UX to PM

Editor's Notes

• #2: Huge thanks to everyone for spending the evening with us! We’re going to have a conversation tonight about my story moving from being a UX Designer to becoming a Product Manager. But more than just my narrative, I want to apply a more generic lens of what it means to manage relationships and build influence in the workplace. But before we dive in, I want to begin with something I learned from some very smart UX Designers as they presented lunch and learns at Home Depot. I’m hoping that something about this talk has already spurred some questions in a few of your minds and I want to be 100% sure that none of those questions are left unanswered tonight. So please enter into the chat any burning questions you’ve brought with you tonight and while I won’t answer them right this second, I will make every attempt to weave them in where it makes the most sense.
• #3: Copy and paste any questions here!
• #4: These are the two primary questions that have been guiding my thinking and I would like to extend them to you all this evening, to ponder while we chat. Specifically in the vein of the second question, I would like to begin this presentation with a short activity! The goal of this activity to get us to each reflect on our own sphere of influence, as it stands today. To help us with this, we’re going to be engaging with a model called the Circle of Influence.
• #5: Some of you have probably seen versions of this before, it’s from Stephen Covey’s best-seller, and just as a note I’ll be including references to my sources in each slide (and yes I will share the slides after, so don’t worry about taking notes about specifically what’s already written). This is a simplified version of the model and just includes these two areas – distinguished by a spectrum of influence. In the middle are things or people you have some, or a lot, of influence over, and outside are the things/people you have little or no influence over. You’ll notice I’ve called out people and things, so those might help as you think about people you can influence as well as concrete or abstract things you have influence over. The activity we’re doing is to have each of you sketch out a version of this for yourself in your current role. So grab a piece of paper and something to draw with and we’ll take the next 3 or 4 minutes to draw a quick version of this for ourselves. Afterward we’ll briefly split into breakout rooms and share what we’ve drawn with 1 or 2 other people. Ready go! --- (Time reminder half-way through, when done have hosts split everyone into breakout rooms for 5 mins, bring everyone back, ask 1 or 2 people to share any insights they may have had while sharing and discussing) Okay I’m going to put a pin in this for now and we will revisit it later. But before we go on, I want to urge you to keep this conversational approach going. If you have questions or comments, enter them into the chat at any time, or just unmute and interrupt me. I prefer to have this as more of a dialogue than a monologue, so please jump in at any point.
• #6: Okay in order to attempt to build a shred of credibility, as well as let you see where I am coming from, I am going to give you a quick rundown of who I am and what led up to my jump to Product Management. My baby professional career began with a BFA in graphic design at Utah State University. So yes, I get to sit among my MBA-branded business peers and say I have an art degree! I was extremely fortunate to break into UX right out of graduation, because back in those days, if you knew your Gestalt principles and had a pulse, you could safely break into UX. And I definitely had one of those things. My first UX job was at a large government contractor where I worked on the most interesting projects I can never tell anyone about. In fact some of my work was so secret, even I didn’t know what it was (I wish I wasn’t serious). My next UX gig was at a much smaller Internet of Things company. There I worked on the experience of controlling thousands of network-enabled smart lights from a mobile device. That was certainly an interesting challenge. After that, I made my way to where I am now – Home Depot. Initially I joined the massive enterprise UX team, but after about a year I made the jump to product management and have spent the last 3 years in that role. The obvious next question is also the one I get most…
• #7: Everyone here who is working in UX has had a unique experience and so these points will resonate at varying levels, but the first reason was to get more exposure to the business. Truth be told, my entire UX career up until that point, it had been a constant battle to get a voice in most of the conversations that mattered. But to get into those business conversations I either needed to get an MBA or become a product manager. And one of those options is less expensive than the other. Now here I am, on year four of my crash course in business, with a design lens. The second reason, similar to the first, was that I came to realize I would often have more influence over the end-user’s experience as a PM, than a UX designer. Not only that, as a PM I had more influence into how involved my own UX designer could be. The third reason was that as a UXer I quickly realized my favorite part of the work was everything people-focused – the interviews, the collaborative design workshops, the relationships, etc. While many of those things are part of a UX designer’s job, they are much more front and center as a PM. We’ll be diving into this more next. But just to reiterate, this one is about influence and this one is about relationships. So we’re going to skip the first reason and focus on these two, starting with the focus on people.
• #8: To drive home the point of being a people-focused PM, and the importance of relationship management, I want to touch on a handful of the things I now do on a daily basis. You’ll notice right away that many of these things heavily overlap with UX roles, which is a great thing. However you will also notice how easily I can geek-out on these topics now that they are even more crucial to success in my role. Nice to haves vs sink or swim.
• #9: Facilitating Dialogue I cannot overstate the amount of time I spend planning for, participating in, and facilitating conversations. And to illustrate the difference between a planned or structured dialogue and its opposite, let’s quickly step through a fields of conversation model from Otto Scharmer. The first two fields we know all too well. Simply dumping information from one brain into another, downloading, and defending our opinion with unilateral conviction, debate. These two fields likely characterize the vast majority of our current interactions and sometimes that is okay. But when we’re trying to make important decisions, trying to tap into our collective creativity, or simply attempting to effectively collaborate, we need dialogue. Dialogue emerges when things like empathic listening, suspended judgment, and psychological safety become the norms that define a group. And as a PM I have an outsized impact on whether or not the conditions arise to support a dialogic environment. A strong relationship with each member of the team, as well as each stakeholder, is a prerequisite for this level of communication. And what dialogue gets you is a high-performing team. People feel free to share their ideas, even their half-baked ones, because the environment is safe to do so. You get higher levels of creativity and more innovation. You also achieve higher levels of engagement and work satisfaction. And at the end of the day it's simply how you converse as a team. Taking it a step further is field 4, which we won’t get into today. I’ll leave that for you to explore if you are interested.
• #10: Vision, Strategy, and Planning Effective dialogue and strong relationships set the stage for discussing personal and shared visions. Unfortunately, and predictably, ineffective dialogue and weak relationships hinder the process. Peter Senge from the MIT Sloan School of Management puts it this way… The better we get at understanding the personal visions of those we work with, the easier it becomes to uncover our collective shared vision. As that shared vision becomes clearer, we collaboratively identify the strategies which would support it, and plan on how we might move in the right direction. Getting the vision right is the most important step.
• #11: Fostering Collaboration This is already a running undercurrent in the previous points but it helps to call it out specifically, especially as dialogue, creating visions/strategies, etc. cannot be done in isolation While there are a lot of angles from which we could approach collaboration, I will just call out three. Thinking collaboratively reemphasizes the latent creativity in groups, which could not be tapped individually. Some ideas can only come to light through a psychologically safe collective, committed to a shared vision. Collaborative constructivism is just a fancy term for finding meaning together. Whether it’s exploring our personal and shared visions, or putting a lens on any of the smaller decisions we make along the way, the group is much more likely to be successful is we’re finding meaning in similar ways. Lastly this is really just about being intentional when we use competition. Sometimes blindly making everything a competition will do little more than destroy group trust and drive bad behavior. Conversely, aspects of collaboration can improve nearly every shared effort.
• #12: Building and Maintaining Alignment If I had to pick one thing PMs are most responsible for, it would be this. The strong relationships built through dialogue and collaboration pave the way for alignment to a shared vision. To put a definition on it, I’ll use one more Peter Senge quote… If the other elements are in play - if dialogue is the default mode of conversation, if the shared vision is committed to by all, and the team consistently leans into radical collaboration, this is the end result. A whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
• #14: Okay now that we’ve gone into excruciating detail around relationships and a focus on people, let’s revisit influence and how to increase the level of involvement from UX
• #15: It took a while, but I did say we'd get back to this Let's literally zoom in a bit and look at this in more detail
• #16: If I were to take a few minutes to fill this out from the perspective of past UX roles, here are a few of the things I would mention... Obviously the end-user experience, but also how they feel about whatever product I am providing them. I would also argue UX has a large part to play in how creative a team is. The way a UX designer works with their team can create an environment where they solely hold the keys of creativity or conversely one where the entire team is invited to unleash their creative potential. In regards to people, the product team (including product management and engineering, at the very least), stakeholders, and of course the end-users. This isn't meant to be exhaustive but it begins to get the point across. In the circle of concern there may be a few things and people like these. You can probably guess where I am going with this.
• #17: Now let's look at this same circle from the lens of a product manager We've already talked about some of these things, so it shouldn't be any surprise that I would extend the circle of influence to include all of this, by necessity. Higher level things might then begin to appear on the periphery. Now I want to be clear that neither of these circles of influence is inherently better than the other. Increased influence cuts both ways, in that now I spend much more of my time cultivating positive relationships and extending my circle of influence. And in order to increase the involvement of UX at the highest levels, I typically bring my UX designer with me when important decisions are being made. But, my UXer also needs heads-down design time, meaning we have to be aligned on where I will handle things and where she will be in the room, or take the lead. Basically it all circles back to my two initial questions...
• #18: And so these are really the most important questions. Regardless of whether it's UX, Product Management, or any other role you might take in the future, reflecting on the relationships and influence you would like to have can help guide you toward the right professional fit. For me, 3 years ago, that meant moving to product.
• #19: And one last thing just to be sure I adequately answer the question of “is product management right for me?” Here is my list of things to consider if you’re on the fence between remaining in UX or jumping to product You’ll spend much more time in the problem space, much less in the solution. Also even less being hands on in building the solution Paul Graham, Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule – 15 to 30 minute increments vs multi-hour heads-down time Some level of interest is necessary in both roles, but as a PM you’ll need to be able to speak to the business model and the technology nuances when your business/IT partners aren’t in the room My favorite PMs will step up and say “that’s on me” when things don’t go well, but step back and let others be in the spotlight when things do go well. Basically, you’re willing to lead without being a leader