{"id":184112,"date":"2016-01-28T14:16:51","date_gmt":"2016-01-28T14:16:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.rm.gfolkdev.net\/?p=184112"},"modified":"2023-07-12T22:31:10","modified_gmt":"2023-07-12T22:31:10","slug":"product-teams-who-does-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rosenfeldmedia.com\/product-teams-who-does-what\/","title":{"rendered":"Product Teams – Who Does What?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When we started talking about putting on the <\/span>PM + UX Conference<\/span><\/a>, the first thing we asked was, \u201cWhat sorts of things should we talk about?\u201d Since the folks at <\/span>Rosenfeld Media<\/span><\/a> are, not surprisingly, extremely user-centered, the obvious answer was, \u201cWe\u2019re not sure. How about we do some research and find out what questions our attendees might have?\u201d So we did. <\/span><\/p>\n

The most interesting thing to me was that a lot of the questions people asked boiled down to \u201cWho does what on a product team?\u201d<\/b> This was curious. I mean, we\u2019re all working on product teams or we\u2019ve worked on them in the past, right? Shouldn\u2019t we know what our jobs are? Shouldn\u2019t we know what everybody else is doing? Well, yes! We should! And yet\u2026 when I started to dig around and have conversations with people, I got very, very different answers about how things really worked. <\/span><\/p>\n

That was odd. <\/span>It turned out that, although we all have job titles like Product Manager or UX Designer, many of us have very different ideas about what it is that we\u2019re supposed to actually do all day.<\/b> Do designers talk to customers? What about PMs? Who decides what features go into a product? Who makes wireframes? Does anybody do usability testing? If not, could they please start? <\/span><\/p>\n

Like any good team faced with more questions than they started with, we did some more research. Ok, first we had a couple of stiff drinks. Then we did some more research. I was volunteered to lead the way. <\/span><\/p>\n

The Research Methodology<\/span><\/h2>\n

I wanted to make sure that we hadn\u2019t gotten weird data or misinterpreted the questions being asked- after all, it was a survey – so I conducted several qualitative interviews with PMs and UX designers in various sized organizations. I asked about what PMs and UX designers did at their companies. Incidentally, I also got a lot of \u201cbut the way we SHOULD do it is\u2026\u201d answers, but I was focused on reality for the moment. And reality seemed just as confused as the survey results. <\/span><\/p>\n

After talking to a dozen or so people, I decided I wanted to collect exactly what tasks were performed at different companies so that we could see how much overlap existed. To get as many data points as possible, I sent out a very simple survey asking people what their role was, which tasks they thought were performed by UX Designers and which tasks they thought were performed by PMs. <\/span><\/p>\n

I got dozens of responses from people on different product teams\u2013mostly UX, PM, and researchers\u2013and even some engineers, marketers, founders and managers. Of these responses, I got <\/span>hundreds <\/span><\/i>of different things that are being done by product teams.I am not exaggerating. It seems that PMs and designers are performing a dizzying array of tasks from generative research to making roadmaps to managing stakeholders to visual design. <\/span><\/p>\n

I got curious. Who on these teams are doing all of these things? Seriously, most product teams just aren\u2019t that big, so how do they get hundreds of things done? Who\u2019s got that kind of time?? I narrowed down all the responses by deduplicating things that were similar. I picked the things that were mentioned the most, narrowed it down to 73 discrete tasks or processes\u2013which is still a LOT of things for a team to be doing. <\/span><\/p>\n

Next, I did a card sort: I asked people to review each task and tell me whether it was mostly done by designers, mostly by PMs, done about equally, or generally done by nobody or somebody besides these. I also said you could make your own categories for things that didn\u2019t fit. <\/span><\/p>\n

I ran the card sort remotely using <\/span>OptimalSort<\/span><\/a>, which was handy, since that meant that I could gather a lot more input than if I\u2019d had to travel around with a set of index cards and watch each person do the sort. It also made it a lot easier to categorize, and you\u2019ll see in just one second why that was important. <\/span><\/p>\n

The Research Results<\/span><\/h2>\n

82 of you weighed in with how things worked at your company. And, surprise surprise, there was virtually no agreement. I mean, there were a few similarities. Everybody agreed that visual design was done by someone in the design department (except for those of you who said it was done by outside people or people in marketing). And almost everybody agreed that roadmaps were made by PMs. Or by execs. Or by managers. Or by someone else. <\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, and nobody agreed about who was supposed to do user research, except that a lot of people made a category called something like \u201cthings we aren\u2019t doing enough of\u201d and stuck user research into it. So, that was fun. <\/span><\/p>\n

Here are a few of the things people actually agreed on mostly.<\/b><\/p>\n

What Are Designers Doing? <\/span><\/h3>\n

Interestingly, there was far more agreement about what designers do than about what product managers do across companies.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"the<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Visual Design<\/span><\/h4>\n

The most agreed upon tasks were things like visual design, design specs and style guides, image manipulation, illustration, and branding. Almost everybody agreed that these were mostly done by designers. <\/span><\/p>\n

The unfortunate part about this particular agreement is that, while it\u2019s true that these are more \u201cdesign\u201d tasks than they are \u201cproduct management\u201d tasks, it tends to confirm the idea that many organizations still see design as limited to visual design.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Visual<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Interaction Design<\/span><\/h4>\n

It has \u201cdesign\u201d right there in the title, but 10% of the respondents said that interaction design is done equally by product managers and designers, and one sad person said that it\u2019s not being done at all. <\/span><\/p>\n

Other Mostly Design Tasks<\/span><\/h4>\n

Other tasks that were mostly done by designers were what you might expect:<\/span><\/p>\n