UXers and Product Managers Both Say Others Intrude on Their Work

Our Research

To understand how user experience professionals (UX) and product managers (PM) see their roles and how the roles relate to one another, we conducted a survey aimed at answering these questions: 

1. Do other roles overstep on the work of PM and UX, and, if so, how often?
2. Which roles overlap with PM and UX?
3. Why does duplicative work happen?
4. What are the effects of work overlap?
5. Who do PM and UX think is responsible for which activities and deliverables?
6. Who holds the power at the organization?

The first four questions are discussed in this article. A companion article covers the last two.

The analysis in this article comes from 372 responses from professionals who described their primary role in either UX (279 people) or PM (93 people). The entire survey included more than 500 responses from people working in a variety of roles in product development.

Most respondents (60%) have worked in the area of PM or UX for 3–10 years, 21% for less than two years; and 19% for more than 10 years.

Most respondents (54%) were from the United States; the next biggest group (27%) were from Europe.

Both PM and UX Have Others Duplicating Their Work, But UX Has Slightly More

We asked participants to rate how often someone else duplicates their work with negative effects, on a scale from 1 to 4:

Survey question: How often does someone else overlap or duplicate your work negatively? For example, you do or make the same thing as someone in another role, or work was repeated intentionally? 1 to 4 scale: 1 = never, 2 = rarely, 3 = sometimes, 4 = often. A text field was offered for comments.

Professionals in PM and UX reported that others intruded on their work more often than rarely. In general, UX felt that others interfere with their work more than PM did (2.6 vs. 2.4). This difference was statistically significant at p <0.05. Both averages were significantly greater than 2, the point corresponding to rare overlap.

People working in the disciplines of PM and UX have long had similar goals relating to meeting customer needs, uniting the product team in user-focused efforts, and leading team collaboration. UX and PM are also traditionally responsible for similar tasks like research, analyzing and sharing findings, and being ambassadors of user knowledge. So, this survey’s evidence of overlap in work between PM and UX is not a real surprise, though it is still troubling.

Roles that Overlap with PM and UX

Now that we have established that overlap occurs, let’s look at which roles duplicate PM or UX work. We asked participants how often other specific roles intruded in their work:

Survey question: How frequently does someone in another role do or think they should do something that you feel is part of your job? For each role — content, CX, development, marketing, product management, product owner, support, QA, UX, other — choose how often someone in that role does something that's your job on a 1 to 4 scale: 1 = never, 2 = rarely, 3 = sometimes, 4 = often. A text field was offered for comments.

The roles with which both PMs and UXs overlapped less often than rarely were Q&A and support; the averages were significantly different than 2.

PMs said that the following roles overlap with their roles more than rarely (average was significantly different than 2, p<0.05):

• Marketing (2.25)
• UX (2.37)
• Product owners (2.44)
• Other product managers (2.71)

In contrast, UX, felt that all other roles (except for support and Q&A) overlapped more than rarely with their work (averages were significantly greater than 2; p < 0.05).

When comparing PM with UX, we found that UX reported significantly more-frequent overlap than PM (p<0.05) with the following roles:

• CX (2.50 vs. 2.04)
• Development (2.53 vs. 2.01)
• Product owners (2.75 vs. 2.44)
• Other UX people (2.84 vs. 2.37)

Interestingly, both groups felt the same frequency of overlap from product managers (2.74 and 2.70).

Note that both PM and UX reported that other people in the same role as themselves interfere with their job more than rarely.  

People in different roles may have common skills and responsibilities. Still, as we will see next, overlap comes at a cost, and so there is opportunity to better define responsibilities across functional groups, as well as within the same functional group. In particular, the responsibilities for UX people seem more ambiguous than those of PMs and need to be clearly set apart from those of other roles.

Drawbacks of Overlapping Work

So far, we’ve established that role overlap happens more than rarely, and that UX professionals are particularly susceptible. But is there any harm caused by this overlap? The following survey question addressed this question:

Survey question: What impact does it have when someone else does work that you think is part of your job? Rate the impact on the following factors: my job performance, my job satisfaction, the products or services I am working on, the perception others have of my team, the perception others have of me: negatively impacts = 1, no impact = 2, positively impacts = 3. A text field was offered for comments.

When we aggregated the data over all our respondents, we found that they all reported a negative impact on job satisfaction (average 1.5), the products and services they were working on (average 1.76), and perceptions that others have on their teams (average 1.76). These scores were significantly lower than 2, the neutral point (p <0.05).

The effect on products and services was, driven by our UX respondents, who felt that the negative impact of job overlap on this dimension was significantly more pronounced than the one reported by PM respondents (1.60 vs. 1.97, p <0.05).

When asked about negative impact of overlapping work on job performance, neither PM nor UX reported significant impact. In other words, they don’t believe that they try any less hard than they would if there were no overlapping work.

Respondents were offered space to comment about the impact of overlapping work. Their remarks were in agreement with the ratings; they mentioned that duplicated work leads to a decrease in job satisfaction and product quality and wastes time and effort in multiple ways: not only is the actual work done twice, but energy must be spent to decide who should be given credit and be held accountable, how to establish and maintain status and credibility, and how to navigate the organization politics. Here are a few representative comments:

PM: “It negatively impacts morale when I have other people duplicating my work. I sometimes question whether I am adding value to the team or what my role SHOULD be, which erodes confidence.”

UX: “It creates confusion on our project teams in terms of who is responsible for design, and perpetuates consensus effect. It also makes it difficult for the UX team to provide design governance over our products resulting in inconsistent experiences. Personally, it's just frustrating combatting solution jumping and fighting for a seat at the table.”

PM: “In general, if others are doing parts of my role, not only does it take away from my value to the team, it makes accountability difficult.”

UX: “Negative impacts occur because while everyone should be able to offer ideas in the design process, it's disheartening when you've dedicated your time to studying and building a career in something and others seem to think they can do it too, without a background or training.”

PM: “Makes me feel like it looks like I am not doing my job, or I am ‘lazy’ and allowing someone else to take on parts of my role.”

UX: “It lowers my confidence in myself and in my work.”

PM: “When a functional expert's opinion is overlooked, products or services tend to get negatively impacted resulting in rework and waste of time.”

Causes for Duplicative Work

To also understand our respondents’ explanations for duplicative work, we gave them the following multiple-choice question:

Survey question: For which reasons do you feel you and others do duplicate work? You're both trying to do the right thing. Your job description is unclear. Their job description is unclear. Lack of leadership, Your personality, Their personality, They enjoy the activities. Your team doesn't have time to help. They believe they are skilled at the activities. They don't trust others to do it right.  (Select up to 3 answers.)

Nobody wants to do unnecessary work, or hurt their colleagues or product. So why is this happening?

The following table summarizes the responses received to this survey question.

Among all reasons, all participants selected the following three reasons significantly more often than chance (p < 0.05; the probability of selecting one by chance is calculated at 30% because each participant can select 3 out of 9 alternatives):

1. The people doing the overlapping work are trying to do the right thing.
2. There is a lack of leadership at the organization.
3. The people doing the overlapping work believe they are skilled at the activities.

PM respondents were significantly more likely to select “trying to do the right thing” than UX respondents (66% vs. 46%; p <0.005). UX respondents were marginally more likely to mention “lack of leadership” (54% vs. 42%; p = 0.08) and “they believe they are skilled” (p = 0.1) than PM respondents.

Overexuberance and good intentions may be causing some work overlap. It’s heartening that PM and UX seemed to be looking for the good in their colleagues, selecting positive purposes among the top reasons for work overlap. This finding suggests a general attitude of respect and empathy in the organizations.

Both PM and UX respondents called for leaders to align with individuals about what needs to be done and by whom and about the priorities of the team, the product, and individuals. Here are a few representative comments:

PM: “Everyone wants to do the right thing, but we need clear guidance and escalation points to help clear up uncertainty.”

UX: “I think that my organization has a lot of issues defining swim lanes so this is an issue.”

PM: “At times it feels like the value or responsibilities within my role are not well defined or understood by others.”

Humans are not known for being highly self-aware and recognizing their strengths or deficiencies. Leaving people to their own devices to decide what they are good at on the job can be detrimental to the product and organization. Also, if people are not sure about their responsibilities, they could gravitate toward those tasks that they feel will bring them recognition, even though these may not be what the organization needs from them.

Collaboration Versus Overlap

Overlap is not the same as collaboration. Comments from both PM and UX expressed an expectation and desire to work together with other functional groups. But they drew a clear distinction between, on the one hand, overt collaboration with stated responsibilities and good communication and, on the other hand, impinging on the work of others and confusing or undermining them. The basic sentiment is that collaboration is valuable, but encroachment is not.

One UX respondent’s perspective about cooperating:

“Teamwork is important and everyone should take the responsibility of what they are doing. Every piece of work should improve the overall quality of the work but it shouldn't cause double work, it should be collaborative.”

Conclusion

Let’s recap what we found:

• Job overlap happens relatively frequently; it happens more often for UX than PM.
• Part of the overlap is within the same role, whether PM or UX.
• While PM work had overlap with marketing, product owners, and UX, UX work had overlap with PM, product owners, development, marketing, content (which is often synonymous with UX), CX, and other (unknown) roles. This result suggests that UX responsibilities are very ambiguous in most organizations. Even for those roles with whom both PM and UX reported overlap, the overlap reported by UX was more frequent.
• Overlap affects negatively job satisfaction and how others perceive the team; UX respondents feel that it also impacts negatively the quality of the products they work on.
• The main reasons behind duplicative work, according to our respondents, are the desire to do the right thing, lack of leadership, and overlappers’ feeling that they have the skills to do the task.

While the survey results shined a light on issues related to work overlap, it also unearthed a desire to collaborate and do high-quality work. Even when remarking about problems, respondents did not finger-point or have an “us versus them” attitude. Rather, they offered balanced, empathetic comments about other roles. We believe people are truly looking to understand others and how to work together harmoniously.

Natural tension and collaboration between various roles can be healthy and motivational. But overlap in work is detrimental. It undermines the credibility and, subsequently, the effectiveness of teams. It wastes time, so resources are not used efficiently, and creates unnecessary friction between individuals and functional groups. It decreases job satisfaction, and it hurts the quality of the products and services offered to customers. All of these can impact fulfillment and ultimately retention. A loss in productivity or good employees can have severe consequences for a business, and unhappy people and bad products make the world less joyful.

How to avoid these issues? For each role in the organization and for each project, clearly define people’s responsibilities. Also, individuals should share knowledge about the expertise needed in their roles with other functional groups so everyone has a better understanding of the nuances and complexities of each job. Leaders should look for overlap issues and have open discussions about who should be accountable for what and when.

To learn more about defining UX and product roles and goals, collaborating throughout product development, and navigating overlap, take our course Product and UX: Building Partnerships for Better Outcomes at the UX Conference.