#50 Collaborating as Product Manager & Designer
The Product Bakers talked for the first time to another Product Manager & Design "couple." Yoav (PM) and Tudor (PD) share their experience about working together on projects and how they split responsibilities and maintain a trustful relationship.
In this episode, they've caught up on topics such as design review, prioritization, and design sprints.
Yoav & Tudor online:
Yoav Linkedin: @yoavfarbey
Yoav on medium: https://farbey.medium.com/
Tudor Linkedin: @tudor-teisanu-7b08a4b2
Tudor on medium: https://teisanutudor.medium.com/
Table of content
00:30 - Episode summary
02:35 - Intro Yoav & Tudor
05:00 - Their day-to-day business
06:50 - Team setup & collaboration
08:50 - The key to good collaboration
11:45 - Data for better decision-making
15:50 - What design needs from product for discovery
21:40 - Prioritizing solutions
27:25 - Team workshops (design review & design sprints)
39:20 - Yoav's & Tudor's tips for good collaboration
How does a day for you guys look like collaborating as the Product Manager and Designer?
Yoav: With lots of Slack messages on a daily basis. And what we make sure of is we have a weekly cadence looking at the actual work. The scrum team is going to work on the short term and then do more long-term discovery involving the right stakeholders, including tech, design, product, and whoever the expert we need.
Tudor: I think that is maybe the fact that we're replacing the desk checks with Slack messages again. We're both not big fans of emails but if there's any doubt or if there are any ideas or if there are any concerns about what we do and the direction we always try to talk. It's usually on Slack having a quick call.
So I wouldn't say that's part of the daily work but I think it happens almost every other day or once every three days or something like that, that we have a small chat about what's happening and what ideas we come up with and how we move on.
Who is part of your cross-functional team?
Yoav: There's myself as the Product Manager, the Designer and there's a Product Owner. ParkNow splits the role between Product Manager and Product Owner. Then there's a technical architect, someone with really high-level expertise, and then there's the scrum team which includes backend front-end developers, and QA.
And then alongside that, we have what we call a V-Team. So that's a different expertise from the business. So, marketing and operations look at other aspects of product, but we meet them on different cadences.
What’s currently the biggest problem you need to solve?
Tudor: We're not that many Designers as we were growing. I have to work with multiple PMs and multiple of these cross-functional teams. So I have to shift focus most of the time. I make sure that I get to define whatever problem we're talking about with all to make sure that we can go through some of the latest data we saw.
And then eventually end up with actual designs and then ideas and get some feedback on the business and the vision and this whole V-Team.
What's the key also for a successful collaboration between Product Manager and Product Designers?
… tune in to learn more 🎧
