I’m so glad I read this. Not only it illuminates how product managers think and this explains some behavior but it also tells me that product managers have absolutely no understanding of what designers do. and the broad spectrum of design which includes a lot more than UX.

And it explains ALOT about the tension between people who do design as a verb rather than a bunch of UX screen order filling like waitresses at a diner. Because I can guarantee you anyone who does design as a verb would feel marginalized and undervalued in a place that ran their product management like this.
This may be the way product management has been done for decades but I hope it doesn’t stay this way for a lot of reasons. But mostly so we can get beyond creating products that neither are valued or value humanity.
Design is a future oriented practice it’s job is to bring the deep understanding of humanity into the concrete space of product, platform and services. Design Research (which isn’t even mentioned) is a rigorous process that distills and translates ideas, desires, culture and value into concrete features and capabilities to provide confidence in design direction. We do this through co-participatory design and engagement with people (NOT only customers because you are building for people you don’t know yet unless you don’t plan on growing) repeatedly throughout an iterative process. That is a design methodology. We do this with engineers and data scientists and other disciplines and we do it in an accelerated way to build small scale first to eliminate wrong choices and then move on to scaling.
Leveraging the full spectrum of design beyond UX screens (or whatever imagined output; I’m not quite sure what those lone UX designers are doing out there on a island) makes better products. Period.
When I started as a design leader I’ve always been intrigued why design is not being actually used in the product space I mean you can tell it in the products launched. Except for a few places who are not set up like the diagrams above Spotify, Airbnb to name a few, design is rarely leveraged.
And in fact the way I lead design teams would never work in this structure because it marginalizes the power of design.


So now I know. Illuminating. Or maybe I’m reading wrong and I certainly could be missing something because product management has always been a fuzzy topic for me because I can’t trace it’s lineage to rigorous, scientific method like I can with tech and design. I’m trying to figure out what’s the underlying expertise that product managers are to be relied upon. It’s been different in different places I’ve worked. I love the diagram that breaks down skills and attributes that was illuminating as well though the org structures are a bit confusing because I’m trying to see where actual people and customers fit into this explanation.
Where is design, design research and design strategy is all about people is product all about product? Which seems strange to me to.
My comments are not so much a reaction to this article as it is a reaction to product management philosophy.
Which explains why human centered design isn’t getting into products these days.