Product Design vs Product Management and Why They Need to Join Forces

There is no single recipe for creating a development team. Available resources limit the size of the team, and the ambitions and goals of the product determine which roles will be prioritized. As a result, in some teams, the roles of product manager and product designer may be combined in one person. Others may outsource product design to an agency, or it may be a startup with a developer, CEO, and designer.

On the other hand, large products may have a large product management team and a separate product design team. Knowing the difference between them is key to choosing the team model that best suits your product.

What is Product Management?

When a product succeeds, it's because all team members did everything required. When a product fails, the product manager is to blame. 

This is a quote from Marty Cagan's book "Inspired: How to Create Tech Products that Customers Love", and it couldn't be more accurate.

One definition of product management is "creating a product that meets customer needs and aligning it with the business strategy." If product design can be illustrated in a case study on Behance without ever being presented in the real world, a product management case cannot exist "in a vacuum." Product managers must work with marketing and sales departments, study the market, and prepare solutions that benefit both customers and the business.

Product management is often confused with project management. However, to become a product manager, a project manager needs additional training. Since they must be the link between designers, engineers, and other team members, basic knowledge of programming, accounting, product development process, and design thinking principles is mandatory. And this list is far from complete.

According to Marty Cagan, product manager expertise is based on four pillars of deep knowledge:

• Customer. Knowing how your customers live, think, and interact with the product is very important for a product manager. It is impossible to create a good product without understanding user needs.
• Data. The ability to collect, read, and analyze data is what allows decisions to be made based on proven hypotheses, rather than just following gut feelings. With the vast amount of data available, a good understanding is required to navigate the ocean of KPIs and not be misled by vanity metrics.
• Your Business. If the previous pillars are shared by both product managers and product designers, deep knowledge of the business is the job of product managers. They must know their product's place in the business and keep in mind all stakeholders, both internal and external.
• Your Market and Industry. To make a product successful on the market, a product manager must be an expert in the industry, track competitors' actions, and their strengths and weaknesses. To become a leader in a competitive market, they must know the industry well.

Product management involves working on the product development strategy, roadmap, product vision, product-market fit, etc.

Questions product managers face:

• How can we improve customer churn rates?
• What changes should we make to our roadmap?
• What are the priorities in product development?
• What is product design?

Product design is the process of developing a user-friendly product that meets customer needs by identifying user problems and finding creative solutions to those problems.

For people not involved in product design, the difference between product designers and UX designers seems blurred. However, we insist that they are not the same. Product design involves a more holistic view of user experience and design. It doesn't end after the product launch and goes through many stages of testing, iteration, and evolution as opportunities for improvement arise.

Product Design Process

So, what does product design mean in practice? It is an iterative process that goes through various stages and follows a cycle. 

The religion of product designers is design thinking. Today this term is applied (almost) to everything - from social work to personal development. I cannot say how universal this concept is, but in product design it is absolutely essential. Here are the main stages of design thinking:

• Empathize with users/customers. Designers try to understand what they feel, think, and need. Talk to them, observe them, put yourself in their shoes. (Yes, this happens even before studying competitors.)
• Define the problem. What is their need? The need must be defined by the users themselves, not by the desire to fit a solution that designers already have in mind.
• Ideate. Once the problem is defined, designers can start looking for a solution. For best results at this stage, it is recommended to use integrative thinking (that which goes beyond ordinary rational thinking) and involve people from different backgrounds in collaboration.
• Prototype. It is important that the idea implementation does not reach perfection. The prototype should be sufficient to pass testing. Overdoing it means wasting time in case of failure in the next stage.
• Test. This is the moment of truth. The prototype should be tested, preferably on the same users that designers empathized with at the beginning. If the prototype does not solve the problem defined in stage 3, then the designer goes back to stage 1 and starts all over again.

The most important characteristic of design thinking is the iterative nature of the process.

Every product goes through a series of iterations, and the development team must understand this. To successfully apply design thinking, designers must have a certain level of optimism and experimentation in order to accept the fact that ideas need to be rethought and the project needs another iteration.

To see how these principles are used in product design, check out some examples of design thinking.

Questions product designers face:

• How to improve user flow?
• Which moments cause the most difficulty for users?
• What can be done to help users achieve their goals faster?

What Do Product Design and Product Management Have in Common?

Customer Focus
Getting to know users should not be the responsibility of only one person. Ideally, every team member should be familiar with the customer profile and their needs. For designers and product managers, this is absolutely necessary.

Testing and Iteration
Iterative design is the key to success, and a product can only succeed when both the product manager and the product designer understand this. If either of them relies solely on their intuition, trying to launch the product too quickly, the entire project is at risk of failure. Every idea must be tested, and the team must be ready to change everything until they achieve the best result for the customer and the business.

Research-Based Decisions
Both product managers and product designers must conduct research, analyze results, and avoid bias. For example, we always strive to ensure that our clients decide on a redesign not simply because "they want something new," but because an audit showed that the existing design is not effective enough.

Summary

Both product management and product design aim to create great products that solve user problems and drive business growth. The tools used by product managers are more related to business goals, while product designers primarily focus on users and how to make the product as user-friendly as possible.

These are two crucial members of the product team. In our work, we insist on close collaboration between our product designers and product managers on the client side. We don't just receive briefs and deliver the final result. Instead, we hold regular meetings, discuss all ideas together, and jointly make important product decisions.

Many startups can get by with a couple of engineers/founders, and bring in a designer only when the product has already taken shape and needs a visual interface. However, we recommend involving a designer early on, because design thinking is not something that can be applied on top of a finished product.