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How Product + Design Work Together To Build ‘A Better Future’

3 Tips from Jared Spool (Strategic UX) and Roman Pichler (Product)

Compared with other software development disciplines, product management and user experience (UX) design are still pretty young professions. That said, they’re maturing rapidly and growing more specialized every day. As their evolution continues, it isn’t always clear who’s responsible for what on a product team and how best they can work together (we offered guidance on this topic in a post last year). Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that UX designers and product managers seem to get in each other’s way on the road to success.

This post canvasses the views that Roman Pichler (PM) and Jared Spool (UX) recently shared in consecutive podcast episodes of Product Momentum. What’s most intriguing about both conversations is how they each arrive at the same desired outcome – improving the lives of end users – despite taking parallel paths.

Jared calls that desired outcome a better future, while Roman describes it as the positive change a product should create. But both agree that whatever the solution, it’s less about building shiny new features or making things look pretty (i.e., outputs). Outcomes always trump the digital knickknacks we create along the way.

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Our Practiced Approach to Problem-Solving in UX Dynamics

The ITX User Experience (UX) team has grown steadily in recent years, not only in number, but also in breadth and depth of expertise. It’s a growth that reflects the continued recognition of the value of UX, and in turn, the investment businesses are making in UX, including research and discovery.

As we have grown, so too has the need to evolve our teams’ norms and practices. More people mean more experiences to learn from, which requires more time that we required to share and discuss our work. This post zeroes in this one area that required improvement – our Design collaboration meetings.

 

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Bridging the Gap: Highlights from ITX’s 2nd Annual Product + Design Conference

ITX hosted its 2nd Annual Product + Design Conference on June 22-23 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel Ballroom in downtown Rochester. The 2023 event’s 225+ Keynote Day attendees included every fashion of product maker and leader.

They may have entered the conference as product managers, designers, engineers, QA specialists, and content strategists. But they exited as members of a product team – collectively responsible for solving one shared problem: how do we improve the lives of our users

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From Product Strategy to Roadmaps and Release Plans

Illustration showcasing how a Product managers starts out with a product strategy and ends up going through a product road map to end up in a product release.

In the Planning Stage, look for the ITX innovation lead to guide the product team from Vision to Strategy to Roadmap. In our recent post, we explained that Vision represents a desired future state. Strategy explains how you’ll get there, and Roadmap lists the mile markers along the journey. In this post, we examine the innovation lead’s role in navigating that path.

Building software isn’t about the features you add – the bells and whistles. It’s about helping your end users be more successful. Any notion that a product with more features is by definition better than a product with fewer features is a misguided one.

Innovation leads help their clients and teams discover the difference between adding features for features’ sake and adding features that solve problems for users and create business value for clients.

Our journey starts with Vision, which directs everyone’s effort and investment toward making users more successful. In addition to vision statement – a declaration of objective – innovation leads help teams strategically derive two additional artifacts: the product strategy and the product roadmap.

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Illustration showcasing how a Product managers starts out with a product strategy and ends up going through a product road map to end up in a product release.

Product + Design: Collaborative Best Practices That Deliver Transformative Results

Product manager and UX designer working together

A discussion of UX Design and Product Manager roles, best practices for working collaboratively, and the transformative outcomes to be realized

Not long ago, Jesse James Garrett shared his concern over persistent conversations around “the differences between design and product and the antagonisms they sometimes provoke.”In this post, we – 1. Explore the product and design roles, pointing out the differences and embracing the similarities; 2. Identify 5 best practices to exploit the tension and avoid the antagonism; 3. Realize the transformative outcomes that can result when UX + Product join forces.

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Product manager and UX designer working together

Why Adopting a Diverse and Inclusive Mindset Matters in Your Product Development Process

Whether you’re building products for hundreds, thousands, or millions of individuals, design that provides as many points of access as you have users is no longer a nice-to-have. For reasons based not only in social responsibility but in sound business management, inclusive design is a must. And embedding it into our everyday ways of working begins with the designers and design teams whose duty it is to carry the banner forward.

Over the past few years, the UX design team at ITX started thinking about adopting a more inclusive lens in our work and soon came to realize why it was so important to us as designers, but also as human beings.

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