Christian Crumlish

User experience designers and researchers are wrestling with product management--as a peer discipline, a job title, a future career--or simply wondering exactly what it entails. In Product Management for UX People, Christian Crumlish demystifies product management for UX practitioners who want to understand, partner with, and even become product managers.

From Designing to Thriving in a Product World

Product Management for UX People

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When asked who gets this value, he said, "I think people get confused by adding financial metrics as value metrics. Some of those are necessary, but not sufficient, and some are pure garbage. No true value is created by just financial and growth metrics; in fact, we now know there are serious unintended Consequences if you are focused only on them. Nothing beats staying focused on true value to your customer-everyone wins!"

The product manager is responsible for value, through the coordination and delivery of customer experiences, and for making sure that the experience being delivered to customers (and other stakeholders) provides enough value to be “hired” by the user and developed as a sustainable concern, ideally in service of a broader vision.

in what sense? It’s a broad goal. LinkedIn product lead and social change evangelist B. Pagels-Minor suggested at least one dimension of this: “Something the user values and repeatedly uses.” In addition to that, for a system of any kind, business or otherwise, to become sustainable, it needs to find repeatable cycles of inputs and outcomes that literally keep the system going. Some of the inputs, usually those related to people or money, need to be at least steady and consistent, if not growing, Whatever you’re building has to keep these cycles flowing.

Loving the potter analogy + 'the substance of the experience' phrase :))))))))

For UX designers, the material you work with is the substance of the experience: the words (copy), the visual metaphors, the interactions, and the broader experience. Just as a potter develops a subtle and sophisticated feel for the texture, granularity, and performative properties of their clay, a UX practitioner develops a similar feel for the digital software materials with which they craft affordances.

For product managers, in a very real sense, the material you work with is this welter of data (alongside qualitative signals, of course), which has its own texture, granularity, and informative properties. It requires deep immersion for sustained periods to develop the necessary feel for your own product’s data.

PMs don’t have a monopoly on decision-making at all, but at the same time, they make more decisions per hour than any of those other roles.

One of the hardest things about taking on the mantle of decision-making is recognizing that it’s impossible for all your decisions to be correct. You have to make peace with the fact that you will get some things wrong. Inevitably, you will make decisions that don’t pan out, or decisions that make it clear another choice would have been better. As Clement Kao, co-founder of Product Manager HQ, said, “When you don’t make a decision, you’ve actually ‘made the decision to delay.’ Many entry-level PMs assume ‘If I haven’t decided yet, then it doesn’t count against me,’ but putting off a decision is itself a hidden decision with its own consequences.”

Tbh because people forget. :) Asynchronous communication!!!!

Also, remember, engineers are makers. Unless they are managers themselves (in which case they are your adjacent colleagues in many things), they are creators who benefit from large stretches of uninterrupted time in which they can summon up complex mental models of the problem, solution, algorithm, or logical issue they are working through.

For this reason, try not to harry engineers with micro-interruptions, but instead focus your communication, feedback, and direction into asynchronous written formats that the developers can review when it suits them and the regular cadences of Agile scrum ritual.

…if people want something badly enough, they will crawl through glass to get it. This does not mean that lining your entranceway with broken glass is a great user experience. It means that what you are offering meets people's needs to such an extent that they will put up with a subpar experience to get it. 

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