Unblocking Misalignment in Product Teams as a Designer
When receiving input doesn’t allow you to move forward
As a UX designer, you probably have experienced some sort of misalignment with your team. Your PM tells you one thing and your engineering team says another. What do you do?
Identify when there is no consensus
It’s okay if there is no consensus. If that’s the case, acknowledge it, take a step back, and align on what is missing. I’d been passively accepting feedback on my design and not expressing a strong point of view behind what I personally felt about it. But I’ve gotten to a point in my project where I repeatedly make small changes—add something, get rid of it, and add it back again—because of mixed feedback and not expressing my gut feeling of needing a better collaboration process. Though some of the product details seem small from a visual standpoint (“let me add a few pixels here and there”), they actually have a big effect towards the user experience.
It doesn’t matter if we keep trying to make the visuals better if we don’t have solid alignment. If we don’t define the user flow or have the details figured out, the product won’t work in a…
