Building Better Products - The Key Takeaways on Product Designers and Product Managers Dynamics from Our Survey.

Note: the results shown in this post are taken from a survey filled out anonymously by +100 people. It doesn't represent our views. These results were discussed in episode #2 of our podcast, Product Notes. You can listen to it here: https://hopp.bio/productnotes

What do you think when you hear questions like these:

• Are Product Designers and Product Managers truly collaborating, or are they merely co-existing under the guise of teamwork?
• Is the partnership between Product Designers and Product Managers a pathway to innovation, or just a power struggle wrapped in corporate diplomacy?
• Are these roles synergizing their expertise to enhance user experience, or is it a battle of egos at the expense of product development?

Questions like these are increasingly popping up in professional communities, creating a divide between two professions that are meant to work closely striving forward in the same direction.

I would like to start this post by giving a huge shoutout to everyone who took the time to share their insights on the survey we launched earlier this year. Really, it meant a lot to us, and it helped us to better understand what is on your minds. While we anticipated that some points would be somewhat controversial, the results were even more surprising than we expected, and definitely less polarized than what you might read on social-professional networks like LinkedIn.

Let’s dive into what your responses reveal about the real state of affairs between PMs and UXers.

The Survey

The analysis of this article comes from the responses of 103 professionals who described their roles as shown in the following graph:

At least half of respondents (51%) came from professions with more than 6 years experience in the software development industry and 30% from professionals with between 3-5 years experience.

The Thin Line Between Roles: Product Designers and Product Managers

Before we dove into most challenging questions, we warmed up with more general questions to set the tone and gain a broader perspective of the situation.?

Survey questions and results:

To the question, How clear is the boundary in your team between the roles of Product Designer (UX&UI) and Product Managers??

Results show that, overall, Product Managers and Product Designers perceive a clear boundary between what is expected in each profession. This leads to an interesting question, as Dovydas elaborates on in the podcast, "Do we even have a boundary? Do we need one?"

People often say (in one way or another) that Product Managers are responsible for the "What" and "When," while Product Designers are responsible for the "Why" and "How." Even if this holds true in some companies, I must say that it feels wrong. If Product Managers don’t know about the “Why” and “How” and Product Designers don’t know about “What” and “When,” we can easily develop products that help nobody and solve no problems.

Let’s move on. The next question was, have projects, in your experience, been adversely affected by unclear role boundaries between Product Designers and Product Managers?

The answers align with the previous results. The fact that most PM/UX see a clear boundary between both professions proves that, in most cases, there is no adverse effect on projects.

We moved on in the survey to ask about overlapping efforts and how often that occurs. The question was as follows: How common is it to see overlapping efforts between Product Designers and Product Managers on your team?

This was the first question where we found some unexpected answers. The majority of Product Managers felt that there were no overlapping efforts. On the other hand, more Product Designers (almost double) felt that overlapping efforts happen more often than rarely. This is interesting because we also did a follow-up question for those who marked “Always, Often or Sometimes.” to specify what activities were adversely impacted. Here is a word cloud of those answers.

It’s very interesting to see so many "research phase" keywords, such as user “interviews” or “product discovery”. We learned more about this later on. It was an interesting surprise.

To close the warm-up section, we looked at some positives and asked: do you believe there are benefits to having some tasks duplicated across the roles of Product Designers and Product Managers?

These results are again very interesting because, across all professions, the same split was present. I personally believe that duplicate efforts bring more information to the table and, at the end of the day, it just makes the product a stronger product. That said, it’s also true that if you are constantly repeating the same research over and over again, you are wasting a lot of time that could go to other, more important matters.

We also asked follow-up questions for those who said that they saw benefits in overlapping efforts. This word cloud displays the main value points that were given.

I feel like we discussed this quite thoroughly in the podcast and recommend that you listen to that part in the episode for more info.

And now to the most interesting part (in my opinion) of the survey. The real juice. We formulated our question as follows:

For the Following Set of Tasks, in Your Opinion, Which Role —Product Designer (UX) or Product Manager (PM) —Should Take on the Responsibility?

We are aware that we didn't add both options to the survey, leaving only three choices: Product Manager / Product Designer / Other. In the option "Other," we left a free text input for people to write as they pleased. It was important for us to have your perspective of who should lead tasks, take initiative and, at the end, be responsible for the result. But enough explanations, let's see the results:

Product Vision & Mission

Business opportunities (market research, competitor analysis & etc.)

User Research (user interviews, surveys & etc.)

Problem Definition, Goals & KPIs

Scope (features, requirements & etc.)

Planning & Prioritization (sprints, roadmaps & etc.)

Ideation (brainstorming, sketching, LF wireframes & etc.)

Design (HF wireframes, visual design, prototypes & etc.)

Validation (usability testing, accessibility evaluation & etc.)

Quantitative testing (A/B testing, heatmaps & etc.)

Post-Release Insights (BI reports, support tickets & etc.)

I’m sure you can make your own conclusions from these results, and we would love to hear your thoughts and comments. Leave a comment here or on the podcast episode.

Don't forget to listen to the whole episode on your favorite platform:

YouTube: https://productnotes.hopp.to/youtube-episode-2

Spotify: https://productnotes.hopp.to/spotify_episode_2

Follow us:

• Dovydas Vystartas: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/dovydas-vystartas/
• Tomas P. Rup?ys: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/tomaspr/
• Mario Ba?ares: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/mbanares/