Resonating with your product managers: a designer’s guide
3 ways to work hand-in-hand with your PM.
An experience shapes into its true form when the Product Manager and the designer resonates in the same frequency.
The relationship between a product manager and a designer is quite critical, as the synergy play an important role in shaping any product we see in the market. The primary duty of both professionals is to create meaningful experiences for their users, and both are equally responsible for ideating solutions and contributing to the larger piece of the pie.
In most places, Product Managers positions in the frontline of any project. While engineers are majorly responsible for the technical functioning of the product, PM & designers are generally ‘together responsible’ for the overall experience of the product.
It is very important for both of them to understand where to draw the line, to argue clearly and positively, and not let any clouds of ego make unfortunate decisions. Point is, the working relationship between these two beings impacts any product immensely.
The entire “field” of user experience emerged for one reason — to accommodate, and overcome, poor (or non-existent) product management practices.
Having the correct mix of emotions and working in resonance throughout a project is critical as both of them need each other to put up the best work. Working with your Product Manager with ever-lasting positive energy might be hard, but these simple rules I learned along the way may help you sync with your Product manager better and build a better product. For Everyone!
1. Using the Power of “Why”
I personally believe that asking a lot of “Whys” during the initial stages of your project helps not only the designers but also the other contributors to the project. Diving deep into the problem and starting off without a solution is what designers do best. While your Product manager and other stakeholders may have many solutions in mind, but unearthing the problem completely from the beginning will direct everyone towards thinking in terms of users, towards knitting stories that solve their problems.
Unveiling the Whys throughout your process will empower everyone to learn deeply about their users.
Involving everyone will help everyone
Brainstorming sessions across product, engineering, and design team at the start of a project always helps in defining a proper roadmap, in increasing efficiency and reducing contradictions along the way. I believe, the most important thing is to brainstorm the problem: the build-up, the causes, and the effects.
Understanding the Why of the problem helps everyone involved to lie on the same page while setting a common ground of goals for the project. But in many cases, the problem setting part is handled by the product manager, creating a chain process of product development.
“Having an inclusive process with all stakeholders from the initial phase benefits because — whether we like it or not, everyone outside your design team is making some design decisions”
The point is, you should always ask Why whenever you get a chance, even if the path is super clear. Your Product Manager may have a strong problem statement and may even provide proper wireframes, but don’t forget to ask Why. Start with —
- Why does the problem exist?
- Why is this a problem for the user? Wait... Is it?
- Why do businesses care about this problem?
- Why is this problem important than the other problems(projects)?
- Why are we doing this?
This general why round will give enough clarity to all stakeholders involved, about the purpose of the project.
Having a common purpose helps all teams to align on the same path. The string of whys should stretch throughout a designer’s work cycle and must become an integral part of every design decision you take, as it will answer the reasoning behind every pixel movement of your design. These reasons will finally help in rationalizing the designs with other stakeholders.
Whys will make you dig into data
Product managers know their users very well — with their market expertise and numbers. They float on data and make or break things depending on it. This alone is a big reason for designers running after their PMs. We need data and your PM can help in all ways. A valuable PM will always be excited to know more about their users. They will become your best buddy on conducting User Research exercises and will help you in all possible ways: to learn more about the users, together.
Dig into the quantitative data that your PM will have at his disposal, or plan to collect with him. Ask for research and more data, push for conducting short user interviews or simply doing A/B test on confused pieces.
The answers and the data you pulled out with the Whys will generate one true purpose and will help you resonate with your PM more. Keep challenging each other to find the Whys. Seek for more knowledge about the user, their behaviors, their goals, their needs (your list should never end); and the clarity of the story will be the fuel for the team to think together.
Remember, good questions empower everyone involved.
Want to explore What to ask & When? Read this — Great Questions Lead to Great Designs
2. Strive for a Balance: Business vs Users
Today, businesses value design to scale up and touch the experience of their customers, to build a connection with them and finally knit a beautiful story around the product they are selling.
They understand that ‘experience is what customer demands.’ To achieve it, companies push for collaboration across their marketing, business, design and development teams to contribute towards creating a user-centered environment. These occasionally lead to overlapping objectives and responsibilities, but the right amount of business thinking on your design process and the right amount of design thinking on the business vertical will take us a long way.
Setting up the right responsibilities in your organization reduces costs and risks throughout the entire product development process. — Cooper.com
Being responsible for shared responsibilities
Sometimes, this perplexity in the objectives of various teams creates a situation where people are confused about who is in charge of what. For instance, ‘Instant full-screen popup’ to capture email IDs sucks. But more often, email capturing & unwanted friction goes a long way to show positive results and retention.
While creating it, the Marketing team feels the responsibility of deciding the nature & functioning of their lead generation pop-up blocker. But any form of it will affect the experience of the user. So, the designer feels the responsibility of deciding the final nature & behavior of the blocker. This kind of crossroads creates situations where various teams will want to have a larger say in the decision.
Situations like this demand a product designer who weighs every possible factor, mine out the underlying logic, its long term objectives, its possible effects & impacts and listen carefully to the business needs. As a Product Designer, you know that a part of you is chasing numbers for the business. Which is not wrong, but quite beneficial in helping you find the tipping point for your UX. It helps you create a balance, using the constraint in a way that it doesn’t affect the overall experience but helps fulfill the business need.
Reaching here is possible when your thoughts align with your Product Manager, who will be the central guy on all these crossroads.
Listen, Process & Optimize
Debate with logical arguments for every decision your PM takes and do not accept a decision without knowing the true intentions behind it. (Business intentions could be cruel sometimes!). Have a healthy argument and try to understand the thought process behind your PM’s rationale, the factors that led him to that decision. Your Product Manager cares about the business and to create a sustainable business, the user stories should have a shared vision with the business. Listen and value your product manager’s input. It will help you immensely.
During all these, never compromise on the experience, but create a balance by using the inputs that benefit the business without wrecking up the User Experience. Your intensity of the debates and the passion to find the answer behind every tick of the product decision will eventually create an optimum experience, balancing the business’ and the user's needs.
3. Advocacy for your users
The art of how intense design advocacy should be on various stages of your stakeholder meetings.
As a product designer, we land in situations where you are the only person speaking for the user and you are the one who mostly creates a battleground for friendly discourse. No one might support you and few might not even get the value of fighting for the users. But you go on, you consider factors like cognitive load, empathy, assurance, etc. to back up a design decision or a rejection towards some proposal. You argue whenever you think a loose requirement might affect your users and always stand stiff to speak shamelessly on the behalf of your users.
But in most startups, larger decisions are driven by the business; while designers mostly get a lot of say on experimental projects. Also who gets the say and takes the final decision is also dependent on the company’s situation, aggression and future plans. A decision against a user need might be beneficial for the company at that moment, but your job is to advocate for the users. Largely, your users don’t care about the business, but be there for them and put their interests on the table. Clearly communicating & rationalizing each one of the stakeholders is the key to pushing more of what users deeply need in the product, and creating a healthy user-centered environment.
Sometimes stakeholder meetings throw a situation, where you believe in your design but somehow forgot the history & reasons behind it. You have no immediate reasoning to pull off that thing in the meeting. You know that this particular design will work, and you want to defend that design. You believe in that design. What do you do?
Designers lie in these situations when they skip critical steps on their process. It can be a clarity you missed to have from the PM or something your PM missed. It can be because you did not ask yourself the Whys while designing, or just because there wasn't much time to hover through that one use case and you skipped it. Somehow you are blank for logical reasons.
Use the “Next Time” move
Ask for more time shamelessly. Take up the blame but don’t agree with any solutions shot at that moment, which will result in compromising the interests of your user. It is better to ask for a little more time, to dig into the things you might have fumbled upon. No wonder, the alternates proposed by others at that moment can be great. Listen to it, value it and note. But taking that extra time for your case and validating it through your design methods before deciding anything is the essence of Design Advocacy.
Practicing it will create a better product along with a good design culture in the company.
In the same boat towards one destination
I always felt that product managers and designers have the most frequent lock horns as both their roles overlap on many fronts, but not to forget, both of them contributes uniquely in shaping the product, and both of them are grateful to each other’s contribution. So can’t we draw a line somewhere?
While companies with clearly defined roles & responsibilities of Product Managers & designers state that it reduces unnecessary conflicts & unfortunate decisions that create delays and broken ownership, but I think a product get its optimum form when both professionals oscillate together.
Apple is one of the great example of a synchonized workspace. Apple understands the importance of the end-to-end customer experience. Marketing, product, retail, packaging and services all work together to form a cohesive customer experience
— As experienced by Rakesh Agarwal, Sr. Director of Products at Amazon
The best thing is, that oscillation creates a product that resonates with both the product manager and the designer. Ultimately, we are aiming towards a single purpose of building a better product for the people and more profit for the business. The right fit will win the race.
“It is in understanding the different job roles, their intersections, values and accountabilities that you will end up with a great product.”
