AMA: IBM Product Management , Jacqueline Porter on Product and Design Alignment

One of the highest leverage relationships a Product Manager can have is with their designer. Specifically, it is the dyads responsibility to find l best way to partner that use each others strengths to the fullest. This means you will want to tailor the roles and responsibilities based on the individuals not just the title. For example, I have had very customer and research minded designers on staff, in this case as a PM I may take a back seat to driving user interviews and customer relations in ...Read More

My favorite way to think about shipping fast is the cost we will incur needing to redo something if it doesn’t work or fails to deliver on the promised outcomes. By focusing on results that are expected to be rendered from shipping a product it becomes clear that what PM needs to deliver are positive outcomes for users and not just putting code into production. When that shift happens it becomes easier to have the discussion with the business on “do we just want this in the public domain or are ...Read More

MVPs are really only as good as the user problem they are trying to solve. Design is a critical piece in defining that how to solve the user problem in the least friction way while considering the end to end journey of that user. An MVP is actually not viable if people are unable to use it. I have always built the first iteration of products with the following questions in mind: Are we solving a known and real pain point for the user that is high severity or is this a nice to have/cool feature? ...Read More

Product is often responsible for the market and commercial success of a product capability while design is focused on designing with standards and usability. A case where a Product Manager would be heavily weighted in a design decision is often around how something is designed impacts the ability to discover, use, and transact on a product. Design can then revise mock ups and prototypes knowing that PM owns these areas. In terms of how to effectively establish these boundaries, I recommend two t ...Read More

Some of my favorite tangible metrics that can be shared across Product and Design: Time to value - time it takes to complete the action in product Retained users - number of users that stay WoW, MoM and YoY Support tickets for unusable or unclear features - this is often a more manual reporting but tracking how many support tickets come in asking “how do I this?” Or “This seems broken.” Are great areas for improvement to the product Across the business I like to see NPS or CSAT measured and then ...Read More

A value I hold is that more voices early on ensures you are optimizing for a high fidelity product or result without needing to build new context or change gears because a perspective was missing. As a PM and PM leader the most important counterpart voices in your product roadmap or vision are Design and Go To Market teams (marketing and sales). Design ultimately helps out the PM problems to solve and capabilities into focus by adding UX context and product specification point of views. By havin ...Read More