In the software industry, we’re constantly trying to make order out of chaos. Teams design and build MVPs to gauge the market; organizations create verticals to channel resources to tackle emerging priorities; resources expand and contract to meet development needs. Herding cats is a conservative metaphor of our day-to-day life, especially in startups.
As we double down and pivot to get in front of what data tells us, we rely on each other to move through our ambiguous problem spaces towards the light of a solution.
User experience designers and researchers rely on product management to steer the ship in very explicit ways.
Clear and concise product briefs
Designers and researchers operate best when presented with clearly framed, user-centered opportunities to delight.
A problem statement can begin to unpack the job at hand, but it only does so much to provide human context — the more information added to the statement itself, the more difficult it becomes to parse and the notion of a concise statement becomes lost.
Enter the product brief, where the whole is most definitely greater than the sum of its parts. When I consult product managers about their briefs, I‘m clear about the expectations I have around the following elements:
- Problem statement: What’s the core of the problem at hand and why are we solving it now? How are users affected? What’s the business opportunity? Frame the project focus as succinctly as possible.
- Outcome statements: What do we know about our users in the context of this slice of our product? Are desired user outcomes understood well enough to frame up for UX designers to chase? IBM Hills are good examples of outcome statements.
- Business considerations: Are there legal or marketing requirements in play? (e.g. Must we avoid a specific type of push notification? Is there available consumer insight around a conversion approach? Is there an efficiency solution that must be included?)
- Technical considerations: Are there engineering requirements in play? (e.g. Structured or non-structured data? Security requires MFA to go live. Etc.)
- Clinic considerations: Does the clinic have a position on how this must be built to support our doctors? Are there licensing concerns?
- Accessibility considerations: What inclusion requirements for this project might reside outside of our current best practices?
- Instrumentation: What paths need to be tracked in order to measure outcomes? Do we need a new service or can we tweak something that currently exists? Instrumentation is critical for chasing outcomes, and not just producing output for stakeholders.
While the above seems rather comprehensive, the goal isn’t to spend an inordinate amount of time crafting a requirements document.
The information found within a brief should frame the engagement, and be no more than an artifact of a foray by product management into the problem space. A brief should inform the prioritization process itself, just as much as it directs team ideation for solving the problem once it has been prioritized.
You might ask: if a brief can inform teams within new areas of focus, how might it apply within an iterative approach? Let’s step through the scenarios:
- If you’re in a startup or a new side of the business producing a true MVP to test in market, it’s crucial to rally your team around the problem, potential user insights, and yes, the numerous XFT considerations in play. Perfect scenario for a brief.
- Once your service is in market, and you’ve identified new edges of the product to chase, briefs are useful to get laser focus with shifts in direction
- As you lead a team deep into a specific areas of the product, UXD&R relies more on measurements and findings of the previous sprint to inform focus than what’s can be found in a brief. Yet while iterating in a singular space, outlying areas that need comprehensive focus will become apparent. Once again, the perfect scenario for a brief.
While no brief will be able to cover the unexpected challenges that make themselves apparent between ideation and deployment, a well written brief will provide your UXers with clear framing of the most important project opportunities and constraints up-front, which is the secret sauce for initiating high-quality design thinking to reach design system components sooner than later.
A partner and sounding board
As the product manager, it’s been said that you’re the CEO of the EPD—you represent the business in the product space and serve as the lead on purchase or build decisions. You make the final call on project prioritization and time to task trade-offs. UXers welcome this relationship, but here’s a bit of insight from a design leader with 20+ years of experience in tech: if you don’t develop a strong relationship with your lead designer or researcher, good luck getting anything close to impactful work out of them and forget about getting it consistently.
Designers are intimately familiar with receiving pointed direction, as our work is constantly centered within initiative full of why and what answers, all prioritized externally. That said, the best designers won’t limit feature ideation to requirements outlined by the PM. Designers with a leadership gene will consistently iterate their vision through formative research and will often present their ideas conversationally prior to a formal presentation.
“A good PM will recognize their designer as not only a resource that makes the shiny-shiny, but as an intellectual property partner who has an overlapping, yet explicitly focused concern on the people who use their product.”
The best UXers understand how PMs maintain product vision and the goals of the business, providing the primary context of their UCD focus. AND UXers focus more deeply on serving the needs of actual users though precise execution, concerned with whether or not the product experience will mesh with their mental model of the domain.
As the PM sweats out the details of timing, resources, 3rd party vendors, data feeds, analytics, GTM strategy, etc., we dig in deep with researchers, chasing down user insights, and begin to formulate our own vision for how to move the product forward.
My advice: Make yourself open and available to your UXers. Get coffee each morning, take weekly meetings outside of the office, get beyond the here and now, and discuss what your problem space might look like three, six, twelve months out.
This is the blueprint for creating a thriving product culture, and eventually, a user experience that works for everyone.
An accessible and collaborative roadmap
Whether you’re defining an early MVP or iterating within a problem space, a road map is crucial to planning, communicating upward to executives, and outward with your team. To many UXers a product roadmap is as tangible as ones medical record; it’s referred to often, but rarely does one get to see what’s in it.
“Roadmaps are evidence of strategy. Not a list of features…” – Steve Johnson
As a product manager, you need to manage your top-down initiatives and priority stack in a way that highlights your strategy moving forward. Why not make that spot available to your team?
Many platforms suffice, but I’ve become a fan of Asana, as it allows for custom columns, subtasks, milestones, and assigned leads along with all of its communication features. UXers can manage similar boards to give additional insight into how they’re contributing to the product moving forward:
- Between top-down projects and/or time-boxed efforts, designers can identify and execute against micro to macro feature ideas
- Researchers can expose study timing, findings, and insights to keep the work public and constantly communicating outward
Invite your UXers to recurring roadmap meetings to review all boards in play and you’ll immediately discover a more motivated team. While collaborative prioritization fosters an open culture and better teamwork, it does something else that’s extremely vital for the PM — it establishes a living portal for executives to view progress against their own goals and allows the PM to rapidly re-address timing and outcome priorities as necessary.
Win-win.
I’m the Head of UX Design and Research at 98point6, a MedTech company making primary care accessible to the masses. We’re hiring UXD&R managers, designers, researchers, and a conversational UI writer. More info is available at 98point6.com.
