A letter of reflection and appreciation to a great product manager <> designer relationship

Before I started my current job I had been thinking about how long it had been since I worked side-by-side with a product designer or a group of engineers. Going back to an individual contributor role got me thinking about my working style with these roles and since I knew this was going to be important to my success I was a bit worried that my skills were a bit rusty.

Fast forward to today, I was having a conversation with a mentee about their own designer <> PM flow and I started bouncing these questions back at my current reality. To my surprise, that fear I had a few months back had transformed into satisfaction. It turns out we have a really good collaboration.

So what makes it work?

While the following is not an exhaustive analysis of what makes this relationship work I think it shows a set of good reasons that could make almost any cross-functional interaction at work a success. Another caveat is that these observations are only my side of the story. With that, let’s look at them:

We started with clear expectations

We were both very open from the beginning about what we expected from each other in our respective roles. She was very open with me about the work that she’d been doing, and where she was seeing gaps in what she saw were the product manager’s responsibilities. I was also forward from the start about my concerns and fears about not having worked with a designer for a while, and I was expecting that she would be transparent with me if she saw an important flaw I needed to work on. This kick-off helped us get comfortable with gradually bringing our ideas and concerns to the table.

We have consistent and open communication

We have 1:1s scheduled in our calendars once a week, but I realized that we have many more valuable conversations that are not attached to a specific calendar event. We are always interacting whether through ad hoc calls (huddles?) or chat about ideas and questions we have.

We experiment with different approaches to work

We are both very passionate about doing continuous discovery. We discuss ways to implement it without getting bogged down in having a perfect process. So, for example, after commenting a couple of ideas to more systematically track customer feedback, we decided to try an approach. We then gave each other feedback on what wasn’t working and also gathered feedback from other teammates, a very important one for us being our engineering lead. We went from a spreadsheet, to a set of customer cards in Miro to, more recently, an opportunity tree where we capture every incoming question, request or need and then classify together every couple of weeks together with the engineering lead.

We prioritize action over talk

On our quest to improve our discovery material, she suggested one day we could track these emails that customers send to our sales team and that we have access to. She started doing it on a weekly basis and sharing the learnings with the team. I thought this worked well so when she was absent, I followed her lead and continued doing the same. Some weeks we fall off track like in these final weeks of the year when there is a bit of roadmapping madness and a bit of lets-circle-back-next-year feeling, but I feel certain that somewhere in our minds we have a share feeling of “we have to catch up with this feedback because we think it’s important to inform our work”. We do the work on the spot to illustrate what we mean. We also agree on the actions we expect each to take next.

We care about purpose

We share learnings and questions regularly and whenever new work comes our way, we ask ourselves if it really aligns with what we see as priorities. While taking action is important, more important is to take actions that matter so we have a good deal of ranting or shifting priorities we we see it makes sense. We don’t like busy work, but when there is no alternative and we have to do it, we also encourage each other.

We have complementary skills

I have noticed we complement each other on things that we like and don’t like. For example, there are problems that our users have that are more UX-specific and that require a little bit more of that creative skill set that designers typically have. Similarly, there are other problems that are a little more technical, and I more naturally incline to them in the form of numbers and spreadsheets so while we won’t explicitly say “I will do or will not do these”, we have learned to note each other’s preferences and, to our advantage, these preferences complement each others’s work rather than leave a blank spot. We would probably have to negotiate them if we both had to do something we don’t like, but I think we’re also capable of doing that.

What we don’t do

I don’t think we have explicitly fallen for the oversimplified idea that “product managers focus on the problem and designers and engineers come up with solutions to those”. Instead, we think about the challenges that come our way and the ideas that we’re having to approach them. It is true that she can work with Figma and I cannot. Or that I enjoy spreadsheets and she hates them. And yes, the engineering lead or myself might come up with more specific technical requirements to some problems, but for the most part, we sort of mix and match our skills and build on top of each other’s work. And I think that’s ideal.

Ultimately, I think these observations can be applied to make other roles fruitful in their collaboration, and not just designers and product managers. In general, I believe that as long as people are competent and have a touch of niceness or humour in how they communicate, we will most definitely work well together. So be nice and be smart 🙂

What makes a good working relationship in your view? (I mean this question, so go wherever you saw this post and comment if you have some thoughts or just DM me 🙂

PS. As the saying goes “praise in public and criticize in privite” so with her permission, this great colleague is Gabriela Ospina and you can go check out her website: https://www.gabrielaospina.com/