Summary: A survey people in user experience and product management shows that these professionals disagree on who should be responsible for many key tasks, like doing discoveries and early design.
Over the years, we have encountered scores of cases where it was unclear whether a task or deliverable was the responsibility of product management (PM) or user experience (UX). As UXers, we have often thought that the UX roles were not defined well enough to be understandable by UX professionals or by people in product development, and that caused misunderstanding in responsibilities. We’ve also heard my PM friends complain about the ambiguity of a UX job and how UX professionals do things that are PMs’ responsibility.
To understand how user experience professionals and product managers see their roles and how the roles relate to one another, we conducted a survey looking at PMs’ and UXers’ expectations about who should be responsible for various common activities related to these professions. As you will see in the detailed data charts, we found many cases where UX and PM professionals disagreed about who is supposed to do what. Or, for a summary of our findings, you can always jump directly to the conclusion .
Our Research
Our survey of UX and PM professionals aimed to answer these questions: