As we continue to work from home during these unusual times, there are lot of exciting events happening in the product management space. One of the events that I have been following as an aspiring Product padawan is the Product Management Mastery sessions.
I must say that these events are packed to the gill with participants around the world with one common obsession: How to manage and deliver great product experiences.
Recently, I had a chance to attend a product mastery session where a great product leader [who has had an incredible experience working with product teams and designers and now heads the product development of a product that has been created for designers of products] spoke about the inherent tension that we see some times/often between product and design teams and what could guide us to work with our Designers better.
Boy, this was a topic that resonated with all of the product community and continues to be something we all experience day in and day out in a product development set up. So let me share few of my learnings from this event:
- At the heart of product development, design is a human process and the designers always have the best interest of the customer experience in mind when designing a product. We as product leaders have to keep that in mind.
- Designers are great story tellers.
- The best way to approach our interactions with designers could be to follow a pyramid model that our guest speaker introduced to us in the event:
Some tips that were shared:
- When interacting with designers, we can try speaking their language by always taking the user’s point of view.
- While Product managers may speak in terms of functionality, designers always want to know why did users behave the way they did and what can they learn about the users for next time; This is definitely something that we should appreciate and encourage.
- Giving useful feedback to designers always starts with zooming out and zooming in. One must resist the temptation to zoom in before hearing them out. It was interesting to note that one of the participants in the event brought this point that sometimes designing for the longer term may aid the product vision.
- The best take away tip for me was that “Instead of critiquing the design, we must try to critique the assumptions”.
It helps to synthesize explorations and define the solution space to avoid re-works.
I would like to end this post with the thought that designers in the product space are amazingly talented bunch who without compromising on the quality of experience within the constraints of scope strive to deliver the best possible product experience.
Will keep sharing future learnings.
Stay safe and stay well.
Originally Posted on LinkedIn.