Should UX and Product Management merge?
The Industry is changing
There has recently been a surge in design jobs within the Information Technology industry. People from various domains are interested in pursuing product design and product management as a career path.
While both professions are expanding and becoming more lucrative as career paths, there has been discussion about whether the boundaries between the two broad domains of product design and product management are becoming increasingly thin and overlapping.
Product Management entails overseeing the entire product life cycle, which includes introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Product Design involves giving shape to a raw idea. Airbnb was just an idea to make extra bucks by renting air mattresses to attendees of a conference because all the hotels were booked.
Survey and the outcome
I recently launched a Linkedin survey asking the design community if UX and product management should be combined. During the discussion, some excellent points were raised. Let me quickly summarize them.
Point 1 — In a smaller organization, UX Design and Product Management roles overlaps and sometimes it’s a single person doing both.
Point 2 — In a typical design process, there are a set of rules that we apply and a product is built. Over the years Design has become a codified system anyone who has the idea will be able to use to create products.
Point 3 — The industry is still not ready for this approach even the design education does not have a curriculum designed for students.
Point 4 — Merging roles can lead to a compromise in quality. Keeping roles clear, distinct and manageable increases the overall health of everything.
Point 5 — A group of professionals believe a merger has already occurred. UX or Product Designers manage product requirements and roadmaps, set timeframes, manage the development cycle, assign tasks, business competencies, and conduct research.
Point 6 — Both the fields are quite vast in themselves how can someone think of merging.
Point 7 — UX and Product management should not merge but Silicon Valley is forcing this culture, in an attempt to get closer to the growth designer role.
Point8 — There are designers already doing half UX and half product management.
Point 9 — Strong opinion stating a UX designer cannot do a product managers job as product managers are involved in researching, evaluating, balancing critical trade-offs, deciding the direction of the fate of a particular product and coordinating the efforts of various teams, and accountable for the success of the product
Point 10 — There are things in common like success metrics, customer retention, both should co-exist and work together.
The Result of the poll
While the poll is ending soon you can still make comments on the post to continue a healthy discussion. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aliptaballav_design-productdesign-uxdesign-activity-6829118683336572928-c9lc
Conclusion
Both UX design and product management is a shared responsibility and the way the role is defined lies on factors like the size, process and culture of the organization.
At some point, the roles of UX and product merge. While the project management process is lengthy, the UX team can help with a portion of it and is never included in the entire Product management life cycle.
UX is in charge of tasks such as interaction design, prototyping, making products accessible, deciding on the look and feel, crafting micro-interactions, iterating based on user’s feedback. Even the research performed by users is limited to a few task flows, and the focus is primarily on whether the user perceives the interface to be effective, efficient, and satisfying until the research is exploratory or evaluative.
PM is responsible for a broader range of tasks such as need-finding, idea validation, competitive analysis, product roadmap creation, go-to-market strategy development, lead generation and many more. To make an informed decision, a great deal of business sense and even some management accounting knowledge is required.
Any product development process is a team sport, with members coming from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines with specific skill sets. Let’s respect each other and collaborate as a team to create amazing product experiences.
Thank you design community for getting into a healthy discussion.
