Business: Product Management

Product sense. Product-minded. Product builder. These terms are often associated with our learnings as UX researchers in the field of enterprise software. The term product sense originated from the field of product management and refers to gaining a deep understanding of the product’s goals, business goals, and users to find opportunities to enhance the product experience.

As a UX researcher working within an embedded product team at an enterprise software company, I constantly collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders such as UX designers and product managers. Although we all have different job functions, we have a common North Star: building great products for our users. So what is product sense and how does it relate to UX research?

Product sense focuses on the intersection of the users, the design, and the business. Read More

As organizations become more customer obsessed or user centered, we are seeing greater specialization in the delivery of user experiences. We are also experiencing significant changes in how organizations are delivering user experiences. A role that has recently risen in importance and shares some overlap with User Experience is that of Product Management. Specialization and modern forms of project management are encouraging these changes.

Rather than following the traditional waterfall process of software-project management, more and teams are adopting agile methods of software development. For organizations who may still be at an early stage in their UX maturity and user-centered thinking, it is still quite common to have a single UX professional working with a standing team of generalist developers who divide their time across multiple projects. However, as agile methods have become more common and in today’s world of scrum teams and agile sprints, it has become necessary to consider more specialized roles. Read More

In an ever-changing field such as User Experience, it is sometimes good to step back from the whirlwind for a moment and get back to the basics. This is especially true today, when design trends are leaning more and more toward service design rather than product design. Often, users no longer want just a product. They want an entire ecosystem that supports and enhances their experience. Thus, they’ve raised the bar. Today, for companies to achieve their business goals, we need to meet users’ high expectations, which are higher than ever before. We need to deliver an ideal user experience.

In this column, I’ll discuss how User Experience and Product Management (PM) can work together to deliver ideal experiences and create empowered, successful, loyal users. Read More