Blurred Lines
3 Strategies to Ensure a Successful Product Manager-Designer Relationship
Sam the product manager and Danny the product designer hadn’t worked together before and were recently staffed on an agile team to ship a new digital product. Sam focused on driving results, understood and appreciated design thinking, excelled at creating a product vision, and crafted a well-rationed plan to execute it. Sam was eager to work with a designer who could bring the product vision to life. Danny, like many product designers, had a broad skill set including product strategy, user research, and UX design. Danny excelled at problem-solving with developers and was eager to work with a product manager who wanted to collaborate on the product’s vision.
Doesn’t this sound like a strong product manager and product designer match? In theory, it was, but in reality, it wasn’t. Sam and Danny clashed along the blurred lines of work that are present in these two roles.
Product managers and product designers share the same goal of building a successful digital product. However, reaching that common goal depends on numerous factors, one of which is how we work together. The two roles come to the table with distinct specialties, yet sometimes we are expected to straddle different lines of work, dabbling in product strategy as designers and critiquing designs as product managers. Unfortunately, not every individual, team, or organization, is set up to collaborate fluidly across roles.
In my experience, the fluid roles and responsibilities between product managers and designers are beneficial when a team’s staffing strategy is focused on hiring people with the right skills, defining roles, and clarifying expectations.
Finding & Hiring People with The Right Skills
As technologies and business models continue their rapid evolution, organizations are experiencing a change in the workforce skills they need to thrive. Depending on the organization or a specific team’s needs, finding an individual with the right blend of generalist and specialist knowledge is crucial to their success. In the context of an agile delivery team, like the one Sam and Danny were on, an M-shaped employee is favored because this individual can supply knowledge across multiple skill sets. A T-shaped employee has broad experience and knowledge but is only specialized in one discipline. Whereas an M-shaped employee has specialized skills in more than one discipline, sometimes making them more valuable. For example, an M-shaped individual on an agile team might have broad design strategy knowledge and possess the ability to create detailed user experience designs based on user research they conducted. Frequently M-shaped team members are equal or at times even more knowledgeable in the skills expected of a T-shaped specialist. These M-shaped individuals are commonly members of high-performing cross-functional teams.
When interviewing, teams should employ techniques that uncover how a person used their various skill sets in both a specialized and generalized way. Interviews should cover how M-shaped applicants worked with other individuals that were a different shape. In addition to this, a team’s specific needs play a factor. For example, an agile delivery team might need a product manager who has essential skills like clear communication and the ability to collaborate across a diverse array of roles. The team may also need someone who can do product visioning, someone who understands the current market and technologies, can solve for current problems and come up with innovative solutions. Ideally, a product manager who excels at product visioning can develop creative solutions in partnership with a strong product designer. Yet this perfect product manager and designer combination can be hard to find, and they both have to play well with each other.
Sam and Danny weren’t M-shaped employees, they were more akin to the specialized T-shape. Yet their skill sets weren’t the main cause of their clash. Instead, their role expectations were not clearly defined, and they did not allow their specialized skill sets to complement each other to yield a great product. Rather, they clashed over shared roles and responsibilities across product management and design. They didn’t allow flexibility across titles or define clear boundaries for their roles, so they were perpetually in conflict. This continuous cycle of tension kept them from unlocking the best way to collaborate and build a great product.
Defining Roles & Expectations
Members of an agile team, product managers and product designers included, tend to focus on doing agile but not being agile, which means traits like personal role flexibility, openness, and adaptability are often missing. In certain situations, the “not my job, not your job” point-of-view is dangerous and unproductive. At the end of the day, the team’s goal is to build a successful digital product. Therefore, being open to feedback from team members in various roles should only help achieve the team’s ultimate goal.
Since the responsibilities in product management and design can have significant overlap, it would be prudent for these two individuals to speak to what their specialized and generalized skillsets are. This will allow them to come to a conclusion on how their areas of expertise are complementary, and how they can deploy those skills to best serve their teams. Many times, these conversations between product managers and product designers do not happen.
Product managers and product designers should share their areas of expertise with full transparency and be ready and open for discussion and debate. Sam wanted a designer who could bring their product vision to life, and Danny wanted to be part of the larger product vision creation process. What these things actually meant to Sam and Danny should have been thoroughly discussed to align on a way of working.
Product designers and product managers need to make time and space in order to clarify the rules of engagement from the start of a working relationship until the end. They can meet to define a working agreement, aligning on who will conduct research read-outs, who will demo prototypes for user stories, and how the final roadmap decisions will be made. These are just common examples and can be adjusted based on the team’s skillsets and individual professional development goals. In my experience, in order for a symbiotic, successful product manager and product designer relationship to form and thrive, a working agreement is crucial.
More Effective Team Staffing
Regardless of the fact that Sam and Danny didn’t have the right conversations in order to effectively collaborate, perhaps Sam and Danny should not have been placed on the same team in the first place. Not all organizations or team leads have the ability or time to find the perfect people to work together on a team, however, they might be able to find complementary employees. If we can’t find perfect team members, then we should aim to staff our teams with complementary members.
Before teams look outward, they should look inward. Start by making efforts to take inventory of the current workforce’s skills. Then analyze market and technology trends to uncover skill gaps and define actionable plans to close them. I’ve been part of skill set inventory exercises and they have been beneficial for the individuals, team leads, and the team as a whole.
It can start with a simple spreadsheet asking individuals to populate what their skill sets and learning objectives are from a primary, secondary, and tertiary perspective. From there, teams can tackle learning objectives by creating pathways to gain knowledge and increase their skills. When it comes to staffing a team, use a skills inventory to find a set of individuals with the right blend of expertise to create cross-functional teams that can get the job done in an efficient, healthy, and hopefully a fun manner.
In Conclusion
Product manager and product designer roles are integral to the success of a product. With that in mind, the collective we — whether you are a product manager, a product designer, a digital product lead, or a hiring manager — need to recognize our individual responsibilities in ensuring that the product manager and product designer relationship is working. That means accepting the fact that the lines of work are often blurred and that navigating these lines in a productive manner often requires both a breadth and depth of skills within the team. Ultimately, we need to create space to foster a candid collaborative environment in which both product managers and designers can thrive.
Let’s step across these lines together and guide our product managers and designers toward a complementary collaboration that leads to better products and even better workdays.
