What collaborative skills should a Product Manager have, to be able to understand the work that a Product Designer does, bearing in mind that both parties have a common goal of improving user experience?
Product knowledge, credibility, empathy, and communication are some of the biggest ones that immediately come to mind.
- Product knowledge: in the sense that the people you’re working with need to know that you know your product and the people you’re building for at least as much as they do
- Empathy: for both teammates and customers
- Credibility: People on your team need to be able to trust that you have your domain covered
- And communication, which I think is the most influential part of the relationship between PMs and Designers
How do Product Managers and Product Designers come to an agreement, when they both have different perspectives of what the design should look like?
If there’s a significant disagreement about the design direction and that only comes out when the designer has presented their final work, then it probably means that the shared vision for the product wasn’t clear enough from the start. In this case, communicating, agreeing on, and documenting what the team is trying to achieve before-hand will help prevent the disconnect.
Agreeing on short check-points in the work for feedback also helps to make everyone involved is aligned on what’s happening with the product
But life isn’t always straightforward and it’s not always the case that you can do this before-hand, so a way to course-correct would be to:
- Articulate what you think is wrong with the current direction and how it can be better
- Let the designer know that you’re working together to solve your customer’s problems and it’s not your idea vs their idea
- Find ways to test your ideas so that the final decision is backed by data instead of just opinions
What are the ways Product Managers and Product Designers solve conflicts around “make it pop or make that button bigger” issues?
Loool, these conflicts shouldn’t exist.
jk, jk. I think it ties in a lot with the last question. Feedback like this should come with concrete reasons and preferably be based on data
In the grand scheme of things, debates like this don’t matter too much to the end-users. The best way to move forward will be to align on what the team cares about the most and trust your designers handle the experience of how the product works
From your experience, Is there any extra thing that a Product Manager does that helps to fast track the Product design phase/process?
Yes. Clear communication and documentation is the biggest thing I’ve seen PMs do to help the team move forward faster.
It’s very helpful to know that there’s a resource/person keeping track of what the team is working on, what the most important next steps are, and what we need to move forward
After the discussion session, we had questions from the members of the community, here are some of them.
I am quite familiar with drawing up user flows and wireframes with simple tools like whimsical and other drawing tools. I’m well aware that some PMs think it may not be necessary to have these skills if there’s a product designer on the team.
I think those are great skills to have for everybody! But at the base levels, they’re all just tools for communication. I think people should embrace whatever method best helps them communicate their ideas with their team regardless of their roles. Some people are visual thinkers, some communicate ideas better in writing, and others are masters of presentations, slides, etc. I think in the end it boils down to what works best for the people and ideas involved
What success metrics do you use to measure that what you’ve designed with your PM?
When everyone is aligned on the goal of the product, it becomes fairly easy to point out what the most important outcomes are. If the product is a checkout form, then we can judge our design by the percentage of people who are able to successfully complete payments using the checkout and how quickly they’re able to complete those payments. Those metrics should be agreed on by the team before-hand.
As a designer, how do you work with syncing your thought process with a PM, especially when both of you have different thought processes?
I think the answer to this is clear communication. In most cases, you don’t want to start doing any design or engineering work until everybody is fully aligned on the what, why, and how. The way you go about communicating will vary based on who you’re dealing with, but you want to:
- Explain your thought process
- Listen to their thought process
- Exchange feedback on both ideas until everyone agrees on one single vision for the product
How best can User experience be explained to us PMs, so we can have a basic understanding of how best to draw up user flows?
A lot of user experience is objectively putting yourself in the position of the person who’s using the product you’re building. And I think this applies all through the product cycle and not just while drawing user flows. At every point, you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to access the value they’ve come for without sacrificing their security, personal information, etc.
