Behind the Titles: Demystifying and Competing with the Perceived Gap Between PM’s and Designers
Taking a look at a brief history of product design, PMs, and how the evolution led to design as a misunderstood product outlier.
A Brief History of Each Role
Product managers were a function of marketing
PMs inched towards tech by first entering the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) world. Their original role, and the majority of PMs in FMCG today, was part of the marketing function. PMs focused on understanding customer needs, figuring out how to solve them, and then applying them to a marketing strategy.
Their key metrics were sales and profits. However, due to the slow-moving nature of FMCG’s development and production of new products, they focused on the “final three p’s”: price, place, and promotion*. Similarly, they may have used Bob Lauterborn's four Cs: commodity, cost, communication, and channel.
*This model is known as the “4 Ps”, also known as the “Marketing Mix”. While the origin of the “4 Ps” can be traced back to the late 1940s, it is widely accredited to E. Jerome McCarthy, who standardized what elements should be included within the marketing mix, in the 1960s. Philip Kotler, often referred to as “The Father of Modern Marketing” popularized this approach.
Product management increasingly became a marketing communications role focused on packaging, pricing, promotions, brand marketing, etc.
It was only when the tech world brought product development back to the center of the product management role that it grew towards the role we know today. The separation between the development and production of a product was untenable in tech, as these new tech companies were inventing new industries that required validation beyond the packaging and pricing of a commodity to succeed.
PMs then moved towards understanding customers’ needs to align the product development with them. Once product development was hit with the agile manifesto, it profoundly changed how product managers and engineers worked individually and collaboratively for the first time.
“Scrum invented the role of the Product Owner, but really all agile methods embraced communication between the Product Management role and the Engineers as the best method to figure out how to build the best solution to a customer problem.” — History and Evolution of Product Management, Mind the Product.
Product design is an outgrowth of industrial design
According to the Industrial Designers Society of America, “Industrial design is the professional practice of designing products used by millions of people worldwide every day.”
Before the mass-production era of manufacturing, most products were built by hand, meaning there were fewer available and higher costs. Once the industrialization of manufacturing enabled mass production to be inexpensive, more people were able to afford to purchase new products.
This led to manufacturers enlisting the help of industrial designers to create products that were both functional and aesthetically pleasing to sell their products.
Over time, a subset of industrial design evolved into its own category: product design. Industrial design implies the use of physical products such as appliances or furniture, whereas, in contrast, product design can refer to any product, including digital and virtual products, or what we all know and love today, software applications (SaaS)
ProductPlan provided the above information on The History of Product Design.
Once the industry began to move into a digital sphere, birthing tech like Google, Apple, and eventually MySpace, we saw the rise of UX design as websites slowly morphed into web apps; people moved away from IA and towards Interaction Design.
At this time, more nuances were introduced to visual design (like improved CSS browser support); this began to move beyond what web designers and visual designers were capable of at the time, opening the door for traditional graphic designers who focused on visual design. As websites became more complicated, companies had to start solving for those experiences.
As web capabilities grew, we saw large-scale sites for the first time. This raised questions about how to structure those sites, how users would navigate around them, and how they would choose to interact with components on the page, like buttons or forms. This is where information architecture, interaction design, user research, and usability engineering came into play.
Product Design and Product Management Today
There is a thin line between our ownership
There is a thin line of separation between product design and product manager responsibilities. We both approach feature initiatives and design projects with our process defined by
- Discovery
- Planning
- Data (measuring success, current standing, etc.)
- User research
- Defining the end-user experience or result
- Implementation
- Testing
- Follow-ups to evaluate and iterate
As many designers have noted, we’ve found ourselves at odds with the mechanics of product orgs today. As the role of product management evolved over time, they began to take on more and more of the responsibilities human-centered designers, interaction designers, and user researchers owned.
As that became increasingly common, it became more challenging for outsiders, and in some instances even those closest to the work, to see the value of design compared to product managers and engineers.
The only standout factor was the ability to design. The visual understanding of design began to segment the function further.
For some product designers, we still own that process
Many companies today understand the role of design in an organization and utilize the design team to its full potential. They provide clarity and education to employees outside of the product about how design drives their initiatives and what each pillar owns.
In other instances, designers still own that process but do not receive recognition or acknowledgment for their attributions. This is due to the well-understood nature of a PM and an engineer, making it simple for employees further away from the product to assume role ownership.
The PM is seen as the captain who steers the ship, the innovator and provider who brings these features to life. The engineers are seen as the ones who build the boat; the captain would not have a ship to steer if it didn’t exist to launch, and the engineers wouldn’t need to build a boat if there weren’t a captain to guide it.
But who the hell designed the boat?
If the helm is installed incorrectly, the boat won't steer, so how do the shipbuilders know what it looks like and how to build it? What if the captain manning the ship doesn’t know how to use a helm? What If the captain is used to a different set of controls? How do they know the implications of using the helm incorrectly? Does the boat sink?
The boat might be built to get you from point A to point B with a captain to guide it and all the features you wanted, like a kitchen and bed to sleep on, but what if the way those features were implemented onto the boat were wrong and unusable?
It’s more than the look of your helm; it’s the why and how behind building it and the tools to enable the captain to use it with ease and not, ya know, crashing the boat.
Basically, why has design been reduced to visuals, and why has product management taken the spotlight of product leadership and process?
Does the Word “Design” Affect How We’re Perceived?
In my opinion, yes.
Using different words for similar functions, such as “product designers” and “product managers,” can have significant implications. The choice of titles can influence perceptions, expectations, and the perceived value of individuals within an organization or industry.
The titles imply different responsibilities, even if the work is similar. Product managers are often associated with decision-making, strategy, and overall project management. In contrast, product designers may be seen as focusing more on the creative and visual aspects.
In addition to that, if a title suggests a more strategic or leadership-oriented role, it might be perceived as having a more significant impact on the success of the overall product or company.
Manager versus Designer.
It isn’t hard to see how a bias is formed by title alone.
“Everyone expects design to be just that — design. Pixel-perfect, detailed to the core, and while folks like me tried to argue for years that design doesn’t mean that, that design is a process, or that design systems will solve this problem once and for all — it just isn’t true. People mean by design what they meant always: visual layout.” — “The End of UX Design: The Birth of Product Leadership?” by Adam Nemeth.
Design =/ Visuals.
Just the same as product management =/ marketing.
While there is crossover for both things, especially in product growth/PLG initiatives, no one looks at a product manager and thinks “marketing strategist”, yet everyone looks as design and thinks “visual creator”.
Design Generates Revenue For Your Company, No “and, ifs, or buts.”
Design is a process. Referencing Adam Nemeth again, he says — “design as a process is an abstraction invented by analytical people.”
Amen.
I also believe the process is an abstraction built from analytical minds.
I see the design process as something that appeals to those interested in understanding, digging, testing, analyzing behaviors and trends, asking questions, solving mysteries, de-risking, crafting, guiding, influencing, driving decisions, leading, and combining it all to inform an output based on outcomes you want to achieve.
The frameworks applied lead to an outcome that we’ve predicted and de-risked along the way and continually measure over time to iterate and improve.
It’s the recipe I’ll pass down as my family heirloom.
I’ve wondered if calling our role something else would change the perception of value a product designer has before we go so far; we’re reduced to pixel-pushers working off a checklist our PM provided based on conversations we don’t get to be a part of.
Our role is the only one that requires a day in court each week to defend our outputs, ideas, and outcomes. In fact, for most of my career, the word I identify most with in my title is product, with design feeling like it trails off in the end.
No, the engineer did not design the screen you see at your company all-hands. A designer did.
A product manager did not define the solutions implemented on that screen nor evaluate the pathways for the potential solutions that came before this. A designer did.
And no, AI did not do all the work for that designer, prompting the already-annoying and out-of-date question, “Won’t AI just replace product designers?”
Half designer, half defense attorney
Why is it that design is required to write novels, speeches, and Shakespearean poetry on their accomplishments and how work they scoped, researched, tested, validated, iterated on, and eventually implemented led to a positive outcome?
Get this: PM shows executives a number/metric from their project outcome, that executive likes what they see, PM do good job! (yes, I’m speaking in caveman on purpose)
The designer shows executives a number/metric from their project outcome, and that executive likes what they see. The executive asks what “exactly” “design” did to get that number.
Someone at work once told me it’s almost impossible to tie design outcomes to business outcomes. “You can’t really “prove” that design led to x outcome or generated x revenue .”
We are the only role actively employed by organizations while simultaneously being asked to tell them why we exist.
Influencing Behavior is a Design Challenge
Product design offers something unique to the process. Taking a human-centered design approach and applying that to cold digital products allows us to analyze metrics and correlate them to user behaviors.
Additionally, we use psychology within design to guide decisions we make when thinking through user engagement, onboarding, activation, and completion rates (such as an onboarding checklist that guides users to their activation moment).
Beyond pixels, designers can combine their product sense, user-centered practice, intuition, and qualitative/quantitative data to tell inspiring stories.
We have the unique capability of inspiring those around us and helping them see the long-term vision, going well beyond JIRA tickets. We’re not just building x feature; we’re building the foundation that leads to x outcome, the future of x.
We tell stories to our customers through the designs we build and the outcomes we provide them.“Ohhh, if I do this, then I can also do this, which equals this.”
We enable a complete picture rather than individual pieces stitched together.
Product managers are split amongst different pods on different teams across one org, meaning they usually own one piece to each puzzle in an org that can have 100 pieces to that puzzle.
When one person focuses on a metric they need to move as it applies to the business outcome they need to drive and the technology they need to build, it becomes siloed amongst the product, creating disjointed experiences that look and feel separate from one another, which later reduces your end-users trust.
This creates a narrow path, leaving room for product managers to overlook additional stories within the data. If your PM is looking to answer a question based on a narrow set of requirements, they miss the other stories hiding amongst the data. Maybe your PM saw that their solution wasn’t the right fit for cohort A, but looking at the data, you can see that the behavior actually drives a ton of engagement for cohort B, which PM “John/Sarah Doe” owns over in “x” department.
Designers help avoid the narrow funnels that product managers can unintentionally and accidentally create. Our role requires us to work cross-functionally with other designers, PMs, and, at times, roles within marketing, sales, and customer teams, giving us key context on personas and product goals outside individual project initiatives.
This gives us the opportunity to enable our teams to think through the full end-to-end experience as it ties to the overall product, the story it tells to your customers, and your work’s impact on other teams as you add or remove functionality.
Designers make products more human; we create a domino effect through outcomes we create for our customers that lead to business outcomes that lead to revenue outcomes.
The Future of Design Is Dependent on the Ability to Learn the Business
There’s no way around what’s happened in the past and what continues to happen today. The only way forward is to zoom out, look at current trends, and figure out how to re-insert ourselves into different parts of the process.
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The areas that were celebrated before, like “design intuition,” now need to be backed up and vocalized. Guide others to a shared understanding of the value you bring and how that drives impact over time.
How did you reach that solution? What process did you apply to reach that output?
Take questions that come to you as an opportunity to enlighten others on the power behind design systems thinking and frameworks. Try not to see these conversations as an attack on your existence or importance.
Be vulnerable with your process
Don’t hide your scratch work inside a file your colleagues can’t access. Use those as discussion points in your syncs or when you present the final outcome to help educate teammates on solutions you explored, how research changed each direction, and why you landed on your final design.
Show and tell people around you how the design morphed through the process. Otherwise, it’s too easy to see a screen and think you went into Figma and whipped it up in a few hours.
When you take your teammates on a journey with you through your design process, from start to finish, you help them understand the product decisions you made along the way and how you used the goals and outcomes aligned in your PRD or 1-pager to guide them. This improves the team's understanding of your product sense and customer expertise, building trust that later allows you to get buy-in on more experimental ideas you may have.
Tailor your voice
Refine your business acumen. Our core responsibility is to represent the end-user, but providing insight into what those users want and don’t want isn’t enough to convince leaders (or investors) that what you’re pitching is a solution that drives revenue. Learn how to speak the language of your audience so you can target the talking points they are most interested in.
For example, I wouldn’t discuss how the final design will help reduce tech scope when in the room with sales. I’d focus the conversation on how the design solution guides users toward the intended action and how that ties into more sales opportunities.
Utilize a business value framework to break down and understand the value you create at the company, function, product, team, and individual levels. This allows you to tailor your voice to the most impactful areas related to each.
For example, if you’re talking about how you/your designs impacted the company (one example of many), you could focus on how you’ve impacted revenue (i.e., you built an experience people want to purchase).
If you’re talking about your impact on the product level, you could focus on things like how you’ve improved product conversion rates or competitive features offered.
We’re All Design Mutts Now
With all the change and layoffs in 2023 and the landslide of layoffs continuing into 2024, we should utilize our community and lean on each other to continue learning as the industry enters a new era.
While I have no idea what that era is, it seems right now the tech industry has broken its money-making compass, leading to layoffs that drive up stock prices, make shareholders/investors happy, and allow them to re-strategize behind the scenes without paying the roles they didn’t understand previously.
There will always be a need for product design, just as there will always be a need for product management.
At the root of it all, we and our companies want to continue building and producing products that serve the needs of our customers.
While I’ve seen hundreds of posts across Reddit, Blind, and Linkedin implying that PMs and designers will be replaced by AI tools, proving once and for all that engineers are the actual “value” of an org, I think the functions that PMs and designers own will always be needed.
As we’ve seen throughout history, the function never disappears; we only re-work the titles.
