The occasional light expression

During my Barcamp conversations with Ashish from Yahoo and Soumya from Aditi, i was stuck by how User Experience (UX) and Product Management (PM) are two groups which have more in common than many other product development related groups.

Both care about products being successful, easy to use, and differentiated in a cluttered technology marketplace. Both use various methods to gather customer and user data and map that data into features, functions, and User Interfaces. Both need to be good at what they do but also good at generally understanding technology, competitors and market trends.

Boxes and Arrows even had an interesting plug on ‘Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management’ - both the authors are ex-UX professionals who now work as product managers. They’ve outlined some interesting distinctions and overlaps in these two roles.

I think Product Managers and UX professionals/managers can collaborate and find common ground on several areas: Field research methods (dont both groups use interviewing and focus groups as a standard data gathering technique?), wireframing and prototyping, development of product roadmaps (most UX groups are called too late to the table for roadmap discussions), joint customer site visits, and how usability and design labs can be jointly used by PM and UX professionals to conduct user sessions.
I’m thinking of organizing a round table along these lines - perhaps in d-camp space. Feel free to send me any ideas on this…