Depending on the size of the product team and its position in the organization, the leader of the team might have any number of different titles: chief product officer, vice president of product, director of product management, even group product manager. …

“That’s a great idea,” I remember telling a Ph.D. with deep expertise into human interaction who was working at the time in the innovation lab of a huge tech company. “I love it, but how are you going to get it onto the roadmap?” If you ask enough UX people…

With it pretty well established that UX practitioners and product managers share many concerns and deploy adjacent proficiencies, this leads to a perennial struggle to define exactly who is responsible for what. …

Of all the things product managers do that UX people tend not to do, data analysis is perhaps the most alien to the design orientation. Even the business aspects can be framed and understood as solving problems, designing solutions that address competing needs, and so on. …

Remember how a product manager needs to be a kind of scientist? Perhaps a mad scientist at times if you dream big. But always grounded in evidence, taking care to measure things accurately. Scientists learn everything they can about a subject and wonder about the parts nobody seems to have…

While it’s not true that all designers get uncomfortable when the talk turns to money (budget constraints, the need for revenue, potentially seeing people as paying customers above all else), it’s fair to say that many UX designers are happy to have someone else (a “bean counter,” a “suit”) obsess…

For many designers, business is a dirty word. …

A big part of the product manager’s job is providing engineers with everything they need to be productive. Sometimes the product manager feels their job is to tell the engineers what to do, but they quickly learn this is like trying to herd cats. …

There will always be some overlap between the concerns of product managers and UX professionals, and this can function as a healthy tension if addressed forthrightly or a wasteful turf battle if not. Many UX designers look at this overlap and wonder really how different the two roles are, or…