🕵️ Developing an Eye for High Craft Product Making

How to raise the bar as a PM on a UX team

I love my Toyota truck, but one thing about it still annoys me: When the engine turns on, it automatically resumes playing the previous song or podcast from my phone, which is generally stowed far away in my pants pocket. 80% of the time, this is fine - but for the 20% when I was in the middle of a conversation with a passenger, it takes over 20 seconds to stop it - as the audio starts playing well before the touchscreen has finished booting and there are a series of slow-to-wake screens to wade through before I arrive at the player controls.

Sad but true: This is the experience I will most remember from my truck. Not the carrying capacity of its bed, its horsepower, how it drives over rough roads, or any intended delighter. It’s often these rough edges that define a customer’s primary emotion towards a product.

Peeling Back the Curtain

For me, I always view my interactions with a product as the manifestation of the tradeoffs of its product teams. Call it the curse or the blessing of seeing a bit of product management wherever I look.

I can just imagine what happened here in my Toyota example: The audio team was proud of having just navigated the complex handoff between phone and car. The touchscreen team assumed no one really needed to interact with it immediately upon car start. And anyone who was thinking about the design was more concerned about achieving the outcomes (“Yay! We support the iPhone resume functionality”) vs. watching for unintended pitfalls (“How easy would it to be recover if that’s not what the user wanted?”)

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My post this week is about how you can develop “product sense” - an intuition about how to avoid these rough edges - and combine it with the people skills needed to drive impact within your organization. It’s the most important development goal you can invest in if you are a PM on a UX team.

The Role of PM on a UX Team

These little flaws and inconsistencies in product are an unavoidable evil of modern product making. We spend a lot of time worrying about how to systemically build a product culture that rids us of them: talks of “shifting left” to catch things earlier, scenario health dashboards, quality pushes - things that promise that if the culture & processes are exactly right, quality & craft happen naturally.

These all help – but the individual mindset and tenacity for quality from PMs on a UX team can make a huge difference as well.  It takes discipline, skill, and grit to constantly improve the customer experience.

All PMs drive growth of some kind – but this is a specific type focused on growing customer love.   As such, this post isn’t for all types of PM’s or all business contexts.  If you just own a button or onboarding flow in a UX, you are probably a growth PM driving revenue.  If you are working in stealth mode on a brand-new product, you are primarily spending your days being curious to quickly discover product-market fit.  However, if you are responsible for the management of a large UX surface area, delivering competitive gaps in an at-scale product, or increasing the retention of a product in scaleup mode, these “UX PM” skills are essential to your role.

Yes, This Can Be Your Super Skill

How to show up as a high-craft PM is not talked about enough in the product management community. Maybe because it’s a shared ownership with design and engineering. Maybe it’s more “grinding final mile” than “exciting new big bang.” Maybe “product sense” is controversially fuzzy in an increasingly data driven world.

Regardless of the reason for the white space from the PM-advice-mill, driving product craft is an in-demand skill and well worth practicing and honing if you are a new PM.

Here’s a few tips to get started.

1. Make Product Play your most important ritual. With meetings and reviews and data synthesis needs, a PM’s life can get busy. That focus is OK if you are a Growth PM or TPM - but if you are a PM on a UX team, you must prioritize hands on time with the product. I have a method I call Product Play that makes this more fun and inspirational.  There are time-on-task improvements that come from putting in the hours of using products introspectively - it’s how you develop product sense.

2. Practice structure and broadcast rigor. Since the goal is to impact the craft and catch the rough edges, a structured framework for rigorously walking through product helps. I’ve blogged about Friction Logging before, which I’ve heard that Stripe uses.   This enables you to turn your product sense into something concrete.

3. Respectfully hold a mirror to design. On many product teams, design is more of a hidden figure than they should be - needing support and allyship from PM to have as strong a voice as they should have. Even the best UX PM’s are B+ designers and threaded across many things; you need A+ designers who are single threaded on the problem of user interaction to achieve the highest-craft product.  The more you view your job as one of intentional allyship of design’s ideas, the more your bar raising and friction hunting will be viewed as a helpful mirror to catch gaps. 

4. Help the team recognize that the bar is always being raised. In a well-run product organization, it’s always a race to the top. What would have been “good enough” 12 months ago is now below the bar. Trends change, compute gets cheaper and faster so UX interactions speed up, and new possibilities open up.  This is why the job of high craft UX is never done – it’s a grind. Invest in learning new industry trends and incorporate product making material into your information diet.

5. Seek out and support those thinking about the entire UX system.  Let’s go back to my Toyota examples, which ultimately was a failure to see end to end between multiple groups within the product.  This is a common pitfall and in the best product culture, there is someone ultimately responsible for the entire system.   Sometimes this is a design director, sometimes it is a product leader, and sometimes it is an engineering leader. It can be a consulship of all three. Have empathy for this role and ask how you can best help them carry this burden. Even just asking “Who is ultimately responsible for deciding the bar that the product needs to reach?” is an unlock question.

Product Sense + People Skills = Impact

There is a falsehood out there that product sense is some innate and unteachable skill. Nothing could be further from the truth - this five-step plan is a mix of improving your own skills and intuition mostly through rigorous time-on-task, and then applying them to the human-systems around you. It takes commitment - but anyone willing to invest the cycles can develop it.

Hit me up in the comments if you enjoyed this look at the UX PM aspects of product making. There’s a lot more to share in this vein, including topics like a) measuring user love b) balancing backlogs across product growth and craft c) creating fluid systems of work across design, specing, and coding and d) incorporating user research into the product discovery process.