A Designer’s Guide to Working with Product Managers
Tags: Design, Product Management, UX, User Experience, Careers

Difference in thought process

To be honest, at first, I had a hard time syncing with the thought process of a PM. As designers we tend to think about the experience, the flow, how consistent the components are, how to make it better work in different resolutions, etc.

Aspects that we do not pay much attention to — current business needs, engineering efforts being worked on, product strategy for the next few quarters to come, what’s on the roadmap, resource allocation etc.

Obviously, this does not come to us instinctively which is why collaboration with a PM is a primal necessity in the product world — it helps paint a broader picture.

After working closely with PMs for a significant amount of time, I decided to reflect and jot down methodologies that help me design with more intent.

Some of the steps I take, in no particular order —

1. Prioritizing tasks

2. Maintaining a UX debt sheet

3. Creating a UX test plan

4. Tracking actions on the product

1. Prioritizing tasks

I have noticed that bringing up topics about inconsistencies or pattern enhancement often times irked PMs. I realized this happened not because they don’t want to fix it or it is unimportant to them, but because it was not just the right time. There is always a right time to bring up your biggest pet-peeves.

And how do we know when is it a right time?

Well, answering this one was a little harder than I thought. What helped me was understanding the product status from a broader perspective.

I started making a note of current business needs and engineering efforts.

Business needs — what needs to be done to deliver value at the earliest. Because if you don’t sell, you don’t have a successful business, and in effect, there is no real scope to design something that might not exist.

Engineering needs — what needs to be done to stabilize the system so that the existing functionalities don’t break. Things that need to be optimized to deliver a better experience.

Understanding engineering constraints help a lot with making design decisions. Something that works better interaction-wise might be a huge load on the system, and a trade-off has to be made to make it stable.

What’s the point of a sexy interaction when the functionality is broken?

With these two major considerations, in addition to the huge list of design changes that I wanted to work on, I started prioritizing.

Aspects of the product that required a major change usually went down in priority, and items that sent out maximum value went up the list. It helped me make peace with what I was working on.

When the time was right (believe me, this time will arrive.), I plugged the redesign ideas I had thought about. This makes the interaction with PMs productive with much lesser friction.

2. UX Debt Sheet

Almost all designers would have heard this from their PMs —

“Let’s get this out for MVP and we can get back to it later.”

This had me hugely frustrated at a point because I realized the changes being made to the product were very minimal. It was not the ideal experience the designer in me wanted.

I feared that if we took an always MVP approach, we would eventually be left with more work over time just trying to fix all the workarounds. More like an MVP Paradox.

Coincidentally, I noticed that the engineers had an account of technical backlog and they called it Tech Debts. This was an inventory of technical tasks that were pending. They dedicated a sprint to finish these tasks specifically. I thought this was a great idea and wondered if there could be an equivalent UX Debt sheet for the project I work on as well.

I had a conversation with my PM and decided to list out all the UX backlog. I chalked out a way of prioritizing tasks that can be finished by mapping it in a graph with Impact and Ease of implementation as parameters.