A Happy Marriage - Product Management and User Experience

For our June 2021 monthly, BPMA hosted an event focused on the relationship between product management and user experience. The event was led by Tim Fu, VP of Product at Valor Performance, and KD Singh Arneja, Senior Director of User Experience at Clarivate. Tim and KD discussed the importance of creating and nurturing a strong working relationship between product managers and user experience team members as we all working together to create products that solve user problems. 

In most organizations, the relationship between a PM and UX designer is one of the most important and most collaborative relationships. The two teams partner to uncover user pain points, come up with solutions, and gather feedback on those proposed solutions. Too often, however, the following situation happens simultaneously: PMs are asked for a roadmap, UX is asked for a design while the developer is ready to start coding, and so on. As Tim and KD discussed in their talk - PMs can’t do it all alone, and we should not be leading with solutions - but user problems. Their presentation also offered a number of great tools and frameworks both PMs and UX designers can use on their product development journey.

Alignment Across the Organization

Before we even start the process of product roadmapping, alignment is crucial. This alignment has to exist across all levels of the organization - among leadership and across teams working together on a product. Unless we follow the same north star and agree on priorities for our organization and our users, it’ll be impossible to design and deliver solutions that solve our users’ problems - and bring profit to the organization. Using a framework like the one below helps visualize this idea:

c REFORGE

Understand Your Users and Problems They Need Solved

Another important step in the product development process is the research. Both Tim and KD discussed the importance of conducting research in partnership. Conducting qualitative research helps identify user pain points by actively engaging with users, asking them open-ended questions, as we try to understand their underlying needs and motivations. Quantitative research, on the other hand, helps us better understand market trends, collect user feedback on existing products, and identify ways to improve them. 

Research helps us identify who our target customer is, what is the problem we are looking to solve, how does that solution differ from existing solutions, and how much are our customers willing to pay. This last one is especially important, as Tim put it, to avoid finding your idea alongside many at the “product graveyard”. Engaging with users in qualitative research as early in the process as possible and including the question around how much they are willing to pay for the product can help minimize the risk and prioritize the solutions we want to deliver first (even if the user experience is not ideal to begin with).

As we engage in this process of research, collaboration can be challenging, whether we are working in large organizations, don’t have the culture fostering collaboration, or are suddenly working remotely without access to the tools we have gotten used to. KD shared a number of ideas about how this collaboration can grow between the two teams, including virtual discovery rooms and online whiteboards. In addition, close alignment between the two teams can be fostered by sharing research frameworks (like the example above), sharing metrics for success, and developing measurable outcomes that go across the two teams.  

Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Finally, Tim and KD outlined some common pitfalls that teams can look out for and try to avoid - starting with the lack of alignment, lack of common mission, or vision that can really hamper product development, and create a lot of confusion and wasted effort. Other common pitfalls are waiting too long to involve other stakeholders and team members into the conversations, as well as lack of collaboration and willingness to make compromises.

All of these seem obvious, and common sense, but all of us have found ourselves in one of these scenarios at some point in our careers. Tim and KD’s presentation and the discussion that followed are a great resource for anyone starting their product management or UX career, changing organizations, or looking for ways to unblock their team.

To hear more about the importance of cross-team collaboration, see all of the frameworks and resources, watch the recording of the event on our events page. Keep an eye out for our upcoming events and register to join another great discussion.