Product Manager + Product Designer: an impactful yet hard to define tandem

For the past few years, I’ve worked alongside product managers in order to provide the best possible vision for a product that customers love and one that moves the company forward. Believe me, it hasn’t been a smooth process. We had to work hard at understanding each other’s job and how we can work together to become complementary. So, how exactly can these two work together?

Before going any further, let’s see what these two roles consist of.

The Product Manager

From my experience, the Product Manager (a.k.a. PM) is responsible for setting the vision of a product and leading the cross-functional team that is in charge of improving it. It is an important organizational role. Like Ben Horowitz said, the Product Manager can be seen as the “CEO of the product”. Of course, the term “CEO” doesn’t mean he gains some kind of authority on the team. “CEO” in this case, should be seen as the person who will set the strategic goals, define the success of the product and build its roadmap, be responsible for the outcome of the product by defining its key features, and last but not least, help motivate the team. To fulfill this role, the Product Manager should have an understanding of 3 main needs: business, technology and user experience (UX).
That doesn’t mean a Product Manager should master all of these. In my opinion, he should be experienced and be passionate about at least one, and be able to talk about the 2 others with practitioners.

The Product Designer

This one is less easy to define because it can be referred to User Experience Designer, Customer Experience Designer, User Interface Designer, Interaction Designer, Information Architect, or even UX/UI Designer, depending on the type of corporation, the latter’s size and/or its design maturity. From my point of view, Product Designers should, of course, master User Experience and have broadened their skillset to business. Also, they may be expected to maintain a discussion with IT practitioners.
Mastering User experience doesn’t mean the Product Designer is a jack of all trades, design-wise. Design skills are huge, and a researcher won’t necessarily know about motion design for example. In my opinion, a Product Designer focuses on the user and is able to handle some UI components that have already been designed by a brand designer, in order to build a prototype he can test. His skills should be good enough to deliver something impactful, intuitive and visually appealing.

The overlap

The below chart reveals an overlap between these roles. They both have to understand business, technology and user experience.

Let’s dig a little further to understand where the overlap is…

Business

Knowing the company’s business (i.e. is it a B2B or a B2C business?), its strategy, understanding its challenge(s) and the criteria of success, are key elements for the Product Manager and the Product Designer. They will both have to look out for competitors to gain an understanding of what is working in terms of innovation and trends.
In order to build a good product, both profiles will have to define the product strategy by identifying the right problem and the user’s needs to have a clear product’s proposition value. With that in mind, the Product Manager will be driven by impact meaning he will set everything up according to the result that the company wants to achieve. In order to deliver that strategy, both profiles should also have a sense of product ownership. That means being capable of building the vision, prioritizing features, and sharing that with the teams.
While these two skills can be enough for the Product designer, the Product Manager needs to be knowledgeable in growth and how to trigger commitment from a Marketing viewpoint, so as to sell the product. Indeed, a product manager has to talk about the product as if it was his/her own and sell it to stakeholders. Launching a new product will imply changes in the company and be integrated into the change management process.

Technology

Regarding technology, the Product Manager and the Product Designer have to gain an understanding of the IT culture, but at different levels. To get the big picture, the Product Manager has to understand system information (and other kinds of information) whereas the Product Designer has to understand the front stage in order to design the solution accordingly. Of course, in order to understand this technical world (and words), they both have to find a good compromise when communicating with the IT teams, which reduces the risk to miss something important.

User Experience

In order to build a good product, the Product Manager and the Product Designer will have to adopt the Design Thinking mindset. Once again, they will both have to do research to gather qualitative data (i.e. interviews, open-ended survey questions, maybe shadowing) as well as to check the analytics to gather quantitative data. All data is precious to analyze and understand users’ behaviors and needs. It helps map out their journey. By mapping the user’s journey, they will identify users’ pain points and be able to identify some opportunities. Afterward, the Product Designer will use all his/her production skills known as UI Design, Interaction Design or even Content Design in order to prototype the identified opportunities.
Testing is key during this process: it is useful for the Product Manager in order to see if the hypotheses previously chosen are validated. if so, that would mean that the product can deliver a positive impact on customers. If not, enough feedback should be received in order to pivot to a more useful feature for customers. This is also important for the Product Designers and I would also add the usability issues that he/she will fix in the next iteration.

The perfect recipe

Explaining every aspect of each role makes it evident the distinction is hard to see. Though, as Melissa Perri implies, I still believe this duet is important.

“Product Management with no User Experience Design creates functional products that don’t make users excited. User Experience Design with no Product Management produces delightful products that don’t become businesses.” Melissa Perri

The question is, how do you find the perfect fit? To add another layer (it wouldn’t be funny otherwise), not only these skills can differ between people but also the context can differ from a company to another. Like I said at the beginning, each company will have its proper definition and responsibilities for the two profiles. The product’s building phases are also a thing to consider: the skills you need during the discovery phase are not necessarily the same in the delivery phase. Where some companies see the process as a whole, some split the two phases. In the first case, that means having profiles with a large skill set; in the second, the company will set up a more specialized team for each phase with a sharing moment in between.

Just in case any of you still have any illusions, the perfect recipe doesn’t exist… The best advice I can provide is, you shouldn’t take the role for granted because it’s not a matter of role, it’s a matter of skills. I think there are different kinds of Product Managers like there are different kinds of Product Designers. To find a good fit, I suggest you analyze all your skills and build your radar chart. If I take my case as an example, my radar would highlight Product Strategy, Product Ownership, Research, User Journey and Testing. I sure know about UI or Interaction Design but my interest in those has decreased over the years. Going back to the chart, the ideal team would be the juxtaposition of each role’s radar chart. If the addition shows that all aspects we’ve seen above are covered, then the Product Manager and the Product Designer should be a good tandem that can build an impactful product.

References:

• I would like to thank Tiphanie Vinet for helping me refine my product vision. If you’re fluent in French, I’d recommend her latest keynote about Product management
• https://medium.com/@bfgmartin/what-is-a-product-manager-ce0efdcf114c
• https://www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management/product-manager
• https://uxdesign.cc/pm-vs-pd-no-matter-who-wins-its-the-p-which-is-losing-28ca9ac08160
• https://medium.com/@melissaperri/labeling-ourselves-17218fd4456f
• https://www.justinmind.com/blog/ux-product-management-whats-the-difference/
• https://svpg.com/product-management-vs-product-design/