Product Owners and UX Designers: Set the Seal on the Strongest Relationship
Usually, when a Product Owner (PO) and a UX Designer work on a product together emotions have a habit of running high.
The Product Owner passes the design to the development team and they start implementing the feature. On the other hand, the UX Designer has different ideas, firmly believing that they should be curating the process. Of course, before tensions reach a fever pitch, both realise that this isn’t the first time this has happened.
So, what is the problem here? What are Product Owners and UX Designers? Where do these two roles cross over? Most importantly, how can we turn a frustrating overlap into effective collaboration?
What Is a Product Owner?
The Product Owner role is typical for Scrum project teams and is usually not separated from the product manager’s role. This person is responsible for defining, prioritising and managing product backlog.
The Product Owner’s responsibilities cover only a part of the Product Manager’s scope. A great Product Manager and Product Owner have a profound understanding of all product aspects, from technical feasibility to user experience:
- Creation of user stories and acceptance criteria (backlog grooming)
- Managing and refining product backlog
- Prioritising needs
- Anticipating client needs
- Evaluating product progress at each iteration
The Product Owner is the bridge between the business and the delivery team.
Contrary to some beliefs, Product Owners are not responsible for building wireframes, comps and prototypes or carrying out user testing — this responsibility rests in the hands of UX Designers. Instead, Product Owners should ‘own’ the product by managing and easing the team’s efforts necessary to build the right product. Building the right product isn’t a simple case of keeping the development team occupied, it’s about making sure you’re providing the right thing to develop. It’s the Product Owner’s task to keep an eye on things and to make sure that it all stays on the product roadmap track throughout the product development process.
Turning the product vision into an actionable backlog is one of the Product Owner’s main and most important responsibilities. Another one is constant communication with the team and generating user stories. Close work relationships are built with developers, marketers and business analysts, but most of all with UX Designers to ensure the designs meet real-world needs while aligning with business goals and budgets.
What Is a UX Designer?
UX Designers handle creating the user experience of software products and services through research, design and prototyping. Their job is to ensure that everything about your product works well for the people who are going to use it — from the way it looks to how simple, safe and intuitive it is to use.
To achieve this, UX Designers find and identify the user needs, conduct user research and create wireframes or prototypes based on findings. The primary responsibilities include:
- User research
- Benchmarking
- Developing information architecture
- Building wireframes
- Creating interaction design
- Creating prototypes
- Usability testing activities
- User feedback analysis to iterate
While the Product Owner aims to deliver functionality and value by managing the backlog appropriately, the UX Designer looks at meeting the user’s needs. This goes far beyond UI (User Interface) layout and using corporate colours in the product’s colour scheme; it includes things like user journeys, how content is worded, icon design, and a thousand other details that, when combined, make for a product that is safe and easy to learn and use.
UX Designers focus on the quality of the user experience.
One of the most important phases of the design process is user testing, allowing the UX Designer to analyse how users interact with the product interface, uncovering where they get lost, confused, or frustrated. This information helps the UX Designer to make changes and iterate it by improving its usability.
Avoiding Conflicts, Gaps and Overlaps
The number one priority to avoid any PO-UX conflict is to include the UX designer in the project from the very beginning. To eliminate or reduce existing conflict, make sure both parties clearly understand the above responsibilities, along with the limits that come with each role. This level of understanding requires bulletproof communication practices and a sense of inclusion in all discussions, with the customer, with the users and within the project team.
A clear chain of command is paramount to prevent problems during project development. The Product Owner ultimately has ownership over the product, so the UX Designers answer to them and should discuss any changes or additions with the Product Owner before adding them to the product. This chain of command goes both ways.
Sometimes, the Product Owner might need reminding that is responsible for managing the process of the product development, not the colour of the splash screen or the wording used on a button.
Frequent Collaboration
At the end of the day, the best products will be those produced through close collaboration between all the people involved in the project team, mainly the Product Owner and the UX Designer. This means setting aside the time and budget to make sure that the Product Owner and the UX Designer are on the same page from the very beginning, with shared goals and clearly defined project scopes — a precondition for all projects. In order to avoid any confusion, it’s worth pointing out that ‘products’ is synonymous with ‘systems’.
Through respectful collaboration, communication, inclusion and clarity over roles, there’s no reason why Product Owners and UX Designers cannot work together to achieve the main goal: producing a product that creates valuable impacts for our customer’s businesses and their users.
