ProductTank: What do UX people want from PMs and how can they best work together?
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Jesmond Allen introduces himself as the UX Director at cxpartners and discusses how product managers (PMs) and UX designers can best work together. While their roles overlap in understanding users and requirements, UX focuses on design while PMs focus on the product vision and roadmap. For effective collaboration, UX designers should ask questions to fully understand the project brief and deadlines, while PMs should provide clear goals, share existing research, and communicate regularly with stakeholders. The key is open communication between PMs and UX designers.
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ProductTank: What do UX people want from PMs and how can they best work together?
- 1. Hello ProductTank! August 24th 2011 1 http://www.flickr.com/photos/infinitewhite/5194724550/sizes/o/
- 2. Who am I and why am I here...? Jesmond Allen, UX Director at cxpartners • At cxpartners for 6 years • Worked in UX since 1996 • Recently spent 14 months embedded as a PM with a major mobile company in Bristol 2
- 3. What should I talk about? What do UX people want from PMs and how can they best work together? 3
- 4. Job descriptions PM UX Be the company expert on the Understand competitor products product and its competition and best practices Business requirements Business requirements User requirements User requirements Technical requirements Design within technical constraints Brief UX team, brief development Work with the team to create a team & get the product built design that can and will be built Product vision Design vision Roadmap & backlog Design validation And more... 4
- 5. Snap! • There’s a lot of overlap there • We can help each other to produce great work • But we need to try not to tread on each other’s toes... http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicholas_t/51621460/ 5
- 6. http://www.flickr.com/photos/alejoarango/4991333914/ How can we work well together? Lessons learned from the coal face 6
- 7. What can I do for you...? • Ask what my work will be used for • Structure my report accordingly • Make sure I understand the brief, meet any deadlines and keep in touch with status reports • PMs are busy people • They have lots of internal stakeholders to communicate with • Make sure I ask questions early • In large organisations, team members may be difficult to get hold of • Make sure I communicate effectively with my Product Manager... • ... not just the in-house UX team 7
- 8. And what else? * * your thoughts, please... http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulwatson/5070827/ 8
- 9. What can you do for me? • Get a clear brief together and be honest about scope • don't ask us for 'blue sky thinking' if you only have a remit to tweak the product page • Be clear about your goals for the project • it's my job to help you meet them • Share any existing research you have • demographics, usability studies, analytics, etc • We get our best results when we know lots about your users • Don’t run rebranding exercises alongside UX • the output to brand work is an input to our work • we can't just replace the logo - brand goes to so much more than that 9
- 10. What can you do for me? • Give us access to senior stakeholders up front • we love to hear their thoughts at a point in the project when their input can really make a difference • Let us know any milestones and deadlines in good time • we want to help you meet them • it helps us plan our projects to meet your needs • Be honest about the availability of key stakeholders to feed back on deliverables • no-one wants the project plan to slip • If possible, collate feedback to give to us • large groups feeding back on wireframes often leads to design-by- committee which doesn't produce the best results • if the culture at your organisation means that this is impossible, let us know when we're planning the project so we can allow for it 10
- 11. Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. 11 http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluerobot/5472868801/
- 12. Any questions or comments? 12 http://www.flickr.com/photos/barabeke/4505953529/
- 13. Thank you Jesmond Allen User Experience Director, cxpartners jesmond.allen@cxpartners.co.uk @jesmond 13