Healthy product manager

What kind of managers do designers love in grocery companies or how to work together to get high

Hello! I am Vanya Solovyov , design director of DocDoc (part of the Sberbank group). Today heading Tim-tim , in which I will tell you how we get along with other teams.



In our company, designers are not just performers. Together with the managers, they participate in market research, competitors and user experience; delve into analytics, build and test hypotheses. They have a common goal - to make the product better. They are partners.
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We love our managers, but it wasn't always like that ...

Smoker's product manager: customer → performer

The manager comes with a ready-made solution, pulls the interface prototype drawn on a piece of paper and says - draw. It will be good if he talks about the task, and does not throw a link to the protocol in Google documents. Familiar? We also went through this stage of growing up the team, when the manager sees in the designer only the final performer of his ideas.

Cons of this approach for the designer:

• weak motivation - it does not directly affect the product;
• can not self-actualize - in the work uses a couple of basic skills and everything;
• bad communication - not ready to defend their decisions, even if they are better than those proposed by the manager;
• low involvement - connect at the last stage, does not see the task entirely;

For the company:

• the interface is created in isolation from the context - it is not always optimal and rarely reaches its goals;
• manager's impotence - when everything goes wrong, he fills the designer with edits instead of clear explanations;
• no consistency - after some number of iterations, the interface begins to “collapse”, since managers rarely monitor the integrity of the entire project;
• Superficial solutions - the manager has little time to think over the solution well, so the interface can be based literally on nothing.

Often, such a manager has no goal to make the task good. He seeks to close one task and move on to the next. This “habit” goes to the designer and the process closes - the manager gives his solution to the problem → the designer draws without thinking → the task goes into development . Then everything can get along, and maybe not: the user will get an inconvenient interface, a business - a drop in conversion.

If you know yourself, think about what will happen to you after a year of working in this style. How far will you go?

What to do?

First, determine whether this style of work is capable of bringing you satisfaction, because not everyone needs constant development, and you can be content with the role of the performer.

If you decide that this does not suit you, and the company you like - it's time to adjust the processes. Here are some tips that helped us:

• Nothing will change in the moment. Change takes time and better be prepared for it.
• Try to “show” and not “prove” the power of your decisions. Do not prove to the manager that he is wrong, show that there are other ways to solve the problem. For example, conduct an interview and show your accounting interface and share your observations with the manager. Remember - you want to become partners.
• You wanted to work on the task from the very beginning together with the manager, but is he against it? Show that you are driven by a single goal - to increase the usability of the product: the user will be able to perform their tasks faster, the grandmother can use the interface, etc. And that together you are more likely to do it.
• Argue your decisions logically and ask the manager to do the same. This will help weed out controversial decisions in the spirit of "I like it so much more." Good practice is to rely on the research results: “I looked at the competitors and there it was like this” or “showed the prototype to the users and they said this and that”

Healthy product manager: partners

At this level of relationship, the real work begins. The manager listens and appreciates the decisions of the designer. Delegates part of the responsibility - because he trusts.

The manager understands that a user-friendly and valuable business product needs to be done together

With such a manager, the designer quickly acquires new skills and immediately applies them in practice. He begins to look wider and sees the task not in isolation, but in the context of the entire ecosystem of the product.

Advantages of this approach for the designer:

• strong motivation - directly affects the product and user experience;
• allows self-realization - in the work uses versatile skills, simultaneously developing them;
• software skills are well pumped - learning to do research, test their prototypes on users and acquire the qualities of a product manager;
• high involvement - in each task seeks to show all their knowledge and skills.

For the company:

• fewer iterations - the designer understands what he is doing and can offer better solutions and therefore reduces the number of edits from the manager;
• the quality of projects increases - by delegating part of the tasks to the designer, the manager has more time to work out the solution itself;
• expanding responsibility - the designer is experiencing not only the beauty of the interface, but also its results “in combat”; The growth of conversion pleases both the designer and the company more than beautiful buttons.

Instead of totals

Not all managers are ready for this principle of work. Some are conservative, they find it difficult to adopt a new style of work. The latter seem to want, but can not - the processes in the company do not allow to introduce innovations. And still others want to work at their comfortable pace and just close tasks.

We still have a few conservative managers, for whom such an approach to working with a designer is not easy, but I am sure that this is only a matter of time.

Finally, I would like to say hello to our managers: Grisha, Dasha, Kirill, Roma, Luda and Bogdan - we love you!