Partnering with UX Designers
User experience design is the art and science of crafting a cohesive, consistent, delightful, and intuitive user experience for software products. Because the cost of discovering and adopting new products has become smaller and smaller over time, software products ultimately live and die by their UX. So, it’s no wonder that the most successful product managers know how to work effectively with UX designers!
What does a UX designer do?
The role of the UX designer can really be split into three parts: empathizing with the user to discover and internalize pain points, designing elegant solutions that solve those pains, and validating that their proposed solutions address the targeted pains.
Designers need to know what specific kind of user they’re focused on, because different kinds of users have different needs. It’s important to remember that there’s no such thing as a “universal” product that solves problems for all kinds of users. As an example, even something as successful as the credit card isn’t widely adopted in all geographies – users in China typically use mobile payment apps instead!
So, as a product manager, your responsibility to designers is to provide them clarity on the following:
Which user segments exist and what their identifying attributes are
Which user segment to prioritize and which user segments to deprioritize from a design perspective
Context on why prioritizing the targeted user segment matters to customers and to the business
Empathizing with Users
Once a designer has a clear understanding of the kind of user that she’s targeting, her focus will be to deeply empathize with that user. That way, she can understand which pain points the user has, and how prevalent and impactful each pain is.
Empathy means conducting discovery exercises such as user interviews, surveys, shadowing, or user tests. Here’s a quick summary of each of these kinds of discovery exercises:
A user interview is a 1:1 session where a designer walks through an interview guide to learn about key questions.
A survey is a quantitative tool where the designer reaches out to hundreds of participants to understand how deep particular pain points are, and how frequently people run into them.
Shadowing is a 1:1 session where a designer follows the user in “a day in their life” to pick up on context that they might not get in a 1:1 interview.
A user test is a 1:1 session where a designer asks participants to walk through a proposed design and vocalize their thoughts out loud, to understand where the mock designs work well and where they don’t work well.
As a product manager, your job is to stay in the loop as designers conduct these exercises, and identify which emerging pain points should be prioritized vs. which emerging pain points should be deprioritized.
Your role is to serve as a magnifying lens – you need to guide designers on which pains will yield the most value to customers and to your business, and identify unanswered questions that they should flesh out more fully.
Designing Various Candidate Solutions
Once a designer has the prioritized pain points to solve for, she’ll then work through various design explorations to evaluate which solution will work the best. After all, problems can be solved in multiple ways! She will try both conventional approaches and unconventional approaches, and she will take inspiration from competitors and from unrelated products to get a sense for which of her competing designs best solves the problem.
As a product manager, your role is to help designers make tradeoffs when they have questions. For example, is it more important for this particular feature to stand out, or should it blend in with the other features that already exist? Should this feature feel like something that’s totally novel and exciting, or should it feel familiar and comfortable to end users? Product managers are responsible for positioning their product within a competitive landscape, and so it’s on us to provide these guidelines on how to position the design.
Validating and Implementing the Winning Design
After completing and assessing various explorations, a designer will have a couple of candidate solutions. It’s now time for them to validate whether these solutions solve the targeted user segment’s pain points. Designers will set up user tests to have these candidate solutions compete with one another, and they’ll assess effectiveness on a variety of scales such as intuitiveness, completeness of solution, ease of use, etc.
As a quick reminder, getting feedback from colleagues on designs is not the right thing to do! Colleagues are rarely the target user, and they’ll rarely have the same kinds of pains that the target user has. While it might feel easier to ask colleagues for feedback, that well-intentioned feedback could take your product down a path where it winds up failing to solve your targeted user’s needs.
Once design has validated the design, it’s now on the product manager to ensure that engineers have access to the design and ask any specific implementation questions that they have. Some kinds of implementation questions include things like interaction design (how should these mouse-overs work?) and responsive design (how should these designs change based on different screen sizes?). In some organizations, designers will also perform a “design QA” pass to ensure that fonts, colors, sizes, placement, and interactions all behave as expected.
How do designers and PMs differ from one another?
Designers and product managers have distinct but complementary roles to play in crafting a winning product.
The key distinction between designers and product managers lies in the altitude of their scope and their decisions. The product manager works at a higher altitude – that is, the product manager is responsible for the overall success of the product (including business metrics like revenues and profitability), sets the vision and roadmap, coordinates with various departments, defines the target user and requirements, and positions the product in a competitive landscape.
UX designers, on the other hand, work at a lower altitude, much more closely to the actual implementation of the product itself. The designer is responsible for the usability and adoption of the product’s design, defines how the product will function in tandem with other products, and focuses on user needs and designs rather than focusing on business needs.
One common mistake that product managers make is that they believe they’re responsible for all of the UX designs. PMs should not be making micro design decisions or become the bottleneck for crafting effective designs – they shouldn’t be on point for every color, every pixel, and every word of copy. Rather, PMs should delegate execution to subject matter experts, and that includes delegating product designs to UX designers.
Another common mistake that product managers make is that they fail to provide enough business context to UX designers. Just because UX designers aren’t responsible for business decisions doesn’t mean that they’re not valuable stakeholders. UX designers can make far better design decisions when product managers remember to surface valuable information such as which competitors are currently taking market share, which customers are the most important, and where the long-term company priorities are.
Collaboration Best Practices with UX Designers
I’ve found the following principles to be quite valuable for working effectively with designers.
Empower Your Partners
UX designers perform best when they’re given ownership of a problem area to solve. The key difference between UX design vs. production art is that production artists simply pump out graphics according to spec, whereas UX design is meant to solve pain in a comprehensive and cohesive manner.
Treating UX designers as production artists is a sure way to lower their morale and to cause them to lose trust in you – and on top of that, it reduces the effectiveness of your product. Don’t force UX designers to build specific user flows with specific interactions. Rather, let them come up with the user flow and the interactions, and defer to them for best practices.
UX designers should always feel empowered to advocate for their own ideas and best practices, and to push back against product managers if they feel that the product manager has not correctly selected which pains to solve. You should nurture your design teammates to be vocal about their design decisions and their rationale, and you should encourage collaborative debate on whether the design is the best solution for the identified user pain.
On top of that, when giving feedback on designs, remember which stage of “design fidelity” you’re in. In other words, if the team is currently focused on high-level exploration, don’t nitpick about word choice or about color decisions. If you provide constructive criticism at the wrong level of fidelity, you cause unnecessary rework and lose the design team’s trust in you.
But that doesn’t mean that you’re taking a back seat. As a product manager, you’re responsible for bringing the user to life. You need to advocate for the user by pushing back on designs that don’t seem to make sense in the user’s broader context, and you need to hold strong stances on why the overall product should or shouldn’t stick to certain interaction paradigms (a.k.a. how features play together) and information architecture paradigms (a.k.a. where information appears on the screen). You best understand the competitive landscape and how your product should be best positioned in that landscape, so it’s on you to bring that information to your design counterparts.
Furthermore, you need to bring business needs to the table – call out customer constraints and deadlines, business needs and objectives, and engineering constraints as early and as often as you can, so that designers know what challenges they’ll need to take into account.
Clarify Priorities
In many organizations, UX designers are cross-matrixed across other teams and other product managers. Therefore, it’s crucial that you provide clear context about your priorities and your timelines. You want to ensure that UX designers are working on the highest ROI work that they can be doing – even if that work isn’t yours! Remember that your job is to maximize the value of your company’s products, and that means that sometimes your products will take a back seat to the products of other PMs.
Similarly, because UX designers are also responsible for research initiatives, you’ll want to make sure that they’re clear on research priorities as well. After all, almost any topic of research can run infinitely long if not properly bounded. Help them help you – identify clear definitions of research success so that they know when they can confidently end the research and move towards the design exploration phase.
One thing that I’ve found valuable with designers is to have a weekly 1:1 where we talk through the stack-ranked priorities that I have for them, and work through how to rank those priorities vs. their other responsibilities. That visibility helps me set my expectations and my customers’ expectations around delivery timelines.
Establish and Protect Working Processes
I can’t stress this enough – UX design is not a production factory. Just like it takes you time to craft a roadmap and to consider alternatives, it takes designers time to craft a proposed design and to consider alternatives.
Don’t throw last-minute deadlines over the fence to your UX designers. Rather, you need to protect your design counterparts and bake in the time that they need to do quality work before accepting any sorts of timeline commitments for any product delivery. Thoughtful design requires dedicated time for exploration, discovery, and analysis vs. competitors – so if you want a winning product, you need to protect enough time for designers to create winning designs.
In general, I’ve found that UX designers typically want to stay about 1 sprint ahead of engineering sprints. In other words, if your engineering sprints are running on 2 week cadences, designs should be completed in the 2 weeks before you hand over designs to engineering.
If you’re going to be tackling a huge endeavor from a UX perspective (e.g. a top-to-bottom redesign of an existing feature or launching a totally new set of products), you need to account for sufficient lead time (sometimes even months in advance!) for designers to craft the right solution, so that they complete 1 sprint before engineering begins the actual implementation. Be sure to work backwards from deadlines!
Sync with Engineering
One common pitfall that I see is that UX design will advocate for a particular solution that winds up being way too expensive for engineering to execute against. That problem commonly happens when UX designers and engineers aren’t collaborating early in the process.
As part of design exploration, budget some engineering time for engineers to give feedback on the feasibility of particular design directions. My general rule of thumb is that design should loop in engineering when they’re at the 60% confidence mark.
That is, don’t loop in engineering too early on in the design process, since engineers won’t have anything concrete to react to. But also, don’t loop in engineering too late, or else they’ll be forced to build something that is far more expensive than an alternative design that solves the pain just as adequately.
Most engineers that I work with have good design sense, based on their years of experience. They can easily propose “just as good” user flows that accomplish the same objective with far less cost, so make sure that they’re a part of design exploration conversations at the right time in the process.
Stay Humble and Curious
UX designers are crucial stakeholders for product managers. As with any stakeholder, you should be curious about your UX design counterparts.
Learn how they align their designs across the organization, how they juggle tasks, what resources they use to uplevel their craft (e.g. textbooks, blogs, conferences, etc.), and what tools they use for their day-to-day work. They’ve worked with other product managers before – so ask them about their preferred working styles, what they like from product managers, and what they don’t like from product managers.
By listening to and empathizing with your design colleagues, you’ll ensure that the end product is far more effective at solving user pains, which then unlocks exponential business value for your customers and for your company.
Closing Thoughts
You can’t ship a successful product unless you have compelling designs, and UX designers are the folks who make it happen. Know what your UX designers are responsible for, and what you’re responsible for, so that you both can collaborate to achieve the best possible business outcomes.
UX designers do a lot more than just deliver the final design spec. They’re responsible for empathizing with the user, for exploring and evaluating competing designs, and for validating that their designs through both qualitative and quantitative means. Therefore, you need to provide them with a seat at the table in making decisions, give them crucial user context and business context, and protect their bandwidth and focus so that they can do the best work possible.
By collaborating effectively with UX designers, you’ll find that your product will grow by leaps and bounds – and that you don’t have to be the person who makes all of the design decisions yourself! That frees up your time to ensure that you focus on business strategy and on crafting a compelling product vision.
