From UX Design to Product Management: A Snapshot
UX plays a major role in determining the ease of usability of a given product. But, can a UX designer become a Product Manager?
This article is an extract from our book, Product Mindset: How to Get Inside Your Customer’s Mind.
James Taylor is an experienced Product Manager and designer based in San Francisco. He is currently working as the Senior Product Manager at Xero where he combines product management strategies with design thinking and delivers successful products. His specialties include business strategy, UX design, user research, and analytics.
The Difference Between User Experience (UX) and Product Management (PM)
UX tasks
- User research, journey flows & IA
- Wireframing & prototyping
- Visual design
- Usability testing
PM tasks
- Vision and strategy & go-to-market
- Analysis, market definition & segmentation
- Roadmaps & prioritization
- Requirements, scope & metrics
- Communication and coordination
Both
- Customer problem identification
- Product validation
- Experimentation
Knowledge Gaps and Speaking their Terms
Learn from your peers from different domains like engineering, sales & marketing, finance, risk & compliance, customer support, and product. Treat learning about your workmates like a user interview. Make it meaningful: cut the jargon, understand your audience, and talk to them about what matters most.
Colleagues are like users; ignore their needs and they won’t care about yours either.
Being a Yes Man/Woman
How do you do it?
- Offer your help.
- Become a Subject Matter Expert.
- Be generous with your time (for now).
Offer to take on some of your PM’s work and share your knowledge with the team.
Making the Jump
Things that you can do to get there:
- Convince your boss.
- Join a startup as a hybrid.
- Join an APM program.
- Do your own thing.
There’s no single way, so just try something and learn.
The Other Stuff
- Work on your resume, update your LinkedIn profile and prepare for the interview.
Quantify your impact, prioritize its content, and read “Cracking the PM interview”.
You Made it, What Next?
- Stop doing other people’s work.
- Learn about the business.
- Keep understanding customers.
- Build trust with your team, and read everything you can.
Your currency as a PM is influence; make friends, be helpful and play nice.
Summary:
- Understanding users = only part of a puzzle.
- Understand your colleagues like you would for a user.
- Help a PM and share knowledge.
- Review your resume & practice interviewing.
- Jump in, make friends, and play nice.
Are you a UX designer interested in transitioning into Product? Tell us your story @productschool
This article was originally published on The Product School blog. We teach product management, data analytics, coding, digital marketing, UX design and product leadership courses in 20 campuses across the US, UK and Canada and the world. To learn more about our upcoming courses and how to apply, visit our course page.
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