ideally, they should understand the importance of user research. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the reality.
Product designers hold responsibility for ensuring that products address real user needs and are usable. This title is an increasingly common catch-all term for UX designers who have broad expertise in research and design skills, with a particular area of specialty. Product designers usually have a keen awareness of business strategy, as they should be able to connect design improvements with business impact.
Often, product designers can be disconnected from product managers. They may receive a design assignment and be expected to come up with a mockup, with little context or communication in-between. They will often have to prove their value to their product managers, earn trust with them, and then use their strengths to influence them.
Collaboration between product managers and product designers commonly breaks down because of role misconceptions on both sides. We propose a product-owner archetype, meant as a starting point for clarifying misconceptions about product managers and improving collaboration, trust, and influence with product managers.
The Product-Manager Archetype
Archetypes are nearly identical to personas. Like personas, they are abstractions of groups of people, but, unlike personas, they do not include details such as a face or a name. We represent the product manager as an archetype to shift emphasis away from personal characteristics. The archetype below showcases typical goals, strengths, challenges, activities, and skills of product managers. Each of these attributes has implications for how product designers can best collaborate with product managers.
Goals of Product Managers
Product managers strive to unify product teams around a common vision, while driving value for the business and customers through experiments that test assumptions and mitigate risks. Here are some of their typical goals:
- Experiment rapidly: Product managers seek to rapidly test assumptions about product opportunities.
Product designers can advocate for quality research-based experiments, because random tests risk wasting time. For example, there is an infinite number of ways to improve user efficiency, but it is valuable to advocate for an experiment that addresses a real pain point or need identified in discovery. Often such experiments will take the form of prototype testing. If you lead these experiments, you should schedule them at a time when your product manager can observe. - Prioritize based on value added: Maximizing the business value of product decisions is a top priority for product managers.
Product design can introduce prioritization frameworks from its toolbox and collaboratively create a custom framework that accounts for criteria most important to the organization. The framework should incorporate user-oriented criteria, in addition to business criteria. If your product manager is putting together a roadmap for the year and the business outcomes are clearly articulated in the priority-criteria set, suggest user outcomes for the criteria set, too. For example, if your product manager proposes a business outcome like revenue, suggest also tracking the user reach or success rate. - Create team alignment on goals: Product managers are responsible for ensuring that everyone on the team understands and connects their work back to a shared objective.
Product designers can map out how their day-to-day activities track to each high-level goal or objective and what the associated business outcome is. Check in with your product manager regularly to ensure that priorities have not changed. If you are struggling to map activities onto goals successfully, it could indicate a disconnect between product design and the business strategy. For example, if your team tracks tasks in user stories, get in the habit of explicitly stating the problem addressed in each story, which is traditionally visualized in the form of a roadmap. Connecting the dots between your daily tasks and their objectives will save your product manager time. - Mitigate risk: Product managers want to identify and assess three types of risks: business-related (indicators that the business will suffer as a result of a particular action), usability-related indicators that a design is difficult to use), and technical (indicators that technical resources and infrastructure are insufficient). However, they are usually equipped to identify and assess only business-related risks.
Product design can leverage a mix of user-research methods to identify and mitigate usability and utility risks, which encompass threats to ease of use and functionality. Share the identified risks accompanied by their severity, so that your product manager can efficiently compare them.
Strengths of Product Managers
Product managers are usually armed with strong communication skills that they use to create team alignment and to synthesize many inputs that inform a decisive strategy.
- Strategic thinking: Product managers combine inputs from engineering, design, sales, marketing, finance, and customer support to make decisions about product direction.
When it’s unclear where new design requests come from, product designers should hold product managers accountable to explain how these requests connect back to goals and vision. Changes in strategy are inevitable and understanding the reason behind them can avoid lack of alignment, conflict among teams, and, ultimately, productivity loss. - Communication: Product managers align the team and foster frequent communication to ensure that everyone follows the same strategy to deliver ongoing value to customers and the business.
Product designers can initiate and welcome frequent communication with the product manager even if it feels like overkill. Communication ensures that new information or changes in strategy aren’t missed and decreases the risk that you waste time on something that will need to be redone. For example, if your product manager learns something from a stakeholder, they may put on their to-do list to share with you, but they might delay sharing, because of other, higher-priority things that demanded their attention during their day. If you message them regularly, they will be more likely to share information in a timely manner. - Decisive action in the face of noise: Product managers often need to make product direction decisions with an overwhelming amount of information. They must distinguish important information from noise. Then, they must prioritize the important pieces of information.
Product designers can check in with product managers to understand which user priorities informed their decisions. If you’re questioning a product manager’s decision, drive for clarity with a tone of patience, curiosity, and empathy. If the decision’ is still unclear, offer to revisit the existing research together. As you consistently drive for clarity, you’ll build up trust with your product manager, and you’ll gain confidence that they took your inputs into account before making decisions. For example, imagine that you were working on an ecommerce product-listing page and your product manager decided that different variations of the same item should appear in different listing elements. Perhaps your research revealed that users prefer to see the same variations in a single element with swatches, instead. You might ask your product manager about this decision and learn that product marketing told them that increasing the sheer visibility of a single popular item in its numerous variations will likely drive conversion due to the popularity of its multiple colors in stores. This information might help you understand the decision and influence you to recommend pre-launch usability testing.
Challenges of Product Managers
Product managers might have infinitely many potential solutions to pursue, but they must overcome significant noise to find a signal and focus on the opportunities with highest potential for the business and its users.
- Manage time effectively: Product managers have overwhelming data at their fingertips, and they may not have the time or patience to delve into complicated user-research findings.
Product designers can simplify research findings and make them accessible. Remove jargon and offer top takeaways with clear user criteria. In many realistic scenarios, the product manager may not have the time to work through every single research finding, so this distillation helps them quickly understand the usability picture; as a result, they may continue to seek you out for expertise in this domain. Even if you might be able to explain every detail, not all those details will be helpful for the product manager. - Keep important details straight: Product managers must keep track of user-related aspects and technical considerations that drive priorities, because they need to justify these priorities to their leadership.
Product designers can involve product managers in research. Invite them to observe usability studies, interviews, and stakeholder interviews, to help them remember important user-related details that might influence priorities. If you shared a super concise and detailed insights document with your product manager, they still might not be able to retain everything they read. But they might remember those same details if they came up in a session that they observed. - Investigate data productively: It is common for a product manager to lose time investigating an interesting piece of data (for example, from analytics) that has little context and eventually leads nowhere.
Product designers should make themselves available for investigating interesting observations or facts that the product manager may have come across. For example, if a product manager mentions that many customers who exit a payment funnel click on an informational button before doing so, you might offer to investigate their expectations. Determining the user issue and resolving it could have a significant payoff for the business. - Not overstep on design work: Unfortunately, product managers might try to dictate design by sending wireframes to product designers and asking them to polish them as soon as possible.
Product designers should dig deeper by asking which business and user outcomes the wireframe addresses. Share design options, including a rationale that maps your design decisions to user and business goals. If they question why their ideas didn’t make it into the design, explain that you considered them and why your choices work better given the existing user and business goals.
Activities of Product Managers
As leaders of the product strategy and executioners of that strategy, product managers must balance getting directly involved into specific activities with looking at the big picture.
- Managing the backlog: In Agile product-development environments, product managers often lead the periodic review and update of the task backlog.
Product designers can ensure that user stories include user statements and user outcomes. For example, if a user story is about adding a multiselect input field, it should include the user need it solves (e.g., flexibility and efficiency of use) and the outcome it addresses (e.g., increased task-completion rates). - Studying business data and trends: Product managers spend time analyzing unique visualizations of data to detect meaningful trends and patterns that indicate problems to solve or opportunities.
Product designers should familiarize themselves with the important metrics that product managers track and add contextual whys. For example, if your product manager manages the delivery experience for an online retailer and pays close attention to the number of times an item is delivered to the wrong address, review existing research related to wrong deliveries or propose discovery research to understand why they happen so they can be remedied. - Studying the competitive landscape: Product managers must keep track of their products’ competition and be aware of competitors’ technologies, go-to-market strategies, pricing, content strategies, and offerings.
Product designers bring a new perspective to analyzing the competitive landscape. For example, the product manager might complete a competitive analysis that explores the marketing strategies of competitors, their sales tactics, product offerings, technology stack, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Product designers can add another lens to this analysis by looking at the features that various competitors provide and the usability of those features. - Documenting progress: Product managers must be prepared to advocate for their teams; in order to do so, they must track team efforts and progress.
Product designers can update progress in the product manager’s tracker. For example, if your product manager uses a shared PowerPoint deck to track progress, offer to update design progress in that document to decrease chances that anything from your side gets lost or missed.
Skills of Product Managers
Even though product managers might vary in specialty skills depending on the type of product team they work on, it is safe to assume they have strong business acumen, working technical knowledge, and an opportunity to learn from product designers.
- Technical knowledge: Product managers commonly have a working knowledge of technical concepts specific to their area of focus. For example, if they work on an ecommerce website, they’re likely aware of general front-end and back-end considerations. Or, if they support a machine-learning–powered product, they probably have working knowledge of machine-learning requirements. However, they’ll need to lean on engineers and even technical product designers to make strategic technical tradeoffs.
Product designers should communicate with engineers early and often. Weave technical considerations into explanations for your design decisions. Your product manager will try to synthesize input from business, product design, and engineering. You can build influence by showing that your designs have technical considerations already baked in. - Business knowledge: Business acumen enables product managers to drive financial sustainability and growth for a business in a particular market.
Product designers should request access to the dashboards that product managers study to build a common understanding of business success metrics. Product designers can use that knowledge to educate product managers on how key business-performance indicators connect to UX success metrics. - Design knowledge: Even though most product managers lack formal design training, most have likely been exposed to design. Some may try to take over design responsibilities.
Product designers should take responsibility for design work, even if the product manager was a former product designer. By providing product managers with clear outputs, systematic frameworks, clear research support for your decisions, and focused communication, you should gain the product manager’s trust in your expertise.
Conclusion
An awareness of the goals, strengths, challenges, activities, and skills that product managers share can help product designers gain influence, maintain trust, and maximize value in the product-development process.
There may be variation in regards to any particular product manager’s area of specialty, knowledge, and role scope, but product designers become more effective partners if they can connect their work to the business goals and metrics that the product manager cares about, show the rigor behind their expertise, involve product managers where possible in the design process, and meet product managers where they are, in terms of tools and skills.
