The overlap between UX & product management roles
Before we get into taking sides or making justifications..I would like to quote Melissa Perri @lissijean (I’m going to do that several times on this article)
In recent times, I have come across a lot of talks and blogs about Product Management being one of the most crucial career of our times, also termed the ‘CEO of product’.
Role of a Product Manager, has a perceived overlap with a UX designer, experts’ claim. Of course the PM is expected to have much deeper understanding of business background, Value propositions & ROIs than a design practitioner, but somehow the roles seems to have shifted more focus on some UX practises, which essentially a UXer is already capable of doing. I find myself conflicted over the redundancy and waste of resource/skills out there.
I was recently educating myself about Product Management, not looking to move to the Role, but just wanted to equip myself to be better at my UX Role.
60% of the subject matter for a Product Management online course was talking about UX processes, much to my surprise(& horror), almost advocating it as a sole responsibility of a Product manager to conduct those, reducing responsibility of a UX designer to mere wireframes, prototypes and possible visual designing.
Can you guess the activities not expected from a UX Designer ?
Creating User Persona(s), User Research, Ethnography, Sitemaps, Information Architecture, User journey map, workflows — all of these according to them can be taken care by the Product Manager. They also expect Product managers to pick up a few skills that help them present these ideas aesthetically to a team :)
What surprised me the most, was something as heavy duty as Ethnography has been burdened onto the (already expected to be omni-present) Product Manager. I’m aware there are many PMs who happily accept the challenge and come out victorious, but I think it’s time for UX designers to step in provide their 2 cents as well. It’s only fair!
Do you think the UX community caused this problem to some extent?
may be result of most of us not providing support for these activities to the Product or Project managers? Are Designers not going out there enough into the field?
I believe so it happened. We ourselves created that void, and so the business management community finds it only logical to define this activity as part of somebody’s job description.
There is lot of ambiguity over some terms used by both Design & Technology community. Like, User Personas, User stories, use cases, scenarios etc. When I graduated from design school, the way we looked at use cases, scenarios & user stories was very different. User-flows cannot be confused with user stories(infact I think as designers we used to visualise user stories, which is so opposite of how tech community writes user stories). Though the hierarchy of Epic-Scenario-Use cases is still the same, how designers are used to visualising them is completely different. From what I have seen through my jobs, how the tech community defines them is also not palatable enough. Hence I’m still working on finding some simple frameworks to build the bridge(Tunnel, or should I say!)
For now let us look to bridge the gaps between Product management & UX Design.
Based on my experience, I took the liberty to add to what @lissijean used on her article. I was looking to define the overlaps in an effective manner, and this did justice to it perfectly.
As you can notice, Business models, prioritisation & planning for scope is in PM zone, however there are things a Product Manager can work in collaboration with a Designer. There is no need to cross that road and acquire skills that the designer might already be applying.
For e.g. Designers already know the art of extracting user’s key insights over a Product’s usage, their goals, and larger aspirations as a result of engagement with a Product.
Let me get into some granular level details, to define what can be the exact combination of Product management skills and UX skills. that could work a magic. The following diagram tries to depict how the two skill-sets can work in tandem to achieve certain goals, through the pre-development lifecycle.
The curves overflowing into the others’ territory is to depict who has more to contribute at that particular stage of a Pre-Dev journey.
There are many helpful articles about measuring UX Impact, which can be highly useful for Product Management to assess and plan the Product Strategy.
It feels as if even the Business management schools are producing User Experience experts now, then are the UX designers going to just produce wireframes and visual designs based on inputs provided to them by someone?
Hope this helps to begin somewhere the conversation on optimum utilisation of skill-sets.
Did you feel something was amiss? Feedback is welcome.
