Enterprise UX — Shred #11
PM and UX job responsibilities
This is an interesting insight into misalignment with modern roles of PM and UX that are increasingly overlapping. The overlap comes with the democratization of collaboration and UI design tools such as Miro or Figma, design systems, or widespread “design thinking” methods that are now used in all functions and domains. Questions related to customer knowledge highlight that study is mostly related to the consumer world. It does not touch subjects as market knowledge, enterprise technologies, business models, or domain expertise. I shared my views previously and believe domain knowledge is a fundamental skill to build within the world of professional and enterprise apps.
The assignment between PM and PO role is difficult to grasp, as one might represent a job title and another a Scrum role, aka a hat to wear. There are indeed organizations with distinct career tracks for PM and PO roles, but this opens a similar ambiguous discussion as “UX vs. UI.”
I am not entirely sold on the final conclusions to align individual roles and responsibilities on the project level and move on. Individuals might not be able to solve systematic organization ambiguity and only contribute to hard problems fading away to the background. Incentives are a key factor for human behavior, especially at work — we work on things making us successful and not working on things that are not. The list of power and influence and references or “everyone is designer” is a great example of this. The one who designs the organization, its incentives, the roles and staffing model, have a fundamental influence and responsibility about everything that happens next. This is directly influencing the product capabilities (Conway’s Law) and collaboration between PMs, Designers, and Developers.
Productivity Paradox
In this new era of communication tools, I might become a bit old school, promoting email and a structured asynchronous communication over meetings. I miss the times when you work on your own, and whenever you need to connect with a colleague, you just pick up the phone. Some perceive the meetings as work and equal to collaboration, but a lot of the meetings fits the concept of talking about work, whereas the work keeps piling up outside of the meeting.
Economist Dan Nixon notes that during the past decade, productivity growth in advanced economies was “persistently weak” during the same period when smartphone shipments increased tenfold. It seems clear that technological innovations aimed to make communication faster and more ubiquitous failed to boost our aggregate ability to get things done. All this extra time spent talking about work instead of actually working has created a 21st-century repeat of Tenner’s productivity paradox.
The technologist’s response to email overload is to make these tools even faster. But as the history of technology teaches us, making tasks faster does not by itself guarantee that we become more productive. It’s never been easier to send a report to a colleague, but at the same time, it’s never been harder to find the uninterrupted hours necessary to do a good job writing the report in the first place.
