A PM State of Mind: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 1
Summary
No doubt you’ve heard of empathy mapping– the simple, yet powerful tool often employed by product teams to attain a deeper understanding of what their customers think and feel in order to deliver a better user experience. In this interactive, two-part activity, we’ll put product managers in the place of the customer, mapping the motivators, external and internal influences, and actions that make them tick. By the end of this exercise, you’ll have gained insights into who your PM is, and how you can best connect with them! Note: Part 2 of this activity will take place during the second half of the day.
Key Insights
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Empathy mapping product managers helps align teams by walking in their shoes and understanding their external pressures.
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Product managers often struggle with balancing executive goals and competing priorities without formal authority.
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Framing product managers as pressured caretakers rather than blockers improves team dynamics.
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Using live collaborative tools like Big Jump and Speak Jam enhances engagement during empathy exercises.
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Capturing direct quotes for empathy maps—even assumed ones—adds specificity and clarity to personas.
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Prioritization conflicts frequently arise because everyone wants something on the roadmap without considering trade-offs.
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Segmenting planned work into exploratory research, validation, and small fixes helps manage risk and resource allocation.
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Mapping what product managers see, say, do, and feel reveals tensions often invisible to their teams.
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Incremental affinity mapping after sessions allows synthesis of collective insights for better decision-making.
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Explicitly acknowledging the difficulty for product managers to influence without authority helps build empathy and collaboration.
Notable Quotes
"It’s important not to seek control but understanding."
"Product managers carry a lot of pressure and accountability without a lot of ability to force people to do anything."
"Everyone is trying to get something onto the roadmap without worrying about the impact on other priorities."
"This work does not fit our product program."
"We can imagine them worrying about managing competing priorities with product strategy execution."
"Capturing quotes directly—even assumed ones—makes empathy mapping more specific."
"During discovery, it’s important to identify which features require exploration versus those that just need validation or small fixes."
"Sometimes the solution is obvious and doesn’t need a lot of user research time."
"Grouping new features into buckets helps teams prepare for different types of product work appropriately."
"Empathizing with product managers is a great first step towards turning understanding into bigger influence for product and design."
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