Product Collective - 💞 Product teams working with UX

Building strong relationships between UX and Product Management

Many discussions surrounding product managers and UX designers are positioned as PM vs. UX or explore who owns the product or is in charge. We’d suggest a different perspective. Instead of seeing the relationship between PM and UX as adversarial, it’s better to think of it as a collaboration of people with different, sometimes overlapping, skill sets who work together to achieve an outcome.

How do product management and UX work together for business growth? On the surface, UX (user experience) researchers and product managers (PMs) appear to have similar roles and goals. After all, they are both concerned with creating value-added products that users will love and rely on data-driven insights for decision-making. Although the roles overlap, the unique strengths of PMs and UXRs mean that collaboration between both is vital to a successful product development cycle. The folks at CuriousCore look at the roles and responsibilities of PMs and UXRs and share some good practices for PM-UX collaboration.

(via curiouscore)

Product Manager vs. UX Designer: Who should be in charge? A lot of people contribute to building and maintaining a product — from casting a bold vision for something new to building repeatable processes that support customers using it. At every stage of the product development process, individuals “own” some aspect of the complete product experience, yet overall everyone on the product team is responsible for understanding customers and delivering value to them. Brian de Haaff takes a look at the main differences between product managers and UX designers when it comes to building products.

(via @aha_io)

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Looking back at 2022
This is the time of year where people tend to make their predictions for what’s to come in 2023. And this year – a lot of the pundits are predicting a lot of doom and gloom. Talks of continued layoffs… a looming recession… it’s a good thing that today is Friday as I write this, otherwise, my mood may be ruined for the day just thinking about everything.

But what do pundits really know, anyway?

I thought it’d be interesting to look back at some of the 2022 predictions that were made in the world of tech to see if what people foresaw actually came true. In my research, I found that many predictions actually did come true – but some, alas, did not. Here are a few to note:

There were lots of predictions made, but I picked one to look back on and sort of “fact check”:

From Dave Wright, Contributor at Forbes:

AI and Humans Will Collaborate More 👍
We certainly saw AI continue to explode in 2022 – particularly towards the end of the year, as OpenAI released ChatGPT into the wild. 

Employees will demand – and deserve – more 👎
Employees probably do deserve more, but we’ve started to see things swing back in the favor of employers. From Elon Musk asking his staff to “go hardcore” to CEO’s pushing people to get back to the office, it seems like demands from employees may be starting to fall on deaf ears

We’ll be acutely aware of our physical world 👍
While some of the talk in the tech world for a while involved Metaverses… the reality is that we live in a physical world… and 2022 brought a lot of “physical world” issues, including logistical, macroeconomic, geopolitical… and, well, you name it. 

Dave’s predictions were hit and miss, overall – which seems to be the case for most pundits. Nobody really knows what’s ahead. But hey, it’s an interesting thought exercise to think about what’s to come and how it may affect us all!

How designers and product managers can build a stronger relationship. Delivering products with delightful user experiences is a winning formula for good business. A poorly designed product might technically solve a user’s problems but provide a frustrating experience, which can lead to the user looking for alternative solutions. Good design leads to positive user feedback and reviews, better customer retention and industry adoption. Eric Chung explains some ways designers can work with their PMs to strengthen their relationship and turn them into design advocates.

(via @uxdesigncc)

5 Tips for product managers to ensure great collaboration with design teams. The product manager and the UX designer have so many overlapping responsibilities that it’s bound to create some areas of friction. Product managers and UX teams are expected to work seamlessly in the best interests of the product. Both should play to their respective strengths and take charge, collaborating to deliver the best product possible. Bansi Mehta explains how product managers and UX teams can work together to create a product that fulfills user needs while supporting business goals.

(via @uxplanet)

UX and product management. User experience (UX), product engineering and product management form the core product development team. Joca Torres introduces some common industry definitions of User Experience, describes how they factor into product development and explains the relationship between UX and product management.

(via @JocaTorres)