Product Managers: How to Build a Strong Relationship with Your UX Designer

Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash

In the business of making great products, few relationships are as important as that of a product manager and their UX designer. Yet, these relationships are often fraught with conflict. When a product manager and UX designer don’t get along, the result is a bad product, or sometimes, no product at all.

There’s always going to be some tension in projects based on the role product managers and UX designers play, but there are ways to keep that tension healthy and productive. Below are some tips that have helped me:

Respect your UX designer

People who feel respected and valued do good work. In the context of building great products and services, my favorite explanation for why product managers should respect and appreciate UX design comes from Dropbox VP of Product and Growth, Adam Nash:

“I believe that software is a team sport… There is no function that exists at your company that doesn’t have a good reason. In fact, if you don’t think there’s a good reason to have a function, most likely, you haven’t worked with someone great at it. And it takes all those skills to be competitive. Because if you don’t leverage those skills, believe me, your competitors will.”

Adam Nash walks through the superpowers of Product, Design, and Engineering

How do you demonstrate respect?

• As in any good relationship, listen when your designer expresses concern or shares an idea on how to make the user experience better
• Take Design’s timelines into account, not just Engineering’s
• Trust your designer’s design, unless you have a specific business, engineering, or user behavior reason for wanting to change it
• Never, ever say any variation of “just make it look pretty”

Frame the problem, not the solution

The most common pitfall product managers can fall into with UX designers is being overly prescriptive about what a feature should look like. You miss out on potentially elegant, creative solutions when you dictate that the designer should create a pop-up or that the button should be a specific color.

Instead, provide your UX designer with a really strong understanding of the problem they’re trying to solve. I have found answering the following questions to be really helpful in providing the right context before kicking off projects:

• What problem are we trying to solve? Why is this a problem now?
• What metrics are we trying to drive?
• What is the current experience like for the user? Why does it not work?
• What is the most important thing we want the user to do or understand, having interacted with this design?
• What is the scope of what we’re trying to solve (i.e. full blown redesign vs testing a small behavior change)?

Give constructive feedback

Designing products is fun. But the day-to-day process of design reviews can quickly devolve if product managers are not thoughtful about how they talk with their designers.

Glassdoor team providing feedback on a webpage design

Here are some tips I’ve picked up after a lot of trial and error on how to effectively give feedback:

• Ask your designer on their thought process first. Oftentimes, designers have thought through many scenarios and options before presenting what you see, and they usually have a good reason behind their choices.
• Keep your preferences out of it. Design is really personal, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of applying your personal taste to a product. A/B tests have proven over and over again that what I think is a good experience is often not. Unless I have a good reason behind why a design bothers me, I save my social capital with my designer for another day.
• Be specific. Rather than “I hate this design”, explain what you hate about the design, such as “I think the alignment on this page is jarring” or “The design looks great, but I think we could refine the header more”
• Provide a reason why. Designers will be able to better address your feedback if they understand the context. Below are some reasons behind why I’ve wanted to change something in a design that seemed to resonate well:
  - Information hierarchy does not focus on the behavior we’re trying to drive
  - Data has shown an alternative treatment works better
  - Usability research shows users struggle with a specific element
  - Inconsistent with the rest of the product, design system, or brand guidelines
  - Inconsistent with user mental models on common practice / industry-standard design elements
  - Technically impractical or not feasible