Designers: How to Make Your Product Managers (PM) Love You

Ok Ok! I meant love working with you. You get my point…

Design<>Product is the most important relationship that needs to be forged to build successful products seamlessly.

To understand how to build a good working relationship it’s important to understand the differences that bring us together.

Product managers “own the product”, and product designers “own the experience”. Both are owners — and it’s essential to act that way.

Be open:

As designers we are experts. Experts come with their biases from expertise. PMs are generalists. A great PM thinks widely, and this means they can come up with the quirkiest of solutions to hard design problems.

An essential part of becoming great working partners is to “humor” each other. Bring a genuine sense of curiosity for a moment, and get your PM thinking through the solutions they are proposing. Have them wireframe their idea as a user flow, role-play by being a pair of hands to bring their idea to life and survey great product experiences together.

This is a great way to build mutual trust and set aside roles and responsibilities focusing on the only outcome that matters — building a great product.

Be imaginative:

Most organizations have PMs write “requirements” before the designer goes on to build the experience. I blame this practice for some of the friction in the relationship between product and design.

Great product designers don’t follow the “requirements documentation” written in vacuum. Writing an experience is very different from designing it and bringing it to life. This means the PM is most likely leave out important aspects that might be critical to a great product experience, if they are doing this “alone” as a “product owner”.

To make your PMs love you, set the “requirements” aside, and dream up the ideal experience. Now imagine yourself in your PM’s role — What will be the MVP experience needed to bring this idea to life with limited time and resources.

Present the future state and show your PM, how the MVP will evolve across the different phases of product maturity. Tie this in to the requirements they wrote and show them how you’ve evolved it through “product-led design thinking”

Working this way with PMs will ensure you have a seat at the table when important product decisions are made. You are on their side — thinking through the missing pieces with them and not really “blaming” them for not envisioning “everything”. This is the kind of designer PMs want to work with.

Be pragmatic:

I’m guilty of this too and I try everyday to get better. As designers it’s hard to understand why critical customer features need to be reprioritized. We know in our bones that a specific feature is going to make the product “tick” for our users but PM and engineering have descoped it. Bummer!

The constraints of release cycles are real. Engineers and PMs need to act conservatively with “code freezes” to cut out large chunks of time for QA and integration testing.

A working product is the first step to building a successful product and a PM’s job is to ensure that the product works!

It’s not to say that it’s not upsetting to look at the piece-meal experience that was launched. It is. However look at the bright side — It launched! It can only get better from here.

Resisting the urge to ship the ideal/perfect experience while holding a high bar for the user experience (which you own as a designer) is hard. It takes a tonne of judgement, influencing and rethinking the problem in a different dimension from the designer’s part.

With that I’m not saying don’t pick fights — Instead think about them through the “practical lens” — How many additional ‘work-hours’ is this going to take, what’s the cost to the business, how will this move the KPI, can this be an A/B test at a later point…

Be Tenacious:

There’s a reason why I prefaced this with “Be Pragmatic”. I understand these are conflicting traits.

Having spoken of pragmatism, a great designer must hold a “high bar” for the customer experience. This means being that voice of dissent when the team leans heavily toward building “something” just because it can be built. This can especially happen with PMs who are more “engineering focused”.

Stepping in as a strong design lead, and leading with the “why” — which can be supported by user research, data or sentiment is essential to guide the team in the direction of doing “hard things” when necessary.

Sometimes PMs are fire-fighting all day across so many different work-streams that it can leave them with very less gas in the tank to “stand-up” for the best product experience. Being that voice of dissent in areas that matter is a great way to win your PMs trust as a strong product partner that will cover their blindspots. They will thank you for it.

Be respectful:

As a team, you need to find a balance between what looks good, and what will achieve your product KPIs.

That said it’s sometimes hard to not take the “quest” for pixel perfection seriously. Especially when it’s the PM that’s saying — “this is not that important for now”.

This is when it’s easy to feel disrespected for your views as a “design professional”. Sometimes what’s needed is education — Talking about the importance of visual hierarchy, information architecture, eye-tracking , progressive disclosure etc can sway the PM’s intuition about why something is “not important to fix” . At other times, it could be tight deadlines and competing priorities.

Whatever the reason — understand this friction is healthy. PM and design are fundamentally different disciplines and marrying them both together needs skill, practice and patience.

In such situations — disagreeing but committing out of mutual respect is a great way to build a lasting partnership. Respecting that the PM is the ultimate “owner” of the product is essential here — so that you can “support” them in fulfilling that role better than be at odds with their decisions.

A great PM is the best partner you can have on your side to build great designs and consequentially great products. Here’s to working toward making that a possibility…

Hey there! I’m Sindhu — A Product Design Lead at Roku. Previously I built my own startup and worked at a startup studio called PSL. Oh also, I worked at Amazon building Amazon Key :) I love building new products and ideas.

Want to discuss startups and design? I’m all ears! Email me at sindu.ux@gmail.com. I can’t wait to hear all your stories :)