While this title is borrowed from Atlassian conference, the content is my own take on how to work with designers as a Product Manager.
Some of the questions I often get from product managers when working with designers are:
Why is the design so far off from what I expect?
How do I influence design without overstepping?
How should I critique design?
Though most seasoned product managers made it look easy, it’s actually much harder than it looks, especially for people new to product management. It is for this reason that I would like to share my own tips to interact and disagree well with designers.
Interacting well
Tip 1: Journey mapping as a cross-functional team
Journey mapping helps teams to reach a shared understanding of the problem to brainstorm solutions. Use this exercise if you are experiencing misalignment of expectations or spending too much time communicating back and forth across multiple parties. Common mistakes when doing so are:
not involving the right individuals in the session
Solution: involve at least a product manager, a designer, and engineers
journey maps don’t accurately reflect the current state of the world
Solution: come prepared with user insights supported by evidence such as customer interviews and data analysis
Tip 2: Validate upfront
Bring evidence through qualitative and quantitative research to avoid wasting time perfecting a design that delves into constant loops of changes. Key validation risks that product teams fall traps to are:
Lack of depth in the defined problems, such as not having the full picture of the impact, how it happened, and current workarounds.
Solution: in-depth user interviews, surveys, behavior data analysis
Lack of understandings of technical constraint that leads to solutions that are not feasible or hard to execute.
Solution: journey mapping with engineers, involve engineers in solutioning
Key assumptions in design work that has yet to be validated with target users, leading to frictions during use.
Solution: usability tests, gradual roll-out plan, seek divergent opinions from design critique sessions
Tip 3: Let your designer do the guestimation
For any design work required in the sprint, let your designers give you an estimation on how long it takes to complete. Adjust scope as necessary to meet the deadline to avoid unrealistic timeline that compromise design quality. While this differs on a case by case basis, a good framework product managers can use to think about this is as follows:
Disagreeing well
Tip 4: Be specific on the WHYs
Be specific on the why behind your suggestions so that designer can explore alternatives to reach the goal. For example, instead of saying “I think the call to action button should be placed here”, try explaining why your proposed solution is better such as “I think the call to action button should be placed here so it’s more noticeable to first-time users”. This will give designers room to explore other solutions that’ll best solve the scenarios in consideration of other design constraints.
Tip 5: Expand on the tradeoff decision
More often than not, choosing design A versus design B involves a tradeoff decision. For example, the image below shows two different designs that involve a tradeoff decision between moving a metric and the end-user experience.
To avoid getting stuck into a back-and-forth discussions without meaningful progress, expand on what the tradeoff entails. Align on that tradeoff equation instead of delving into which design is “better”.
Conclusion
Though working well with designers comes with experience, openness and empathy for designs can go a long way. I hope these tips serve you well as they did for me.