Enhancing Collaboration Between Product Designers and Managers: Key Tips (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: If you're a product designer or an aspiring one, you'll likely work with a product manager. Whether it's your first time or you have a great product partner and want to forge a relationship with others, it's helpful to consider three things to improve your collaboration with them. As product designers, we have the luxury of saying it depends. But product managers do not. They get input from product designers, engineering, sales, data reports, customer support, leadership, and they have to use all of that information to make decisions about product direction quickly. Knowing this, make your research easily understandable and concise. Even better, involve your product manager in the research. And when they make their decisions, trust that they've taken your input into account. Product managers can't please everyone, but they feel pressure to do so. So providing them with accessible research can help them make product decisions that consider the user experience. Product managers have an appreciation for, if not an obsession with, numbers. These numbers are signals to them about how the product is doing, if anything is wrong, and what they should prioritize next. It's also how they sell progress to stakeholders, along with advocate for more resources. As UX, we know that these numbers represent what is happening, but not the why. And the why is what guides decision making. And user research insights are a critical complement to the numbers that product managers study. Tip number two is to familiarize yourself with the numbers and add your contextual whys. And if there isn't contextual research available, that might be an opportunity for you to advocate for more research. In an ideal scenario, product managers will come to you regularly with questions about the numbers, or ideas for things to explore with user research. The third tip is to welcome and even initiate frequent communication with your product manager so they can be a better advocate for UX. You may ask, why must I spend so much time communicating with my product partners? It might feel like communication overkill, but it serves an important purpose. It ensures that you, as product designers, don't miss out on any important information from your product manager that would require you to rework things that you've already spent time on. And it ensures that the product managers are up to date on the information that you're learning about your users, which will help them frame priorities in terms of the user experience when they're advocating for product direction and conversations that they're having with other areas of the business. At the end of the day, making your research accessible to product managers will make it easier for them to prioritize UX considerations, supplementing product analytics with your research insights will enable them to make user-centric decisions, and welcoming frequent communication will help you increase alignment with your product partners.

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