How can PM and Design work better, together?
A designer’s perspective
How can UX Designers and PMs work effectively together? It is common knowledge that the most effective way to leverage a designer’s skill is to involve design early in the process. What is often not clear is the value designers bring to the table (other than creating high fidelity mocks — which obviously, is a designer’s key deliverable.) This gap in understanding often limits UX designers to simply visually representing ideas or creating design specs. This, in my view, is a lost opportunity.
Many UX designers are generalists, who can enter into a myriad of spaces and effectively solve problems. It can get tricky because designers may have varied strengths. Some might be experts in graphic design or design systems while others may be more experienced with service design. It’s best to spend some time understanding the designer’s core skills and leveraging their work to add value to the product.
This piece can act as a guidebook for PMs working with Design (just a starting point, actually) More importantly, it can help designers position themselves and their abilities in the product team.
1. Approach Design with problems, not solutions
Involving design early on means going to them with user problems, not solutions. The designer’s approach is focused on the user’s point-of-view — making them successful and improving their experience. The PM has similar goals, with differing methods!
Designers can conduct/leverage research and form design principles. These can help to arrive at a solution, pick option A vs B and rationalize and communicate decisions. Working together through the initial stages, evaluating multiple approaches, and zeroing down on a solution collectively, is valuable to the user and product!
2. Use Design as another mind on the problem, to unlock a better solution
PMs, look at your design partners as complementary minds for bouncing off any product thoughts that directly impact the user experience. Designers love details, and each detail scattered across any user touch-point contributes to the user’s experience. Some examples — user journeys, information architecture, copy on the marketing page. Designers can also provide a valuable perspective on intangibles, like user trust, comprehension, clarity, or delight!
Designers, it is a win if some of your ideas go into the product roadmap or the PRD, even without direct credit to you. After all, the PM owns that deliverable. It’s wonderful to be able to influence the product positively while working alongside the PM!
3. Use Design to think about the larger context, and ask the ‘why’ questions
Designers are used to thinking about user context, really, really deeply. As a product builder, it’s easy to get carried away with the assumption that your product would be easily adopted and used. It is crucial to be realistic that your product/feature is a smaller (sometimes minuscule) part of the user’s daily activities. PMs can work with designers to structure the user needs as unfulfilled ‘jobs’, which the user will ‘hire’ your product to get done. (Jobs to be done framework). This will help in looking at product features in the context of user behaviors, and help prioritize and evaluate features right at the start of the project.
Designers, this is a perspective that you can bring in, while the PM is thinking of many, many other aspects. Look at the big picture, and make sure you think inclusively, considering edge cases. Evaluate if the feature is actually needed, how it fits in the user flow, if it maps to existing behaviors, or creates new ones?
4. Use design to communicate the story
PMs, your design partners are oftentimes trained to be great storytellers. Involving them in selling product vision, or crafting stories for leadership or customers is a great idea! And not just the slides for the presentation (Designers dread being asked to ‘beautify’ decks) but the actual communication, and the story itself.
Designers, storytelling becomes a valuable exercise when you think about it as a communication design exercise. What data points, user testimonials, and examples can go into crafting a compelling story? How should it be structured? How much information on a slide or frame is too much? Can we bring in a user persona as a mascot to anchor the storyline? Providing inputs like these will help you own and shape the narrative, not just the fonts and styling on the deck.
5. Help design be more effective with the right connections
UX Designers are trained to convert research insights into tangible products. This is a powerful skill, one that can touch all the aspects of the product. Designers may need to interface with many functional partners of the product like backend and front-end engineering, who directly contribute to the user experience. It could also include different PMs across the org, data-scientists, marketing, product operations, privacy and legal, etc. Help them make these connections early on!
Designers, initiate, build and leverage these connections. Some of them might transform into relationships that would be ultimately great for the product and your career!
Design is a broad field, and designers have different skill sets.
Many UX designers are generalists, who can enter into a myriad of spaces and effectively solve problems. It can get tricky because designers may have varied strengths. Some might be experts in graphic design or design systems while others may be more experienced with service design. It’s best to spend some time understanding the designer’s core skills and leveraging their work to add value to the product.
When PMs and designers start working together, the easiest way to bridge this gap is to have a conversation! Simply ask the other person their way of working, or how they can contribute. Then, find a way to collaborate. This may be a good way to start. This means that PM and design can fill in each other’s gaps and work around strengths and weaknesses. Along with visual skills, designers can be cued into numbers and can be data-driven. But most importantly, designers can meld the data together with research insights, intuition, and deep empathy for the users. This helps create something that users actually value. As Julie Zhuo puts it in this piece, Design and PM can work together to create some stellar, next-level shit.
Happy product building!
Further reading:
Julie Zhuo — How to Work with Designers
Product Managers: Here’s How to Make Your Designers Love You
