Guidelines for efficient Product manager collaboration with product designers and engineers
Throughout my professional journey, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with exceptional product designers. All of them were creative and innovative. They tackled design challenges in their own unique ways. They offered valuable insights and contributions.
What is the difference between product designers and product managers?
Product managers develop the product vision. They understand user needs and come up with product features to address those needs.
In contrast, the product designer empathizes with the user journey. They build a product experience to solve user problems.
Challenges
Based on my experience, where we had a tight deadline and a limited product design team capacity. It presented a few challenges, such as
- Misaligned Prioritization: Prioritization of tasks did not align with the expectations of the product team.
- Delays in Providing Inputs to Engineering Teams: Engineering teams experienced delays in receiving essential inputs from the product team. This was due to the product design team’s limited capacity.
- Divergence in Solution Design: In some cases, the solution design didn’t meet the product manager’s expectations. This created discrepancies in the project.
- Late Identification of Technical Feasibility Challenges: Late identification of technical feasibility challenges resulted in unexpected additional efforts from both developers and designers.
- Design Team Discontent with final results: Instances where the design team was dissatisfied with the final product.
Roles and responsibilities within the design team can vary. This depends on the type of company and product requirements. There is no one-size-fits-all all. It’s crucial to align collaboration between Product Managers, product designers, and the development team.
Teams should create stronger relationships by agreeing on
- Areas where product designers and engineers will actively participate in the product development lifecycle (PDLC).
- Who will lead and who do we need to inform?
- What are the expected outcomes?
Collaboration with product designers and engineers in the Product development life cycle
- Defining User Problem and Scope:
In the initial phase, user interviews and data analysis play a pivotal role. They prioritize the user and define the problem scope.
🕵🏼♀️ Lead: Product manager
☎️ Consulted: Product designer
📩 Informed: Product designer
2. Define success indicators
We need to define success indicators . Which can be defined by
- Objective Key result (OKR)
- User goal
- Business Outcome
- Product metrics
- Project metrics
Defining and measuring success is a critical step in alignment. It should be done as soon as possible.
🕵🏼♀️ Lead: Product manager
☎️ Consulted: Product designer
📩 Informed: Engineering team, Product designer
3. Solution Design
This phase involves designing a solution to solve user problems. The engineering team and product managers must be involved.
The engineering team will assess technical feasibility and high-level efforts. The product manager will perform an effort versus impact analysis.
Product designers and product managers ensure that the team understands the critical user journeys. The product manager and designer will again collaborate to assess and ensure which components are nice to have, to achieve the targeted goals.
🕵🏼♀️ Lead: Product designer
☎️ Consulted: Product Manager
📩 Informed: Product Manager, Engineering team
4. Design Implementation:
In this phase, the engineering team will start working on feature development.
🕵🏼♀️ Lead: Engineering team
☎️ Consulted: Product Manager, Product designer
5. Design review — Pre-Deployment:
The design team conducts a Design Quality review and provides feedback. You should not omit this crucial step, especially if it involves a critical user journey.
🕵🏼♀️ Lead: Product designer
☎️ Consulted: Product Manager
📩 Informed: Engineering team
6. Measurement:
Product managers measure the product performance via the metrics defined in step 2 above. They should do this both before and after its launch.
🕵🏼♀️ Lead: Product Manager
☎️ Consulted: Product Manager, Engineering team
📩 Informed: Stakeholders
7. Insights and Learnings:
Insights and lessons learned from the implementation phase inform future product development efforts.
🕵🏼♀️ Lead: Product manager
☎️ Consulted: Product designer
📩 Informed: Engineering team
Collaboration between product designers, product managers, and engineers is crucial at various stages of the product development lifecycle. It ensures meeting user needs and goals. The product is successfully designed, implemented, and measured.
What worked for me might not work for you and your team. It’s crucial to ensure early alignment and agreement. This applies to roles and responsibilities at both squad and project levels. Avoid making assumptions that might lead to conflicts.
If you have any suggestions or feedback, don’t hesitate to leave a comment. You can also reach out to me via my email address at nidasaleem333@gmail.com.
