Enhancing Product Design: Collaboration Between Product Managers and Usability Experts

The collaboration between a product manager and a usability expert is one of the most important yet often understated aspects of successful software development. Each plays a distinct but interdependent role in shaping the final product, and when their efforts are aligned, the result is a well-designed, user-friendly product that addresses real-world needs.

The Role of a Product Manager in the Development Lifecycle

The product manager is the guiding force throughout the product development or project execution cycle. They are deeply involved at every step — from defining initial requirements to guiding development teams, validating workflows, and ensuring that customer expectations are met.

Some of the core responsibilities of a product manager include:

• Delivering detailed feature requirements to the engineering teams.

• Collaborating with developers during the design and implementation stages.

• Providing critical clarifications when edge cases or gaps appear in design documentation.

• Conducting testing — particularly of newly developed or modified features — to ensure the experience aligns with expectations.

• Participating in beta programs and collecting feedback from early users.

• Helping to prioritize defect fixes based on feedback severity and customer impact.

In essence, the product manager acts as the bridge between customer needs, business goals, and the engineering team’s execution.

The Strategic Role of Usability Experts

While usability experts may not be involved throughout the entire cycle like product managers, their role is essential — especially during the early design phases. Usability experts focus on how a product "feels" and functions from the user’s perspective, aiming to make interfaces intuitive, appealing, and efficient.

One particular cycle that stands out involved a comprehensive redesign of a mature software product. The product team had compiled multiple user complaints, feature requests, and visual feedback from previous versions. Alongside this, the interface was beginning to feel outdated.

To gain executive buy-in for the redesign, we had to articulate the vision clearly. Phrases like “modernizing the interface” or “improving the user journey” resonated surprisingly well — especially when backed by usability metrics and customer sentiment analysis.

When the Real Interaction Begins

In situations like a full UI overhaul, the interaction between the product manager and the usability expert can begin even before a development cycle formally ends. Planning, ideation, and initial wireframes often start in parallel with the finalization of the current release.

Several key sources guide their collaboration:

• Customer complaints and forum feedback: Recurring pain points or requests indicate problem areas.

• Expert analysis: Usability specialists often identify issues by examining screen flows, layout consistency, or call-to-action placements.

• Product manager insights: Based on product knowledge and user feedback, the PM often has a list of areas needing attention.

• Technical limitations or new opportunities: Sometimes UI changes are driven by backend modifications or updated component libraries that enable previously impossible workflows.

A Cyclical Design Process

Usability improvements aren’t achieved in a single pass. Typically, the usability expert begins by proposing a refreshed flow or layout for a screen. The product manager and other stakeholders review the changes, offering insights and critiques. Based on that feedback, the next iteration is refined and validated.

This process repeats across numerous screens and workflows. In large products, it’s rarely feasible to redesign all screens simultaneously. Instead, the usability expert works iteratively, and teams begin implementation as soon as screens are finalized.

Here, the product manager’s role becomes even more crucial. They can help drive the process forward by working alongside the usability expert to:

• Prioritize which screens or workflows should be tackled first.

• Ensure engineering teams receive enough detail to begin development.

• Translate early wireframes into preliminary requirements that can evolve as designs solidify.

Project Management and Scheduling

Managing a UI redesign project involving multiple stakeholders is no small task. It requires deft project management, clear communication, and tight scheduling. Project managers often rely heavily on product managers to coordinate with usability teams and ensure timely delivery.

The agile model can be particularly effective here. Breaking down the redesign into sprints, assigning specific screens or modules per sprint, and tracking feedback cycles keeps momentum going and avoids analysis paralysis.

Measuring the Impact of Product Manager and Usability Expert Collaboration

While the collaborative process may seem time-consuming, the benefits are immense:

• Better user experience (UX): Directly correlates with increased user satisfaction and engagement.

• Fewer design iterations post-launch: Reduces rework and development time.

• Clearer workflows and screens: Improve usability scores and reduce support tickets.

• Stronger stakeholder alignment: Ensures fewer surprises late in the development cycle.

Ultimately, products created through strong product manager–usability expert collaboration deliver more value and are more likely to succeed in competitive markets.

Final Thoughts

Whether it’s a small feature update or a complete redesign, the bond between the product manager and the usability expert is essential. By bringing together customer insight, technical knowledge, and design thinking, they create experiences that not only look good but work well — delivering tangible value to end users.

If your team is preparing for a UI refresh or tackling a complex workflow change, investing in this collaboration early can make the difference between mediocre and exceptional.

Suggested Amazon Books on Product and Usability Collaboration

• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug (Buy - Affiliate link)

• Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan (Buy - Affiliate link)

• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman (Buy - Affiliate link)

Helpful YouTube Videos on Product Management & Usability Design

UX Design: What Product Managers Need To Know

What is UX? User Experience Explained For Beginners

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Checking for updates on social networking sites, and deciding whether to go ahead with them or not ..

Around 15 years back, the ease of getting user feedback on a software product was not easy, even for the large ones such as MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, or Photoshop. The principle way of getting this feedback was through the tech support route where users would call up tech support or deal with the support through email, primarily to provide some sort of complaint in a feature or look for some sort of health. Through this process, the support team could also get some sort of feedback on the product and the performance of the product with respect to the needs of the users. As for forums such as social networking, there was hardly anything that was available.
However, if you look at the current day situation, the forums where users can report problems (or more rarely, come out in praise of a product) are widespread. There are user forums, there are Facebook pages, there are email discussion groups, there are Twitter accounts that are used by users for reporting their feedback. When you consider a large product such as the ones in the first paragraph, the number of such forums and comments within them can be awfully large. Even for a team that puts in dedicated attention to looking, consolidating such feedback and respond to feedback that may not be so positive, it can be hard to catch up and respond to such feedback.
And therein lies the danger. When there is feedback and yet no reaction from somebody from the product team, it can seem odd, and lead to complaints that the organization and the product team do not care about user feedback, and so on, leading to something that is negative in terms of perception. Does this mean that you should put in a lot of effort on monitoring and responding to such kind of feedback ? Well, it sounds good, but monitoring and responding to feedback across different social networking forum can be pretty difficult and time consuming, and you might not have enough resources dedicated for this work (and resources with some amount of expertise in such new generation forums can be expensive, since it is not just monitoring, but actually feeding them into a system that lets the team figure out responses and strategies).
The idea situation would be where you have a broad user base that takes on most of the work of responding to such feedback. If you take Photoshop, complaints and criticism from users are many times responded to by other users, which also has a high ring of authenticity to the responses, and shows the commitment of members of the user base. In that sense, a committed user base is worth a large amount of effort and money.
However, there does need to be effort put in for building up such a committed user base. The team needs to be prompt in responding to issues that are gathering track (it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to respond to each and every issue) and show some quick responses. The team also needs to make the users feel that the product and support teams are responsible and geared towards the needs and concerns of the users (this may seem subjective, but it is necessary for this kind of feeling to be generated, as projecting such a feeling through actions inspires confidence in the team from the user community and every satisfied user can then become another committed member of the user community).
Other actions would be for the product to have its own specific Facebook page and Twitter account, maintained by somebody who has an appetite for the kind of enthusiasm and social skills that are required for social networking (if there are no tweets for many days or no Facebook updates, it tends to put off users and also seems to show the product and organization in a poor light). Further, members of the product team who are more well know can also have their own social profiles and send out updates of their own, and these also help.

Where you find that you can't use WinRunner for automation?

Winrunner through the time and tide has proved to be quite a useful functional testing tool. This tool developed by HP has proved to be outstanding when it comes to testing of the automated functional graphical user interfaces. 

With the aid of this wonderful testing tool the user interactions that took place on the graphical user interfaces of the software systems or applications can be successfully recorded and playedback. 

Winrunner is a complete functional test suite and can even be extended to work with the QTP (quick test pro). Through the years this functional test suite has been continuously providing its support to the enterprises for quality assurance. 

Out of all its functions three are considered to be the most important ones and have been mentioned below:

1. Captures the user interactions taking place on the GUI of the application software.

2.  Verifies the captured user interactions.

3.  Automatically replays all the recorded user interactions.

   All the above three functions ensure that the defects are identified and it is ensured that all the business processes are being carried out well. The Winrunner introduced the use of TSL in parameterization and customization of the input supplied by the user. 

    

    Even though there are many benefits of the winrunner, it does suffer from some limitations. One of those limitations is that the winrunner cannot be used everywhere for automation. This is the topic of discussion of this article that where and all the winrunner can’t be used for automation. 

   1.Testers have figured out a number of uses for the winrunner, however, its primary role will always be to act as a testing tool for functional testing of the software systems and applications.

    2. In many conditions the winrunner is often used for load testing by some of the developers. 

   3. What makes the winrunner so powerful is its realization of the real world user. 

   4. Using winrunner in cooperation with the loadrunner achieves even better result. All these reasons have made the winrunner quite important software in the market.

  Winrunner can’t be used for automation in three situations as mentioned below:

     1.The size of the project is quite small i.e., it is a small scale project.

    2.The project calls for the need of manual intervention and cannot do without  it.

     3.The project is quite complex and exhibits a different behavior every time.

    There are certain instances when it has been observed that the winrunner does not even take the protocol layer in to consideration.

    But however, in such instances it has recorded the user interactions and played them. The winrunner program has been coded in such a way that it appears as if the various commands are being carried out by a real human user. 

   

   For the winrunner to function properly, it is needed that it gains full control over the computer system. Once it gains control over the system, it is ready to record and play back the user events. This is the reason why a load test cannot be initiated whenever the generation of load is required. 

  

    For the winrunner to simulate n number of users you need to have n number of computers and install winrunner software on all of them. 

   For the winrunner to record the response time of the user it is necessary that it is implemented within a load test since it has to deal with the processing that will take place in the hardware components of the computer system.

What is meant by Use-case oriented metrics?

Using the use case method is not dependent on the programming language. Typically, you can use use cases as another method of generating the size of the application; the value of use cases is in most cases to the lines of code (LOC) and also to the number of test cases that will have to be written for comprehensive testing of the application. Like many other estimation techniques, the use case method is used early in the software life cycle, before design, development and testing happens.

A use case is written to capture user interactions and functions that describe a system. Many users try to work out what a standard size for a use case is, but use cases can exist at different levels of abstraction. As a result, though there are many attempts to use the use case method as a instrument of trying to measure the effort required for building the application, the inability to define a size and coverage of the use case, means that not many people have been successfully able to do this.

Estimation through use case method is not a simple one; there are multiple steps required such as determining technical factors, determining environmental factors, determining use case points, determining product factors, and then overall, putting all these factors together to get use case points which translate into man-days or man-weeks.

Architectural Design - Representing the System in Context and Defining Archetypes

As architectural design begins, the design should define the external entities that the software interacts with and nature of the interaction. Once the context is modeled and all external interfaces are described, the structure of the system is specified by the designer. It is done by defining and refining software components that implement the architecture.

REPRESENTING THE SYSTEM IN CONTEXT

Architectural context represents how the software interacts with entities external to its boundaries. A system context diagram accomplishes this requirement by representing the flow of information into and out of the system. At the architectural design level, a software architect uses an architectural context diagram to model the manner in which software interacts with entities external to its boundaries.

How do systems inter-operate with the target system?
Superordinate Systems
These systems use the target system as part of some higher level processing scheme.
Subordinate Systems
These systems are used by the target system and provide data or processing that are necessary to complete target system.
Peer-level Systems
These systems interact on a peer-to-peer basis.
Actors
These entities interact with the target system by producing or consuming information necessary for requisite processing.
Each of these external entities communicates with target systems through an interface.

DEFINING ARCHETYPES

Archetypes are the abstract building blocks of an architectural design. It is a class or pattern that represents a core abstraction that is critical to design of an architecture for the target system. Archetypes can be derived by examining analysis classes defined as part of analysis model.Target system architecture is composed of these archetypes which represent stable elements of the architecture. Some kind of archetypes are:
- Nodes
- Detector
- Indicator
- Controller