Working together as PMs and Designers
In this article, I did an interview with one of the PMs that I work closely with on the Pages team at LinkedIn to better understand her day-to-day and how she perceives working with Designers. Special thanks to Julia Abelsky for sharing these words of wisdom and for continually being a great partner!
What does your day to day look like as a Product Manager (PM)?
As a PM, I work across three areas:
- Execution on projects — I work with engineering and other cross functional teams to ensure that we have committed to what we’re doing for the quarter (40% of time).
- Future ideation — I collaborate with Design, Data Science, and Business Operations to think about how to crystalize a roadmap beyond a strategy (40% of time).
- User engagement and research — I like to stay engaged with the Pages admin community to learn more about their use cases and needs by directly reaching out to them on LinkedIn. I also engage with our Product Marketing Managers, User Experience Researchers, and Product Operations Managers, to understand feedback that we are receiving (20% of time).
How do you like to partner with a Designer on work? How about UX Researchers?
A Designer is like the co-captain of your ship who brings in the blue sky vision and helps with thinking about how to tactically solve a problem. Designers help me think more about how opportunities can turn into a product. You want to understand how to solve things in the market against competitors, how to design unique solutions, how to test those concepts, and how to collaborate with engineering to build it. Working with Design does not equate to just creating screens, as that would be very limiting to their process and capabilities.
A Researcher helps tackle big problems that we don’t know how to wrap our minds around. Research is a fun experience where we spend time interviewing users, understanding their mental models, and determining the root of why they do something. These interviews really help us determine why we need to build something, for what purpose, and for whom. After we conduct the interviews, the Researcher does a readout. Those readouts can really influence what we create, the language of how we talk about users’ workflows, and ultimately what frameworks we develop. For example, recently our team did a Page admin segmentation research study by doing calls with admins to understand how different organizations’ teams manage/use a Page. This research really changed our way of thinking about Page admins.
When you have an ambiguous problem, how do you like to narrow that down?
Different design techniques help bring structure to an ambiguous problem. For example our team runs exercises like creating How Might We statements, running design brainstorming sessions, doing Crazy 8 sketches, conducting competitor analysis, and writing user stories. This helps provide more structure on a problem vs. relying only on quantitative data to provide solutions.
What is the value of the design process?
The design process makes you think more holistically and makes you fully understand the problem and opportunity before jumping into solutions. The implementation is generally focused on the solution, whereas design allows you to think and learn before you get there.
I’ve also learned more about the depth of the exploration and feedback process in design. Designers have a strong sense of resiliency and openness to approaching their work. Seeing it first hand after I had to present my Designer’s work one day in a review while she was out of the office, really helped me appreciate the importance of having a culture of giving honest feedback. It made me realize how important that was to achieve a goal as one team. It’s great to see how we push our ideas along and see how we move forward from there. I haven’t seen another function take feedback as fluidly as design does.
How do you like to stay involved in the design process?
I love to stay involved with the design process as much as possible. As a PM, I don’t want to be too prescriptive to the point where there’s no room for creativity. However, it is important to be looped in on critical decisions throughout the process. My involvement usually starts at the 0% point with a kickoff, then 25% point when Designers just start to think about the frameworks, then check in again at the 50% point to provide more clear direction, then at the 75% point is where we engage with other stakeholders, and finally at the 100% point when the designs are done and ready to handoff to engineering. I want the Designer to feel ownership of their work. It’s also important to help the Designer sync with others so we’re not wasting design cycles churning. Micromanaging design doesn’t work well for both sides. Working with the Designer in a collaborative model tends to work the best.
What are some attributes of strong designers?
For me it boils down to a few core skills:
- Communication — it helps to have strong skills with framing your design thinking and user needs. Then it’s important to be able to articulate and communicate with various levels of stakeholders. Having strong communication skills really help Designers excel in complex organizations like Linkedin.
- Prioritization — As a PM, we spend a lot of time thinking about what is a good MVP and how to unblock engineering. My expectation is Designers are also able to think through similar things. Being a strong Designer is having the confidence to challenge a PM on what they might think is a better MVP, but still having the ability to lean in quickly and change when necessary.
- Empathy — When building products, sometimes we boil it down to just a product or some screens. However, it’s a lot more than that. Designers are the voice of reason. They vouch for research and build empathy for the users. Instead of focusing on a solution, strong Designers help us think about the person and problem combined.
What are some things that designers should consider when working with a PM?
It helps for Designers to understand the incentive structures for PMs. PMs are measured by what they ship, product usage, etc. When a Designer aligns with the PM on these goals and understands what both are optimizing for, then collaboration becomes more effective. Something might have a certain impact, but this might not be super important to the flow or the experience. PMs are trained to be vocal, but that decisiveness doesn’t mean that they are always right. For Designers, it’s ok to push back on a PM’s assumptions and perspectives. It’s better than accepting a truth that you fundamentally disagree with.
What advice do you have for Designers who are not as confident with speaking up?
When pushing back, you don’t have to be super vocal. It could be as simple as framing a question a particular way or doing extra explorations to convince others of your perspective. Some techniques include:
- Designing negative scenarios — One thing I have seen work well is framing designs by playing devil’s advocate by showing the solution presented in a bad light. Sometimes thinking about the opposite scenario helps to challenge your way of thinking.
- Asking lots of questions — Sometimes using a statement might feel more threatening. However, framing it as a question feels more like genuine curiosity. For example, “Have we thought about x being a scenario?” This could change someone from feeling defensive to making it more collaborative.
- Escalating when stuck — It’s important to leverage escalations when you feel like you’re not being heard. That involves bringing in your manager or your manager’s manager. This can help you with backing up your perspective when convincing others.
How do you work with Designers after a product launches?
It’s always fun to loop Designers in on the final readout process. Designers really enjoy seeing how their design is performing with users in real life. Seeing the results of A/B tests help so we can learn what worked and what didn’t. This process helps both design and engineering calibrate their perceptions of their work. Seeing real time feedback on what was created helps you learn more about how to improve for the future.
As a PM, when something launches, you already begin thinking about the next project and what needs to happen. As a Designer, you might think about what was de-scoped as part of the launch. It helps to hold PMs accountable on what was agreed upon during the design process. Reminding the PM can help them think about what is needed as a fast-follow to help them better improve the experience. Usually the Designer is the only stakeholder that knows other potential solutions that could have been implemented.
What are some tips that you can give other PMs who are working with designers for the first time?
Building new relationships with Designers is important. Start with setting expectations on how you’d like to work with one another and how you’d like to give and get feedback. Figuring it out later can be a painful process. It’s important to write down notes about collaboration and action items. You want to create that sense of co-ownership from the start.
Secondly, it’s important to over involve your Designer at the start and then slowly pull them back from meetings when it makes sense. The best Designers have a strong sense of autonomy and understanding of perspectives from various stakeholders. It helps to give Designers time to think about the research, to thoroughly understand the problem they are trying to solve, and to think about what makes the most sense for a solution given constraints.
In Summary
I hope that you all enjoyed this brief interview with Julia Abelsky. One of the things she emphasized a lot is the value of collaboration between PM and Design. It’s critical for success on both sides.
What are some tips that you have found helpful working together as PMs and Designers? Would love to hear from others on this topic as well!
