Defining Roles: Keeping UX Happy

Tami Weiss gets to the nitty gritty and tells it like it is. If you’ve seen the Venn diagram, product managers overlap in many domains. Little did we product managers know, UX has one with them placed in the middle! In this talk, Tami, the UX Lead at Knowit, defines clear responsibilities between UX teams and product management.

This land is your land…

Product managers need to tell and sell the product story, with a clear picture and vision for the product. This means defining the product roadmap, prioritising features, understanding the target market, and managing expectations of stakeholders.

UX teams, while needing to understand the business goals, user needs, and technical constraints, are focused on working with development, testing the experience, and connecting the big picture and small details.

Overlapping domains

Whether you want to separate or share overlapping responsibilities, communication is imperative. Areas of conflicting responsibilities include measurement, functional requirements, presenting hypotheses, product vision, and internal/external communication. Defining who is responsible for the UX/PM grey zone will minimise conflict and tension within product teams.

Tami’s 9 practices for collaborative UX and PM teams

Stating communication between teams is the easy part. Tami gives 9 actions you can take to kick start this process to fostering better team dynamics:

• Define clear roles
• Have a design process
• Have a style guide
• Don’t tell your designer how to design
• Facilitate
• Visualise as much as you can
• Meet face to face
• Use collaboration tools
• Ask for solutions to problem