https://uxdesign.cc/product-and-design-who-does-what-5f5913ad2b91
“There are no exclusive areas” seems like a great learning from all this. Collaborate. Cooperate. Learn to receive and give feedback. Learn to give space to everyone to join in and add value.
There is a lot of literature trying to explain the differences between Product Management and Design, willing to help on how to collaborate better between teams and giving advice on how to tackle friction between both. Despite all that, we found ourselves facing relationship problems between these teams.
We knew from our results in 360 evals that there was a feeling of uneasiness when coming to the relationship between Product and Design. We are a big team formed by more than 35 professionals amongst Design (UX, UI, Research) and Product. Therefore, we really needed to address this situation.
In order to solve this problem, we decided to run a big-room retrospective with everyone included. It was run by one of our Tech Leads (so that it was someone who does not belong to either Product or Design) who also happens to be an excellent scrum master and facilitator.
Many topics arose during the session. We classified and grouped all of them to then realize there were 2 main ones. One was that our current Way of Working (WOW) was not working for us, and the other was that the Roles of one Product and Design were not clear.
Redefining our WoW was done as a separate initiative. For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on the second one: defining the roles of Design and Product in our company.
Each team identified the tasks and responsibilities that each product manager and designer was doing at their own squad. No surprises that some of them differ really from one squad to another.
Then, we discussed together these results within our own groups. There was a session for Design to align tasks, responsibilities and role, and the same thing for Product. We found out that even the mission for each group was not clear, and there was a real clash between both!
Therefore, we realized we needed to agree on a Product and Design mission that worked for our company.
We decided to use the golden circle model to create each group mission. And we ended up with these:
Design ensures the best user experience, identifying and understanding user needs. It explores and ideates solutions that meet product vision, business needs and tech requirements by designing a consistent and scalable digital experience.