P-Camp 2008 - PM & UX - Meghan Ede 2

P-Camp Silicon Valley | Unconference for Product Managers | March 2008

Copyright © 2008 Meadow Consulting | Meghan Ede Page 1 of 5

Product Managers & User Experience Professionals: Responsibilities, Overlaps, Issues – Who Owns What? Overview In one of the sessions at P-Camp, an unconference for Product Managers, we explored the User Experience (UX), and the relationships between Product Management (PM) and UX professionals.

PM. According to our group of session attendees - PMs are often held responsible for success or failure of products. PMs gather critical information, set strategy, assign tasks and do everything possible to ensure successful products and feel that they “own” all aspects of the user experience. After all, they feel the brunt of failures and are promoted based on successes. This area is vital.

UX. User Experience professionals – such as interaction designers, visual designers, information

architects and user researchers - also feel they “own” the user experience. They plan, design, architect, evaluate, and sometimes implement, the “look and feel” of products and web-sites, and make decisions about feature choices and overall product direction. Increasingly, they want to set strategy - and companies are supporting this direction by moving the UX function up the management chain – in some cases to C-level positions. Below, we discussed in more detail UX professionals and what they do.

What is the “User Experience”? Beyond UI. Companies often use the term “user experience” (UX) to mean “user interface” (UI) – the user-accessible portion of a product. But, from the customer point of view, all contacts they have with a company’s product and services, including box design, product features, performance and employee contacts (such as customer support) – are part of their experience. We brainstormed 8 possible elements of the user experience, beyond the UI/webpage, and realized there are likely more. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. TheUser Experience - from the Customer Viewpoint - Goes Beyond the UI / Webpage.

UX Interactions over Time. To illustrate the breadth of the user experience, and to help us see products from a customer viewpoint, we brainstormed some

of the possible interactions a typical customer might have with a single product over time. See Figure 2. (This chart is not exhaustive).



Figure 2. Some of the Many Possible Customer Interactions with One Product Over Time. A Contrast Between What Customers Perceive as the UX and What Companies Often Consider as the UX.

Some of these elements we brainstormed are within a company’s control (such as the Box design, UI features and invoices), while others are not (such as “buzz” on the internet in places like Facebook or formal reviews). We found many important interactions beyond the UI (see the column related to Use).

From the customer perspective, each of these interactions contributes to their understanding, use, enjoyment, and likelihood to continue using a product (and buying upgrades or related products) and, combined, create a single experience – the user experience.

What is a User Experience Professional? UX professional is often used to mean only UI designer. A UI designer is a person who creates the user interface (UI), the user accessible and visible portions of a product, such as screens / webpages. While this seems straightforward enough, even simple UIs usually require several different skill sets, such as visual design, technical writing and interaction design, so UI designer can actually mean quite different things.

As we’ve seen, user experience goes beyond the UI. Thus, UX professionals cover a broad range of different professions, each with a different skill set, training, and very different outputs. While some are

easily seen to contribute to the UI (such as visual designer), others are very important for the overall UX, but whose contribution might not be so obvious at first (such as user researcher or information architect).

If this is not confusing enough, the field is new enough that names, job titles and job descriptions vary widely. And they seem to change about every two years. In a separate session at the P-Camp, we generated a list of 8 UX professions (6 core and 2 related), along with likely training and outputs. (For more details on the session in which this was discussed, see the notes for Extreme Usability by Nancy Frishberg, Meghan Ede, Daniela Busse at https://barcamp.pbwiki.com/Extreme+Usability +at+P-Camp08). See Table 1, below.

There are a number of good definitions of UX skills on the internet. For one example, see a definition provided by Jared Spool (See: http://www.uie.com/ articles/assessing_ux_teams/). Other people will have different definitions, but generally most UX professionals will list at least three core areas.

For the over-worked PM, especially in smaller firms or start-ups, it would seem unreasonable to dedicate 6-8 precious positions to fill all of these areas. For this reason, most people out-source some aspect of the UX design. Many times, a smaller firm attempts to get an “all-in-one” professional, but keep in mind



that most UX professionals are really only masters in ONE of these areas, sometimes two, very rarely three. As a bonus, many UX professionals may also be quite good in some non-UX fields as well, such as project management, so consider the whole package.

Another approach is to hire someone who understands what is needed (but doesn’t claim to do it all) who can then do some of the UX work and oversee a combination of out-sourcing and finding hidden talent in existing staff (it is surprising how

often these skills turn up in-house, such as a programmer who’d rather be doing prototyping or a sales engineer who has a degree in Comparative Literature and has already written several user guides).

For the PM who is attempting to do all of this without help, the best thing to keep in mind is that the UX goes beyond the UI and to keep an eye out for possible sources of help or expertise, wherever they turn up .

Table 1. An Overview of UX Professions - with Likely Backgrounds and Likely Outputs.

The Customer ≠ The User Products are sold to customers. In many cases, companies consider customers to be the users, but this may not be true. To keep these straight – customers pay for the product, users use the product. (Okay, there are edge cases, like free products, just replace pay with obtain).

For consumer products, the customer often is the user (think television, cell phones, toasters, TiVo,

Netflix, Facebook), but even in that realm, products may bought by one person to be used by other people, such as family members. Think about computer games: usually the parent is the customer, but the child is the user.

For Enterprise products, the situation can be even more complicated. The product may be bought by a clerk or purchaser, upon the decision of an executive, with the approval of a finance person, under the supervision of the IT department, to be used by an individual



contributor (IC), who, likely is not even known to all the other people in the purchase chain. This IC learns how to use the product from the internal training team (who had to learn the product and create a class about it) and uses it to produce material for a manager and other teams. If we consider the whole of the user experience, many different people within the Enterprise use different aspects of the product and its services, but there isn’t a single user, and almost none of the varied users can be considered the customer.

Some interactions are clearly with the customer – such as sales pitches. But some are not so clear. Consider the following activities, which are often considered to be with users, but are really with customers: a focus group in which preferences, perceptions or pricing are discussed; a site visit in which everyone sits in a conference room and discusses a list of feature requests, “blue-ribbon panels” where execs are wined and dined and their opinions sought, satisfaction surveys sent to product purchasers. These are important activities, but just don’t deal with users.

On the other hand, the following activities are generally with users: a site visit spent observing people use your product in real-time to accomplish work, usability studies in which people who regularly use the product are asked to complete realistic tasks, quick on-line surveys that ask if the help you just read solved your problem, product logs.

One of the overlaps between PMs and UX professionals seems to be in the realm of who represents, understands, and speaks on behalf of users. UX professionals generally consider themselves to be concerned with users (and may present themselves as user advocates), but not necessarily with customers. PMs in this session

described themselves as being responsible for both users and customers. There is clearly overlap here.

PMs and UX The following points were generated in discussion during the session, which was composed mostly of active (and often over-worked) PMs.

Role of PMs in relation to UX The PMs in the group stressed how they felt responsible, and were often held accountable, for all aspects of product design and creation, including UX.

In their words:

• PM is “ultimately responsible for ALL of it” (that is, UX and anything else that ensures a quality product gets created and out the door)

• “PMs own the business process” [of which UX is just a part]

• “My ass is on the line if <insert any aspect of the product> fails”

• PM is sometimes also the Project Manager (and any other role that may be unfilled)

• PM drives change, oversees process • Business goals – may be spread over the country,

and may be different for different regions

Interactions between PMs and UX professionals In this session, many of the PMs seemed surprised at the range of UX professionals and the areas in which UX professionals considered themselves owners. At some companies, there may be no UX professionals or a limited number covering a sub-set of the UX skills, leaving the PM to cover everything left undone.

Even PMs from companies known to have relatively large UX departments, seemed to be doing a lot of activities that the UX professionals might consider within their domain and responsibility, or, alternatively, the PMs found the UX work to be less relevant to the product design and direction than the PM contribution.

PM comments:

• PM = Source of expertise of what user wants • PM is held responsible, but “someone else does

the work [on the UI]” • UX focuses on users – sometimes these may not

be the core market • UI group sometimes designs according to principles

which may not reflect biz goals • User stories & User goals – PMs can write • In an agile environment, or with short development

cycles, the PM may need to work with UX outside the regular dev cycle, how to deal with the following?: • Ethnographic studies • How to speed it [UX activities] up? • How to determine what should be long-range vs.

immediate • PM – hard to keep track of all of the UX skills • IA should be a resource to PMs • The creative group may need to parallel the PM

group • PMs decide what users to speak with • PMs would prefer that UI designers speak directly

with engineering and not go through the PM – both to speed up the process and to allow the PM to stay out of potential conflicts

• “PM defines what, UI person decides how”



• Sometimes management changes the product through the UI

PM Learnings About UX – in this session As a result of this session, some PMs felt they had learned the following about UX:

• It would be good and useful to observe user input sessions

• Going into the field provides perspectives on actual use (as opposed to focus groups or customer visits – where people often list their wants but offer no possibility of seeing the product in use)

• Time-motion studies can be valuable • Customers are not always users

The Final Word One possible summary of this session with PMs might be– “I didn’t know UX professionals did that!” This spookily matches a statement I’ve heard many UX professionals voice about PMs – “but they just don’t understand what we do!” (which may very well hide a different issue: “but I just don’t know what a PM does”). I suspect this lack of knowledge, on both parts, is leading to incredible missed opportunities.

It seems that the original question – “Who owns what?” – is the wrong question. So long as we discuss ownership, both PM and UX professionals are likely to insist they are the true owners of the UI – because the UI is the most evident proof of their work. And probably no-one will want to take ownership of the full user experience (as explored in Figure 1 and Error! Reference source not found.), because it covers too much.

I propose a different question. How about this for a follow-on session topic:

How to create a company that puts user experience at its core, where everyone (including PMs and UX professionals, but not limited to them) owns it and contributes to it in a coordinated and measurable fashion?

This of course means that the company will need to have some pretty clear definitions of user and user experience and what a contribution means and how to both coordinate and measure the contributions.

If PMs in this session are typical (and there’s every reason to believe they are), then the first step along this path – having a clear definition of users (as different from customers) and user experience, may be a big one.

Technology

P-Camp 2008 - PM & UX - Meghan Ede 2