The PM-UX Relationship

Notes on creating breakout product experiences

Aug 23, 2020

The Snippet is a Weekly Newsletter on Product Management for aspiring product leaders.

A few weeks ago, I received news from the United States Patent Office that one of our patent applications — made 4 years ago — had been granted. This was a special one, because not only did we apply for a patent on a novel idea, but the thing we were seeking protection on was the unique experience we would offer users. The UX was where the real value was, and in many ways, the UX was the product. My fellow co-inventors of this concept were also an unusual lot — a UX designer and a UX researcher. I was the Product Manager.

That same week, I also came across this post on Product Management Reddit.

This Reddit user asked a very pertinent question — one that is not automatically obvious. Especially if you are new to Product Management or have served as a PM in companies that have never had a UX person before.

The fact is many multi-billion $ product companies (Non-FAANG) do not have a UX role in their Product teams. These are companies that are typically more industrial, Hardware centric or where the User Experience itself is rather inelastic, i.e. cannot be meaningfully improved (e.g syringes & needles).

Over the past several years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with UX designers and researchers on several products — and I’ve learned that to build a great product the Product Manager needs to understand how to best work with UX folks in their team. The PM needs to understand where they need to lead and show the way, and where they need to step back and let UX drive the agenda.

If you are somebody that has not really worked with User Experience Experts before — here are a few insights to get you started.

#1. Educate your team on the role of UX

If your team has never worked with a User Experience person before, the first order of business is to educate your team about the role of UX in creating amazing products.

Generally speaking, a UX person is onboarded on a product team in the following scenarios.

The product warrants careful and strategic user experience design, which if done well, will significantly impact user adoption, usage & retention — in turn, driving Revenues and Profits.
The Product Manager is constantly being pulled into many different directions and is juggling multiple priorities. In such cases, there has to be somebody that is solely focused on the user, somebody that understands them and represents the user well.

In a Product team with a newly minted UX role, everyone must understand what the role of a User Experience is, how they will operate, and what to expect of them. Its the PM’s job to make that clear and well understood

#2. Give UX your opinions on design — but know that they are the expert

When it comes to user experience or service design, everyone has an opinion. The Product Manager, the engineers, sales, your management — everyone will have comments on how best to create an experience that delights the user. But here’s my advice. Let the UX person drive how best to create an experience that will skyrocket adoption for your product, or perhaps fix your high churn problem. It's literally their only job.

Any good UX person will, of course, take into account the comments/opinions from the rest of the team — but they will also know how best to sift through the noise and biases to make the best design decision for the product or a user segment. UX needs to own this piece and make design recommendations to the Product Manager/ Leader. The Product Manager generally should not have the veto power to UX recommendations—except in cases where there is no real data to support or backup design recommendations from the User Experience team.

#3. Challenge UX often — Ask why they think a certain user flow is the best

Talking about UX recommendations — it is important that the Product Manager evaluates recommendations & challenges UX often to pressure test their understanding of the problem statement, and to ensure that a certain design change is not simply to make cosmetic changes but will materially solve a nagging problem that users/customers have.

Again, the top UX experts will only make tested and validated design recommendations instead of making superficial, cosmetic changes. They’ll have the data to back up their proposals and will have convincing answers to what KPIs will be directly or indirectly impacted due to the changes proposed.

#4. Make sure UX is talking to a lot of customers

In other words, you are not making User Experience decisions based on opinions but customer facts. Typically, the Product Manager, if they are doing their job well, will have a pool of early users/evangelists who they can reach out with questions, to validate new features, to understand issues that need to be solved. The PM should make sure that this pool of evangelists can also be accessed by the User Experience researcher — and that they are in constant communication with each other informing UX wireframes, prototypes and designs before engineers actually start building them.

Again, the very best UX researchers will understand the target market very quickly and build a rotating pool of users that they can interview to understand user behavior, nail down problems, quickly build Wizard of Oz solutions/wireframes and validate the solutions with a different set of users to make sure the solutions will generalize well.

#5. Tag along with UX to observe user interviews

If you are a PM that has the luxury of a User Experience researcher or a designer — please ensure to tag along with them on every and all user interviews.

Interviewing customers to understand their real problems is a revered art that is the holy grail of UX research. I have learned a lot myself watching UX folks on top of their game, talking to users like old friends — even though they just met them for the very first time.

Learn the art of understanding what’s not being said, and is not being articulated. I’ve witnessed this many times during user interviews — people don't do what they say, and often don’t say what they really mean. Its a trap that new PMs must be cognizant of lest they end up building solutions to the wrong problem. So again, tag along with your UX leader to learn the subtleness of uncovering unsolved problems

#6. Make sure your UX team has the space to experiment

As I said earlier, User Experience is an art, not an exact science. The best UX people I’ve met are people with very high empathy and an understanding of both human psychology and physiology — how our behavior responds to stimuli and to changing levels of neurotransmitters (e.g. dopamine) in our bodies.

As such, to really come up with a product design that will change user behavior and ultimately impact a key metric (DAU, Churn, Free to Paid Conversions, etc. )— User Experience folk need to constantly experiment and validate results against an agreed-upon metric.

Unfortunately, many organizations are not set up for experiments and have a low tolerance for what sometimes may appear to be aimless trial and error activities.

This is where the Product Manager needs to step in and provide perspective to the team. The PM must ensure that you provide the necessary air cover to the User Experience team such that they are able to conduct validation testing, usability testing, and UX experiments without the business leadership constantly breathing down their throats. At the same time, such experiments should be time-bound, well designed, and must impact a meaningful metric that the business leaders/ investors care about.

#7. Create Rules of Engagement for UX and Engineers to work Seamlessly

You see, the output of your UX team will directly be fed to the Engineering and builder teams. There is potential for a lot of friction here if the rules of engagement are unclear. The big point of contention often is whether the UX designs are too complicated to build and if that complexity is worth it.

As Product Manager, you must define the rules of engagement between the UX team and the builder teams for a seamless flow of user stories — such that cycle time is minimized and output quality is maximized. For UX, there are the basics such as validated and reviewed designs, cutting clean assets and minimizing rework to optimize build time. For builders, they must review they’ve got the right UX assets necessary to complete a story — and that they have quick access to the UX designer if something needs to be addressed at build time.

UX can be transformational

Just like Product Managers, there are Good UX leaders and Great UX leaders. It is one of those roles where not staffing is preferred over staffing a mediocre person. But if you find the right person, it can be transformational for your product. The right person in that role can also teach the product team a lot about what customer-centricity really means. In fact, some of the best Product Managers and most successful entrepreneurs come from a strong background in UX and design. For me, I worked with some of the best UX minds out there but I’ve also seen the other side — where instead of representing the customer, what was articulated were simply opinions.

Long story short, when I received the notification from USPTO that day, It was a pleasant surprise — I hardly remembered making a patent application almost 4 years ago. But I remembered every bit of creating a real product based on that very idea, validating and testing it alongside our UX teams and bringing it to market in less than 8 months. Here’s a youtube video of the product!