Product, Design and AI
By Marty Cagan and Bob Baxley
Marty’s Note:
My co-author for this article is the design leader Bob Baxley. Bob was a long-time designer and then design leader at Apple, as well as at other leading Silicon Valley companies, and much as I write about and advise companies about product, Bob serves a similar role for the design community.
Another thing we share in common is deep frustration with how many people out there do not understand the necessary contribution of strong product managers and/or strong product designers, and the difference between these two critical but distinct roles.
Further, we believe that in the era of Generative AI, these two roles become even more essential. But we are talking about very specific definitions of these roles, and if you are a product manager or product designer but don’t yet have the necessary knowledge or skills, we are strongly encouraging you to upskill.
OVERVIEW
In our recent article, A Vision for Product Teams, we discussed how product teams might evolve in the era of Generative AI. The article circulated widely, and the feedback was remarkably positive, but we couldn’t help but notice that in many of the subsequent conversations, too many people in the product and design communities simply don’t understand the necessary role of one or both of product managers or product designers.
Moreover, in the era of Generative AI, where the power of the tools plays an ever-growing part of the equation, we need to focus on the critical thinking and judgement that the product manager and product designer each need to bring to the team.
To be clear, when we argue that product managers and product designers will be more essential than ever going forward, we are talking about a specific definition of those jobs.
Our goal with this article is to try our best to clarify the necessary and distinct contributions of each of these roles, so that product teams can focus on the important work, and not waste time naval gazing, or worse, assume their colleague is unnecessary.
THE PRODUCT TEAM
An empowered product team exists to solve problems for our company or our customers, in ways our customers love, yet work for our business.
A typical empowered product team is composed of a product manager, a product designer, and one or more engineers.
The product team is continuously discovering solutions to the problems they’ve been asked to solve (referred to as product discovery), and then building, testing and deploying those solutions to customers (referred to as product delivery).
The product manager, product designer, and engineering tech lead are focused on product discovery, and the full set of engineers, including the tech lead, are responsible for product delivery.1
If your product is a platform product and the interface is essentially API’s, you probably won’t have a product designer on your team. But if your product does include an end-user experience, then it’s important to understand just what it takes to create a strong product.
The one role in the product team that most people seem to quickly grasp is the engineering tech lead. The tech lead is responsible for ensuring that the solutions we come up with in product discovery are feasible – meaning we have the technology, the skills, and the time to be able to build, test and deploy this solution.
Most people understand that someone needs to build the product (or orchestrate the building of a production-quality product, in the case of the more advanced gen AI tools), and there is an exceptionally good recent article from Tim O’Reilly that highlights the likely role of the engineering tech lead in a generative AI powered future.
In any case, we won’t focus on the role of the tech lead in this article (other than to discuss how they need to participate in product discovery); we’ll focus on the product manager and the product designer.
First, we’ll discuss the essential knowledge and contribution of the product manager, and then we’ll discuss the essential knowledge and contributions of the product designer.
One big caveat here: If you are still using feature teams, the product management role described here is largely covered by your stakeholders, and the person with the product manager title is typically playing a facilitator or project management role, which is what leads to considerable confusion and cynicism about the product manager role. So this discussion is only relevant for empowered product teams.
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
The product manager is responsible for ensuring that the solutions we come up with in product discovery are valuable and viable.
Value refers to creating value for the customer – that includes the various types of users and especially the buyer.2
While the product designer is responsible for creating a good experience, the product manager needs to ensure the customer chooses to buy and/or use that experience.3
Viability refers to ensuring that the solution works for each of the dimensions of our business – sales, marketing, finance, manufacturing, compliance, legal and more.
PRODUCT SENSE
In order for a product manager to be able to effectively serve this role, she needs to bring to the product team a range of customer, data, market, business and product knowledge that is not typically represented by anyone else on the product team.
This set of knowledge is the foundation of what we refer to as strong product sense.
– CUSTOMER KNOWLEDGE
The foundation of product management is the result of spending enough time with customers that she is viewed as an acknowledged expert of the customers, and with the data generated by our customer’s use of our products.
A competent product manager studies how our customers discover our products, evaluate our products, purchase our products, gain value from our products, and how such value changes over time.
They understand that the customer may have several different influencers (both inside the company and from outside), often multiple very specific reviewers and approvers, and ultimately someone that must make a final purchase decision.
They also understand that there are often many different types of users of our product, each with different tasks they need to accomplish, and different ways they perceive the value we provide.4
– DATA KNOWLEDGE
There are two important categories of data, and the product manager is the person on the team that is expected to be knowledgeable about this data and the implications.
The first category has to do with the usage of our products, and the second category reflects the impact of the products on our business.
The hope is that customers love our products and use them actively, and that this is reflected in additional penetration, sales and increased retention. But often our products are not used as we hope, and/or the products don’t have the desired positive impact on our business. And this is what we work to correct.
– MARKET AND INDUSTRY KNOWLEDGE
The capable product manager also understands that our product lives within a competitive landscape, and she analyzes that landscape, and the strengths and weaknesses of the various alternatives.
Moreover, there are always emerging industry and technology trends, and the product manager is responsible for evaluating these trends and considering the implications, opportunities and threats.
– BUSINESS KNOWLEDGE
Creating something that our users love and the customer will buy is hard enough, but the toughest part of the job is often to ensure we have a solution that also meets the many – sometimes conflicting – constraints of the various stakeholders representing different parts of our business.
For example, the product manager must learn and be able to represent the constraints that come from each of the important aspects of our business: sales, marketing, finance, legal, compliance and manufacturing, but there may be others as well depending on your particular type of company and product.
The product manager is not expected to be an expert in all aspects of the business (nobody is), however, they are expected to invest the time and effort to learn enough to be a trustworthy partner to each stakeholder (more about this below).
Each stakeholder needs to believe that the product manager understands and appreciates their particular constraints, and will ensure that any proposed solution is consistent with those constraints.
– PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE
This should be obvious but hopefully it’s clear that if the product manager is not an expert on all operational aspects of her own product, then there is virtually no hope of trust with customers, with engineers, or with stakeholders.
PRODUCT MANAGER CONTRIBUTION
Since most of this knowledge is very company and product specific, it is usually learned as part of onboarding and coaching from your manager. However, the foundation for this learning is business, technology and entrepreneurship, and especially valuable are courses in statistics/data science and finance.
This list can look intimidating to many new product managers, but a strong onboarding program can usually bring a new product manager up to speed (to competence) within three months, especially when combined with the coaching of a capable manager or a strong product coach.
Now that you have some clarity on the type of knowledge and skills that go into being able to assess value and viability, hopefully you also recognize that very few product designers or engineers have this type or depth of knowledge. You can also start to understand why strong product managers are so often viewed as future leaders of the company.
Realize it’s not hard to create user stories, write PRD’s, document business rules, or prioritize a roadmap or backlog. It is hard to learn how to discover solutions worth building.
PRODUCT DESIGN
By contrast, the product designer is fundamentally responsible for the user experience of the product. The scope of that responsibility encompasses the full suite of interactions, touchpoints, and visual representations — both online and offline — all of which should work in concert to provide an experience that is usable, coherent, and learnable.
With the proliferation of technology products over the past few decades, many of us have become quite effective at assessing whether or not a product’s user experience is good or not. However, the ability to identify whether an experience is good, is very different from knowing how to create a good experience.
Just as you can be deeply touched by a painting, fall in love with a piece of music, or enjoy the thrill of riding an expertly engineered motorcycle, you likely realize that you lack the necessary skills and knowledge to create such an experience.
DESIGN SENSE
To consistently create strong user experiences, a skilled product designer brings to the product team a combination of knowledge, competencies, judgement and skills that draw from a range of well-established disciplines, methods and techniques.
Although there are some overlaps between these practices, they are generally divided into the five design disciplines described below.
This set of knowledge and judgement is the foundation of what we refer to as strong design sense.
– SERVICE DESIGN
Service design is the practice of designing and orchestrating the various touchpoints, interactions, and behind-the-scenes processes that connect an organization and its users. It ensures that these elements work together to create a seamless, efficient, and user-centered experience across digital and physical spaces.
Strong service designers are able to not only uncover, catalog, and comprehend the complete set of interactions between a user and an organization, but also to craft a conceptual framework capturing the overall experience at both a high and detailed level.
Through this work the service designer can not only identify inconsistencies and incongruences, but they can also engage and collaborate with the broader organization to redesign and simplify these interactions.
When done well, service design pushes back on Conway’s Law, ensuring that instead of “shipping the org chart”, the user feels they are interacting with a single entity.
Absent thoughtful service design, the user feels they are being shuttled between different departments of a bureaucracy that have no real connection to one another.
– INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Information architecture is the practice of creating an intuitive conceptual framing in order to structure, organize, and label a product’s features and content. Information architecture has a direct impact on comprehension, findability, usability, engagement, and overall satisfaction.
A thoughtfully crafted information architecture leverages the user’s existing mental models, allowing them to easily grasp the underlying conceptual and organizational structure of the product, with the result being an experience that fundamentally “makes sense.”
By contrast, a poorly considered information architecture leaves the user confused, frustrated, lost, and irritated.
– INTERACTION DESIGN
Interaction design is the practice of creating and choreographing the conversation between the user and the system. Its primary goal is to ensure that the user can operate the system in a manner that is intuitive, efficient, and usable.
In typical applications, the discipline most obviously involves the selection and organization of on-screen elements accounting for factors such as Fitt’s Law, affordances, feedback loops, error handling, and usability.
Often thought of as the “behavior” of the product, or how the product acts, strong interaction design is most clearly felt in the dynamic exchanges that go on between the user and the system in multi-step flows like sign-up or checkout.
In comparison, poor interaction design results in a product that is characterized by uncertainty about how to operate the system, a lack of clarity about its capabilities, the inability to understand its current state, and confusion about what is happening and why.
– VISUAL DESIGN
Visual design is what most people think of when they think of design, as it pertains to how the product looks. A close cousin of graphic design, visual design involves the selection, arrangement, and styling of on-screen elements. However, unlike marketing or brand design, visual design in support of a product experience goes beyond aesthetics and messaging, to consider the broader set of issues related to accessibility, affordance, and usability.
Visual design principles reflect a deep understanding of how humans process visual information allowing them to leverage Gestalt Principles of human perception, grid systems, and typography, to clearly communicate visual hierarchy and relationships in a natural and instantly intuitive manner.
When done well, strong visual design fosters a high level of trust, resulting in a greater sense of confidence in the product.
Conversely, poor visual design not only confuses the user, it also leaves them with the sense that the product’s creators took little care or pride in what they were building, and thus can’t be fully trusted or relied upon.
– INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Although industrial design is concerned exclusively with physical products, in those cases it’s important to understand that there are additional critical considerations related to materials, manufacturing, repairability, production costs, transportability, and environmental impact.
PRODUCT DESIGNER CONTRIBUTION
It’s worth mentioning that most product designers additionally have at least some training in user research, and in cases where dedicated user researchers are unavailable, the product team will generally look to the product designer for advice on qualitative learning and testing.
Now that you have some clarity on the essential knowledge and type of skills that go into crafting strong user experiences, hopefully you also recognize that very few product managers or engineers have these skills.
It should also be clear that while the product designer works in lock step with the product manager, they each bring a very different set of skills and perspectives to product discovery.
This is also why a product manager that has had the opportunity to work with a strong product designer, never wants to have to build a product again without such a designer.5
Again, it’s not hard to learn to use the design tools. However, it is hard to learn how to create good experiences.
PRODUCT DISCOVERY
Now that we’ve discussed the knowledge necessary for strong product sense and strong design sense, let’s turn our attention to how that knowledge is used in product discovery.
The topic of product discovery is quite broad, but there are two primary activities: problem discovery and solution discovery, so we’ll focus on those:6
PROBLEM DISCOVERY
While product teams are more than capable of identifying new problems to solve – both customer problems and business problems – most of that work is done by the product leaders in the creation of the product strategy, informed by user research and data science.
This allows the focus of the product discovery work to be about coming up with winning solutions to those problems. Remember that if you want people to switch to your product, you need to discover a solution that is dramatically better than the competition.
However, it’s important to realize that there’s little chance of coming up with a good solution, if the product team does not understand the problem.
Fortunately, we have very good techniques for quickly understanding a problem. The product manager and product designer select appropriate discovery techniques to help the product team quickly understand the problem that they will need to solve. Note that the tech lead is also included so as to develop a shared understanding of the problem.
SOLUTION DISCOVERY
As the product manager and product designer work to solve the assigned problem, they will typically flesh out many ideas and approaches (wherever the ideas may come from) via a combination of techniques, especially interactive prototypes.
There are several types of prototypes used in product discovery, depending on the circumstances and the risks being addressed, but the higher order point is to be able to very quickly (in minutes and hours) explore how a given idea or approach would play out, so that we can judge how well this approach might solve our problem (assessing value, usability, feasibility and viability) and achieve the desired outcome.
To be clear, strong product teams have been doing this for several years, often using tools like Figma to quickly create these prototypes. Yet now we are entering a golden era of product discovery, as there are a range of new, generative AI powered tools that can create several different forms of prototypes, especially the extremely valuable live-data prototype, in literally minutes or hours.
The reality of product discovery is that many ideas or approaches sound great until you flesh them out in a prototype, and the result is that many ideas don’t last longer than minutes before they are discarded. This is what Steve Jobs was referring to when he complained about “the disease of thinking a great idea is 90% of the work.”
The stronger the product manager’s product sense, and the designer’s design sense, the quicker unworkable or nonviable ideas will be discarded.
Once an idea passes these initial evaluations, they’re ready to be tried out on users, customers/buyers, and stakeholders.
The purpose of “trying out our ideas” is to assess usability, value, viability and feasibility during product discovery, so that we have evidence (or, when necessary, proof) something will be worth building and deploying to our customers.
– USABILITY AND USER VALUE
The product designer will typically test the current prototype on one or more users to determine if they could use the product to accomplish their necessary tasks, and whether they would choose to use the product for those tasks.
The distinction between “could use” and “choose to use” is critical and the difference between assessing usability and user value.
Depending on the circumstances, we have both qualitative and quantitative techniques for assessing usability and especially user value.
– CUSTOMER VALUE
While the product designer is focusing on the various types of users, the product manager needs to focus on assessing whether the customer would be willing to actually purchase the product. This typically involves testing the current prototype with influencers, approvers and purchasers.
As you might imagine, “testing” means something quite different for a user versus a buyer. But the concept is the same.
The strong product manager is skilled at the range of discovery techniques we have to evaluate value, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
It’s worth emphasizing that achieving the necessary value is often one of the most difficult yet essential jobs during product discovery if you hope to achieve the necessary outcomes.
– BUSINESS VIABILITY
As we’ve discussed, it’s not enough to come up with a solution that our users love and our customers choose to buy. That solution must also work for the business.
As part of the product manager’s work to ensure business viability, she may also take that prototype to show it to one or more key stakeholders, as a way to ensure that the proposed solution would also meet the needs and constraints of that stakeholder (more on this below).
It’s not unusual to have on the order of a dozen key stakeholders, each representing very different but significant aspects of our business – compliance, sales, legal, business development, manufacturing, and more. If the product manager has developed the necessary product sense, they have a reasonable understanding of each of these constraints, and they use this knowledge to shape the solutions that are being considered.
But they also know that in some cases, the proposed solution will be approaching the problem from a different angle, and it may not be clear that a proposed solution is consistent with the constraints of one or more stakeholders.
In this case, the product manager takes the prototype personally to the impacted stakeholder, and shows the prototype so the stakeholder can see how the proposed solution would look and behave, and only then can they make an informed assessment. Note that this is where trust is earned.
– FEASIBILITY
Throughout solution discovery, the prototype iterations will be tested by the engineers (typically daily) in order to both assess feasibility, and to see if the engineers might know of a way to leverage enabling technology to better solve the problem.
It’s important to understand that the product manager is shaping the solutions with their product sense (knowledge of the customers, data, market, business and product), just as the product designer is shaping the solutions with their design sense (knowledge of the various design disciplines), and the tech lead is shaping the solution with their knowledge of the enabling technology.
This is the critical and essential collaboration of product discovery. It is not about documenting requirements, designing an experience that reflects those requirements, and then building out those requirements.
A TRUE CROSS-FUNCTIONAL PRODUCT TEAM
If you’re on an empowered product team, responsible for solving problems in ways that our customers love, yet work for the business, then we hope it’s now clear why the roles of the product designer and product manager are each essential, and could hardly be more different.
An empowered product team depends on each of these skill sets to be able to ensure the products that are built are valuable, usable, feasible and viable.
And if you make the mistake of empowering a product team that does not possess this range of skills, you are very likely setting the product team up to fail.
Remember, the question has never been whether we can build a product. The question is determining the right thing to build, that will solve the problem and achieve the necessary outcome. For this, we need strong product and design sense working with our best tools.
Our belief is that when generative AI tools are used by people with strong product and design sense, we can not only build the product faster than ever (delivery), we can figure out the right product to build faster than ever (discovery).
Special thanks to Chris Jones and Audrey Crane for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
- There is no law that says only one engineer participates in product discovery. We do need to count on at least the tech lead’s availability, but in our favorite teams, every engineer participates in discovery.
↩︎ - For a consumer product, the user is generally also the buyer, but for a business product, the user is rarely the buyer. ↩︎
- Realize that just because a user can use a product, doesn’t mean they will choose to use that product. Countless products have failed from ignoring this reality, and this is one of the core reasons why feature teams so often fail to deliver outcomes. ↩︎
- Note that most if not all of the activities for the product manager to deeply learn about customers will be done alongside the product designer, as the designer’s job obviously depends on deep knowledge of the various types of users. While both are usually learning simultaneously, they each have a different lens, and are seeking complementary types of understanding. ↩︎
- There are some people that are truly skilled at both product and design. There are even a precious few that are highly skilled in product, design and engineering. Those special people are called “triple threats,” and they are true unicorns, but there are some that do exist. If you can find someone that truly is strong in more than one of these disciplines you should hire them if at all possible. But be sure you don’t confuse someone that thinks they are strong in multiple disciplines, with someone that genuinely is. But in practice, even if someone has the skills, the demands of each role, combined with the limited number of hours in a day, mean that it’s usually not sustainable to cover with less than three people. ↩︎
- Realize that for the purposes of this overview article, we are simplifying product discovery considerably. For a comprehensive description, see the books INSPIRED or Continuous Discovery Habits.
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