Christian Crumlish
UX, Product Management and Dangerous Dogma
In this episode of Brave UX, Christian Crumlish blows up some myths that product and UX people believe about each other and shares his insight into how designers can find themselves ‘at the table’ more often.
Highlights include:
- Do you consider yourself to be UX person or a product person?
- Are UXers simply clueless when it comes to product management?
- Are product managers just beancounters in disguise?
- Where does the tension between product management and UX come from?
- How can UXers be responsible for ethics if they’re not responsible for strategy?
Who is Christian Crumlish?
Christian is the Benevolent Monarch of Design In Product, the UX and product management, strategy, and leadership consultancy he founded in 2019.
Through Design In Product, Christian has worked with organisations like NEST Health, EduWorks, and Listen App, and he’s currently working for the State of California as the Product Lead for COVID19.ca.gov and cannabis.ca.gov .
Prior to ascending to the throne, Christian was the VP of Product at 7 Cups, a mental health and wellbeing startup that is scaling compassion globally. There, Christian built and ran the product team, helping the company to become profitable without VC funding.
Christian is also the author of a number of books, including “Designing Social Interfaces” which he co-wrote with Erin Malone and, most recently, of “Product Management for UX People”, which was published earlier this year.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Christian Crumlish. Christian is the Benevolent Monarch, and yes, that is his real title, of Design and Product, the user experience and product management strategy and leadership consultancy he founded in 2019. Through Design and Product, Christian has worked with organizations like Nest Health, Eduworks and Listen App, and he's currently working for the State of California as the Product Lead for covid19.ca.gov/ and cannabis.ca.gov.
- Prior to ascending to the throne, Christian was the VP of Product at 7 Cups, a startup in the mental health and wellbeing space that is scaling compassion globally. There, Christian built and ran the product team, helping the company to become profitable without VC funding. Now I must admit, Christian has an impressive career history, which includes time invested at CloudOn, a company that was acquired by Dropbox in 2015, as a Senior Director of Product, AOL, also as a Senior Director of Product, and Yahoo, as the curator of the internal design pattern library. There are also many more highlights, which I'm hoping to explore some of with Christian soon. Christian is also the author of a number of books including, Designing Social Interfaces, which he co-wrote with Erin Malone and most recently of Product Management for UX People, which was published earlier this year by Rosenfeld Media. A generous contributor to the global UX and product communities, Christian is a Fellow at Rosenfeld Media, an Advisor to the PathCheck Foundation and a Community Host for people exploring the intersection of product and UX. He has also been a long-term Mentor for Code for America, a Co-chair of BayCHI, and sat for several years on the board of directors of the Information Architecture Institute and now he's sitting on a chair somewhere in the United States waiting for me to finish up this introduction and welcome him to the conversation. Christian, welcome to the show.
- Christian Crumlish:
- It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's really great to have you here too, Christian. And as you know, as we were discussing off air, I like to do a bit of prep for these conversations and something that I came across in my travels for yours in particular was a black and white picture of a younger you perhaps around 20 years of age, possibly shot at college wearing what looks like a military jacket of some sort. Do you know the picture that I mean?
- Christian Crumlish:
- I think I know the picture that you mean.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes. What is the story of that picture?
- Christian Crumlish:
- Well, it's definitely not a military jacket, although I think it has some sort of thrift store Army Navy flight wings on it or something, which was probably an attempt at a drug reference I would guess. I don't remember. It was college it, it's a picture from my last year at my senior year of college at Princeton from what my eating club there, which is this kind of weird archaic thing that's half like a fraternity except that people don't tend to live in it like a dorm. If you're familiar with American fraternities literally a place you go for dining but also a clubhouse and it's a social group that you join that you can join at Princeton. And it's a tradition there of some sorts. And I was in a club called Terrace Club, which was the fringe Countercultural Radical Club. I mean in Ivy League terms, it was the first to allow Jews to join in the middle of the 20th century.
- It was the first to integrate racially, it was the first to have dances for the gay alliance on campus and things like that. And this is in the late eighties at that point. And I wasn't that radical myself and especially not when I entered college, but my friends I think influenced me and the group I was with. And anyway, so a good friend of ours back then took portraits of the members of the club that year and black and white makes everybody look stylish and cool. It was actually a number of years later that he sent me the Prince cuz he was a little disorganized and it quickly became my favorite memento from college years.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You said that you weren't that radical, at least when you entered college, but I also look back at how you described your years before college, while you were at school at high school and you self-described, I think you said you're a huge nerd. And so tell me about this movement from mean being a nerd or being a geek. I know they're different things and Bob Baxley will chastise me for equating them with being the same thing. But these are often labels that we either place on ourselves or other people place on us that reflect us being a bit different than the norm. There's people that see and live in the world a slightly different way or have obsessions about certain things. Now what was this journey from being a nerd self-described nerd to being a radical, potential radical person by the time you finish college? What was that journey?
- Christian Crumlish:
- Well, I'd say that there's probably a common thread the whole way that still is true for me in many senses, which is that I don't tend to thrive or spend most of my time ensconced in the center of a group fully committed to one group of people the way some people are happiest. I seem to be the kind of person who spends time near the edge of the group and the edge of many groups and at the places where the groups are interchanging and the definitions aren't so clear temperamentally, that seems to be what's always drawn me. But that's also probably a nice way of saying I didn't have the best social skills as a kid. I mean, maybe at some point I would've wanted to be the center of everything, but that was never the path open to me. I always managed to have friends, I've always had things that I liked to do, but it wasn't always the coolest thing or the most popular thing.
- I didn't always have the knack. Some kids seemed to have, I was clumsy in some ways. I love some sports, but I was not greatly athletic and I didn't get a lot of positive reinforcement that made me enjoy athletics. So like a nerd growing up in the seventies, I read books, I had glasses, I was interested in a science fiction. My father worked in printing and brought home early promotional materials for Star Wars about six months before it came out. And we were cool at school showing people this thing that was going to have a place called Tay in it and all this kind of stuff that we were hearing about at the time. And also another thing from my dad being in printing was that he brought home books of well, lots of dummies to draw on the samples, essentially bound samples and books on typography and printing and lithography and stuff like that because he saw that we were artistic kids and would be interested in that.
- So I was both nerdy in the sense of a little bit, not the coolest kid and a little bit of a know-it-all smarty pants reader kind of kid in some ways. And also geeky a little bit in the sense that we didn't really use that term back then, meaning a person who could become obsessed with a thing with Greek myths, with baseball, with later on computers and things like that. And I was exposed to computers in grade school. My school had a shared digit, a deck, digital equipment PDP 1130 I think that we dialed into with an acoustic coupler mode modem. So now I'm doing that thing where you brag about the earliest tech that you ever encountered as a computer person. And I played math games and Star Trek games on it, on a thermal printer. It was no screen and learned basic programming, just very simple, 10 go, 20 go to 10 kind of infinite loops and things like that.
- So yeah, I think there always was that interest for me in getting obsessed with things that fascinated me, even if that wasn't cool or didn't make me popular, stuff like that. By the time I got to college, I think I had kind of developed a more socialized persona and I wasn't a big man on cam, I still wasn't the matinee idol or the jock or anything like that. But I had carved out in the Asian newspaper editor in high school and always, like I said, was able to find friends. And it's just that I think the friend groups that I found were themselves not the king and queen of the prom kind of style of kid. And so we together then started inventing our own counter or subcultures, borrowing from all the precedents we saw out there already.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you've obviously leveraged this into a strength of yours. It's something that if you look at your career journey, which will definitely come to being on not necessarily the center of something, but being able to, you seem to be able to join the dots particularly well and you seem quite comfortable moving in and out of different particular areas of influence. And I also noticed that when you're at college, you studied philosophy at Princeton. Right now this is a fairly serious college, but you studied philosophy. This is going back to, is it the early eighties? Early to mid eighties. Late eighties. Late eighties, right. Sorry to pre prematurely age, you there Christian, but this interested me, why not, you know, spoke about the jocks in high school and not being with the what's considered to be the coolest kids. So why philosophy, why not for example, business school?
- Christian Crumlish:
- Oh yeah. Well business school didn't sound appealing to me at all. And I would say some of this is came from my life, my family, the culture of my family, which was education oriented but also somewhat idealistic about it. There was a real commitment to the liberal arts, to the humanities as a almost ideological belief that about what's good in the world and probably some sense of class striving too, like a third generation Irish Catholic immigrants in the US trying to have all of the trappings of the upper class go to the best schools, have, get the training, speak French, things like that. So I think I internalized some of that. So in college I was both encouraged and I think internally still driven towards what do I really wanna study and what interests me most, not what will set me up best for my career.
- And I don't say this in any sense in terms of an evaluative or a question of character or value or anything like that at all. Because I think in some ways it came from a place of privilege and so much advantage in the sense that if you've been admitted to Princeton and you don't go outta your way to screw up your life, you probably can coast through the rest of your life in America, you're probably going to be fine. And particularly if you're a white kid and have other things like that that won't be held against you as you enter life outta college. So I can't universalize from my experience, but I think on some level I felt like I had the freedom to spend college continuing to really just explore what interests me intellectually. And I don't think everybody has that freedom. So I don't look down my nose at anybody getting a business degree or someone who loves business as an undergrad and just wants to understand it better.
- Our society is very capitalistic and understanding business is smart. I mean, I'm understanding business now. My book is about business in some ways for people like me who came up through creative fields and maybe didn't feel that business was their native language. And I'm trying to demystify it and things like that, but that's also be, but I came to it late as well. It wasn't my path into the working world or anything like that. A business focus philosophy to me was actually, if anything, a way to postpone specialization because it's such a giant umbrella for almost anything that you really want to continue looking at.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you have looked at a number of things in your career, you know, have had an interesting career. It's had a few twists and turns in it for sure. And you mentioned your father, he was in publishing, I believe you mentioned.
- Christian Crumlish:
- Well he was in print,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Print, print, right, print, yeah. So early on in your career after university, were an editor, you've been a writer, you're still a writer, clearly you had some time in publishing, you also had some time as a literary agent and then you took a shift, you know, leveraged those skills. I'm assuming here, I'm projecting here into web strategy, IA and UX. And then you had another shift where you actually moved from that role at Yahoo as being the design pattern library curator into being a product director at a O l. And now you've moved into this product leadership. I wouldn't say phase because I don't know if these things are sequential other than being mm-hmm sequential in time. But you've certainly had a curious career path this thinking about your time and you're still in IT and UX and now in product. Do you consider yourself to be a UX person or a product person?
- Christian Crumlish:
- Yes, yes I
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do. I thought you might say that.
- Christian Crumlish:
- Yeah. Yeah, that's a cheap one, but I would say yes. And so I have to answer that question a couple ways. So first of all, title wise, in terms of the day-to-day work I do and the role I take on as it's constituted nowadays I'm a product person. I'm a product guy except that's gendered. But I'm a product person and I'm also a UX rooted product person. I'm a product person who has, if I'm the bar of the T or what the vertical bar of the T is on UX and I'm not an engineer and I'm not an MBA or a, I don't come from a pure business background or any other, I don't come from a pro project management background, a data analysis background and sales background, all the other ways you can become a product person. I'm rooted in UX so I continue to have a UX lens on my work.
- I also am somewhat in agreement with Peter Holtz who sort of argues that in a certain way product in UX are synonyms, that they're both ways to talk about the shared overlapping concern with making a great experience for specific people that they wanna keep using. That's not conventionally how we use it. We use UX as a synonym for design. And so I don't wanna be too cute about this because these words are shifting meaning as we say them out loud right now. But I will say for instance that I never was a hundred percent comfortable calling myself a designer. And it's partly cuz I grew up in a world where graphic design was really what design meant to me and I knew that I didn't have not my greatest strength. I have some art skills but that's really not my core strength. And I came to understand that I was a designer in many ways and I literally was a UX designer and interaction designer.
- And also that I had no wonder design skills. And so I'm comfortable saying that I'm good at design and I'm a pretty decent designer, but some people that's their identity. And I remember going to the very first I X D A conference and part of it was a little bit almost like a rave where people were meeting their tribe for the first time and they openly used that kind of terminology. Which again, I think is problematic terminology now cause tribe has been used over time. But generally a sense of I found my people I I'm having, so everybody I meet here is like me. There was a strong sense at that moment where kind of the IA frame was a little bit stale and that interaction frame was more with it and was more open to design tradition and things like that. And I really loved that moment and I had a really great time at that conference, but I didn't go ahha, this is if anything in ias were my group already.
- So I didn't shift central focus in that sense at that moment. So to me in putting on and taking off these titles and shifting a little bit, the proportion of what I'm emphasizing on to adapt to what people value now or care about has never felt like a tremendous changing of my identity. But I feel like what I've done almost going back to publishing and through the internet, eating everything has been fairly consistent in a lot of ways. I'm an orchestrator, I'm a big picture person who connects the dots and makes sure as things really happen and makes sense and everybody agrees on what we're doing. I did that as a developmental editor at a book press. I did that as an information architect or content strategist before I was an information architect. And I do that in product now. I have different levers, the techniques are different, the medium has evolved, but in some ways I'm opportunistically saying, oh yeah, that I do that because it's just like what they call what I do now.
- And because often I've had to brush up on had to, when a company bought a company that I was at and said we don't have content strategists, we have information architects, that's what you are. I said, okay. But then I joined the Information Architecture Institute and the mailing list to find out what my new job was all about. So I haven't always just assumed that I can sail through because so devilishly handsome and clever that I should just be able to do any job I set my mind to. There's a through line from all this stuff, but I've had to pick up a lot of specific craft skills along the way to actually show up in these jobs and do them.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You are someone who has a musical bone in their body. You play the ukulele from memory. And so when you're describing that I was thinking the metaphor I was using here or the story I was telling myself as it's like you have the strength of being able to play music or play the ukulele. It's just that the songs that you've been playing or the music that you've been playing have changed over time, but that core strength has remained the same.
- Christian Crumlish:
- Yeah, I like that metaphor. I think that has a lot to it and I think that like music also is another one of these kind of systems that allows people to get aligned and harmonize and do things in ensemble because I believe that's where my joy in this work comes from that that's part of that through what I mentioned is that success for me is convening or assembling or supporting a group of people as they put on the dance together or the play or whatever the thing is.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you think that we define ourselves a little bit too tightly in UX in particular
- Christian Crumlish:
- In terms of
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The way,
- Christian Crumlish:
- Say more about the question.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, sure. So do you feel that as a field that we are too restrictive in the boundaries between us and them that we draw around what it is that we do? For example, we in UX, we are not product people, we are not product managers.
- Christian Crumlish:
- I mean that's a really tricky question. I think that it's hard to overgeneralize and these things are in dynamic play with each other. And if you took snapshot at any given company or enterprise and you consult, so you probably have visibility into a lot of different people trying to do this work there at. It's like looking at waves, there're at different stages in figuring it out and everything. I would say that UX people sometimes have a chip on their shoulder, understandably, because there's been this struggle for recognition for the actual wedging the field into existence at all. That took, there's a tendency to remember that people didn't want you there, you've had to make a case for it and that it's still not fully accepted everywhere that it matters. So there's also the evangelical strain, which has this positive side because you're so excited by the way, this approach is so much better than not doing it.
- Talking to users is better than not talking to users. And the wins are all manifest. And so we've all probably been there where we've said this, I love this and I want it to happen and I'm going to actually advocate for it. I'm going to fight for this to happen. But the problem is sometimes you then come into the room preaching and sometimes you've internalized that you're better than other people because you have this sacred truth that you figured out. And I, I think some of that opposition to other roles is self-limiting. And some of it's probably natural identity formation stuff like identity unfortunately is often defined as being not something else. Or we're the people who we hold our forks this way, not that way or something like that. And so if you say, I'm UX not product, you are, I think circumscribing your own range probably more than is good for you, especially with things so adjacent and so heavily concerned in each other's business.
- But I also don't agree with saying, I'm UX not business, or I'm UX not sales, or I'm UX. I think, and I say this a lot, but I think we need to sort of focus that empathy lens or that compassion lens that we so famously aim at our end user and sometimes turn it three cubicles down and look at that person who we feel doesn't get us or isn't creative or is somehow blocking what we want and spend some time understanding really where they're coming from and figuring out how we are really them and have things where are we aligned or how can we be? And versus sort of almost an unconscious denigration. And I see it, and again, sometimes it's just people cheer themselves up. Sometimes they're saying, oh, the other team is screwing us. That's seen that in many different businesses. Business mean in publishing, editorial and production, get mad at each other, upstream, downstream, stuff like that. That's human nature. So I'm not trying to ask people to never have those feelings, but I try to cut it guys, guys, I try to cut it short when it's getting a little out of hand. It's like, hey, remember they're working on something too. They have, they're got their own stuff. It's like they're not trying to hurt us. They let's understand better where they're coming
- Brendan Jarvis:
- From. And that's a hugely important thing to do. And it, this is a criticism that I have heard echoed by others who I've spoken to about this seeming lack of empathy we have for our colleagues and the other people that work with us and our organizations. We seem to have it in droves when it comes to our users, the people we're seeking to serve, but not so much internally. And I had been wondering about this recently, whether or not this was something that was actually symptomatic of a defense mechanism, you know, touched on earlier before that some UXs have a chip on this shoulder and that the field has had to fight what it perceives to be quite hard for quite a concerted number of years to get some form of respect in enterprise. And I had been wondering, is this really stemming from a lack of empathy? Because everyone that I know in UX and design and everyone, I'm generalizing, but 90% of people have no problem with empathizing with other people. But I wonder whether or not it has something to do with their own psychology when it comes to how their colleagues perceive them and what they believe to be their role within the organization.
- Christian Crumlish:
- Yeah, I think that's true. I also think that as people, if you seek influencer, if you try to get the seat at the table that people talk about that the fantasy is that you're just going to break down resistance and the world is going to change and just become much more receptive to what you have to offer. And it's almost like a transformation now. Everything's UX and UX is the king and I have arrived. It's all rainbows and unicorns from now on. And I think that probably what's harder to accept is that the closer you get to the seat at the table, the more you inherently become the other people at the table, more about what they deal with than you. To be part of that conversation, you have to drink from the chalice. You have to eat some of the food at the table.
- You can't be both. You can't be the pure artist and the money-grubbing business person. If you work inside a business, you can be insulated from the business concerns and really just focused on your craft. And that's a totally great thing to be if that's what you want to be. But then if you say, oh, I'm not included in decisions, and then when the conversations about decisions come up and you say, money's evil, we should only do what's good for the end user and never consider, I'm stereotype using ridiculous examples. But I think that there's an inherent, again that identity suffers a little bit. If you say I might have to compromise if only by becoming more understanding of the things that I formed my identity around being against. If you have to deal with that and reconcile those conflicts, you have to let go of some of that idea that you are superior, that you're just underappreciated. And that's the reason why everybody doesn't use your tool to solve every problem.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is it a question of maturity?
- Christian Crumlish:
- I think so. I mean, some of it's professional. I mean discipline, maturity. I try to remind myself all the time and everybody who will listen to me that this is the infancy of the internet and we're going to be in it for the rest of my natural life. I mean they'll write about this in the history books. This is just when it all started. Of course, we don't know what we're doing. We're laying down primitive axi axioms that will be built on and eventually deconstructed and torn apart in the future. Can't believe they used to do it that way. That's so ridiculous. And so the idea that there's a job called interaction designer and there's another job called prototyper and then there's one called product manager. And these are immutable natural laws is ridiculous. I mean these are just contingent ways to do this work that we figured out in this roiling situation that I, in my 20, 25, 30, whatever it's been, years of practicing, have literally seen about five or six or seven different models succeed each other. And they all were useful in some way at that stage. And they all were informed, A lot of them were informed by what went before. And I, I've loved being, I mean, how often do you get to be at the beginning of anything? It's super interesting, but I don't fool myself that I get to see the end of this or even the mature stage of it. It's just too big.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Somewhat. Sounds like you are cautioning us against dogma.
- Christian Crumlish:
- Yeah, I mean let's not get locked into anything specific. Especially because even the whole I, one of my original senses, this was sort of designer versus engineer. The original UX people really were engineers. So they were heretical engineers often. And then designers said, oh, we have techniques for that stuff. And they got into the user-centered HCI world or whatever. And then they were pretty successful. I mean a lot of UX and design has had a lot of wins. I don't think it's all moping around, but design versus engineering was a big thing when I first came up. They don't get it. And I have no, it's been probably 10 years since I met an engineer who didn't care about UX or think it's super important. So that's a very obsolete stereotype. But it used to exist. But even then that I was like, this is silly.
- We're making software together, we're literally sitting together figuring out what it should be. And you, I'm pushing the pixels and you're typing the code. But we do the same job if people from a distance can't tell us apart. So this sense that every, it's like, oh, we wear our hats like that and they wear their hats. It it's like, it's ridiculous sometimes to me. I get that we do come from different professions and it's multidisciplinary and the cultural styles are different. And the human nature, I mean that there's worked with annoying people none of us, it's all real. And when people feel bad or don't the work situation, it's real stuff. But I think to attribute it to this kind of person and that kind of person that that's a bad road for humans to go down ever.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So you've recently published a book, as I mentioned in your introduction called Product Management for UX People. And I have to admit that when I read that title mentally I substituted UX people for dummies.
- Christian Crumlish:
- Oh
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wow. And then maybe that's just more about me than it is about you being a UX person. I'm happy to wear that. Yes. But are UXs clueless when it comes to product management?
- Christian Crumlish:
- No. No, not at all. No. I think part of my point is that UX people are really good at some of the most important aspects of product management. Product management has a lot to do with what they would call customer obsession and we would call understanding the end user really well or something like that. But it's the same idea, which is like that you don't make software in a vacuum and then try to find people who might like to buy it from you. You understand problems people are having today with things they do all the time and you think, oh here's an opportunity to, I bet I could get a win by solving that problem. And you do that by understanding. So I think that the UX toolkit and both the lens, the way of looking at things and then the sort of collection of techniques and practices and the whole disciplinary stuff that's been evolved is heavily valuable in product management.
- A product manager who's conversing in those things, just like one who's technically savvy can do a really good job working with UX people. And in some cases where I've been in a small startup doing both jobs at once, I don't highly recommend that approach. But it is actually possible in limited ways, in compromise ways. And there's a Venn diagram that you've probably seen that I could critique, but for shorthand it has designer UX as one of the circles and it has business as another one and then it has technology as another one. And then in the sweet spot in the center it says that's product management or you are here sometimes the way it's drawn to show product management, again, it's a shorthand, it's flawed in many ways. And as I said, Peter Holt says that's UX in the center there and it's designed and one of the circles, and I like to mention that almost every discipline can draw a diagram that puts it at the center and everybody else's job is being kind of a peripheral contributor.
- But just for the sake of a shorthand that these are kind of pillars that go into products. Certainly the technical feasibility and the desirability that you find on the UX side and the sort of viability as an enter just as an effort. Nobody likes to be dependent on money, but guess what? The thing can't pay its way it's going to live in your basement forever. So it's kind of get up and get out there and earn somehow. And so I think that clearly UX people bring that UX part to the table, but they often are less well versed or less comfortable with those other two very broad categories. And I'd say good UX practitioners today are actually pretty good with the technology too. Again, not that they should be shipping production ready code, but they can generally negotiate with an engineer cuz they'd like it some way and the engineer tells 'em difficult.
- And if you're savvy, if you work in tech, that's really kind of requirement that you can discuss this stuff if nothing else. So that comes in handy too. But I'd say product managers often have more accountability around what gets delivered and what the engineers are spending their time on and building. Whereas designers tend to do this more like one-on-one negotiation around specific design or concerns and may not have as much experience with that kind of scrum mastery watching, looking what the whole team is doing and kind of keeping it on track when you don't manage them and you need them to buy in and be excited about what they're doing. I mean that's an art as well that typically a product person coming from a UX background would need to learn to cultivate and get better at practice and learn how to do that and spend more time on that.
- And then often I'd say that business, that giant category of business, which is kind of silly cuz if you're going to make these circles, it's a bigger circle than the other ones cuz it contains more things cuz business is a very generic term and you know have going to the market and you have actually operationally running the business and you have questions like fi, finance and other things, people hiring people off. So all this sales, just all these different businessy things, any of them could be a concern. Any of them could be in the background of a product manager. Any of them might be a constraint or motivational factor for a product manager. Something they need to take into account. And as I sort of hinted at before, people who've chosen self-consciously chosen creative careers or careers that leverage their art skills or their communication skills or their writing skills may stereotypically have avoided getting into business, studying it, taking it seriously. They might mock it as not very intellectual or not very soulful practice of just being a bean counter or something reductive like that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm pleased you mentioned that Christian actually because you have referred to product managers in the past as bean counters and suits your exact words and it certainly seems to me, at least from the product managers and product leaders that I know that they are more analytically minded on the whole than your average UX or designer. There's definitely more MBAs or people that I can think of that have MBAs for example, that have found their way into product management than have liberal arts degrees. Is that a fair stereotype?
- Christian Crumlish:
- Well I'd say that there's definitely truth to it in the sense that it's a more analytical, I agree first of all that product management is a more analytically oriented discipline than UX design that I'd say comfortably say comfortable saying that also that there's a lot of MBAs practicing product management for sure. In fact, I'd say that there was a vogue for taking your MBA into product management directly in the last maybe decade at some point that was kind of on the ascendant. But I would also say that that is an older product management frame that still exists alongside newer ones, including the Silicon Valley technical product manager who came up through, essentially came out of an engineering team maybe as a scrum master or an engineering lead and then suddenly was given broad or responsibilities over the whole product. So that's another kind of product manager that exists and a model that came out of Silicon Valley.
- And then there's the sort of lean or ad lean product startup product management style, which is sort of a mishmash of things. I kind of think of the designer UX rooted product manager as the most recently born version of those things and they all coexist alongside each other. What's interesting is as the product management community of practice has matured, and I often like to say it's roughly 10 years behind UX in email list, blogs, meetups, et cetera, it's falling similar path but it's catching up. And yet some of the people who really helped get that going, the mind, the product folks with their product tanks and stuff like that, they had UX sensibilities and they brought a lot of UX speakers onto the platform. So there's been this ongoing smuggling of UX more and more into product for a while that I definitely see myself as part of.
- And yet the business training is useful. I mean I don't have an mba but when I left AOL as a relatively newly minted product director and then went to join that startup cloud on I more or less app apprent myself to my boss at the time, a fellow named Jay Zari, A is a VC now at Social Capital, but he was our chief product officer. I think he was just called VP product at the time, but CPO when we finished. And so we had one of those great partnerships you can sometimes have, especially when you're coming up where you're the junior partner and you're more operational and executing and the senior partner is more visionary and outwardly facing and strategic. And yet over time he essentially trained me, he taught me how to do a lot of the analytical data tasks. I didn't know how to do a lot of things that we had to, you can now do with stats packages.
- But literally five, 10 years ago it was getting out the spreadsheets and downloading the data and then figuring out the coefficient of virality or with the retention percentage was for that cohort over that part of time. So there was a opportunity there for me to fill in those gaps. And I wouldn't say it's the equivalent of a master's degree in business, but I feel like I got a business education doing the job of some, a relevant one, but I consciously sought it out. I sought mentors, I sought bosses in context where I'd be forced to learn those things. And so now being counter is a pejorative, right? I mean when I use that term I use it facetiously or jokingly or to make light of the idea that we often frame these business people as the heavies going to the dark side as they call it.
- When I was in publishing I worked as an editor and also for a while as a writer and then I became a literary agent as I think I meant you mentioned in the intro and I was teased at the time by my editor friends that I had gone to the dark side because a literary agent is basically a salesperson and they sit across the desk trying to get the money out of the publisher. So it's not the first time in my career that I went down the taboo path that my kind of self perceived artistic friends viewed as somehow the money-grubbing one or something like that. But I think again that's a little bit of a oversimplification about someone's gotta look after the money. I'd never be a good accountant, but I wouldn't wanna work at a company that didn't hire accountants cuz they're not creative enough or not the right kind of spirits for the company or something like that.
- So I mean it's really long answer to your question, but I guess what I'm saying is that sure, there's a lot of people who are very comfortable in their business grounding, working in product roles. The product role is still perceived as a business role, especially by leadership. So coming in the door with that is often helpful. I'm just sort of like to tell UX people that is not a foreign language they can't learn and that it's not irrelevant to the things they know how to do that they can map the things how to do onto this space and become quite proficient at
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It. You touched on maturity there, how you felt that product was roughly a decade behind the maturity of UX. You've said that in terms of respect and power that UX have, you've also said that if you ever have had a job and people went into the conference room and then they came out later with a plan and you're like, I wanna be in the room while those conversations are happening, product management does get you in that room. And you spoke about a little bit earlier about the so-called seat at the table and that is something that is really coveted in design circles. It's something that we spend a lot of time talking about and obsessing about and it's something that we don't really feel like we have that sort of strategic influence in, well not across the board of course it's generalizing here, there are very senior design leaders making great impact in their organizations. But this is definitely something that vexes people. What has, what's happened here? So something like product management that you are considering relatively less mature than UX but seems to on the other hand have a greater role in shaping the direction and the outcomes that the experiences that UXs are working on. How do these two things, how do you reconcile these two things?
- Christian Crumlish:
- Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think there's probably a couple things at work. One is that I think product management came into being as a more bus perceived as a more businessy role. And therefore I think the, we were talking earlier about identity cult almost cultural identity around say like a creative or a design role that a person may in some ways derive some self-esteem from saying, my job is special. You need to be talented, you need to have my skills. And it's not the kind of job where you just put in, you can't measure it. It's there's this idea that we want space to legitimately explore, to make mistakes, to have rule gathering. And we know how creativity works. It is invisible to a lot of people. It does look like you, you're just goofing around and then suddenly, so there's that legitimate need to fight for that room for actual creativity.
- I never wanna mock creativity or anything like that. It's just that when it becomes an identity then I think it starts to separate you from everybody else. So you're like, you're the one department that has no numbers that can't track against goals cuz you're creative. I mean at some point you still have to speak the language of the central organi organizing principles of the company. And I think product management came into being already speaking that language. And UX is sometimes fighting is ambivalent about whether it wants to speak that language effectively or whether that would mean losing something important. I have colleagues and friends who feel like I'm sort of doing a bad thing and some, well not, I wouldn't say a bad and my friends don't think I'm doing a bad thing. But I have been accused by one or two people that essentially I'm betraying UX by just accepting products, ascendancy and joining their team.
- And there's probably a kernel of truth that we've talked before that I've hopped from trapeze to trapeze. If I thought that was the vehicle to continue to do what I wanted to do or to get further into what I wanted to do, there's certainly a self-serving aspect to that. And then I'd say I also feel like, but I'm bringing my UX sensibility into the product role and I'm making space for that to be a legitimate way to do the work on behalf, not for the people who come after me, but inevitably if I'm successful I will make more room for people to come after me. And I do believe in going where reality is right now rather than just aspirationally hoping it will come around to where I would like it to be. So I think it is something like what I think I hinted at before that if you want the seat at the table, you know have to accept what comes with that.
- And it might be that that's different from being the person who is not in the room but also not accountable for the decisions made in the room. You may miss the innocence you had once. You have to own the decisions too. Or you may say, no, this is what I wanted. Let me in the room I did, I wanna be in that room and I try to get myself in it. I've never loved never. And sometimes it is not even that I wanna put my thumb on the scale and drive the decisions. I'm just super nosy. I wanna know everything that's going on. I hate there to be a level of information I don't have yet. And so that's not even a great thing. It just happens to be true for me. So I feel like I haven't quite scratched all the way to something that you're getting at there.
- I mean some of it's anxiety. I do think UX is getting a seat at the table. I think it's coming. I think it is happening. And there are more and more examples of it. It's just that I especially think that UX and product in leadership is even closer together because the craft skill differences become much less, whether you're in a spreadsheet or Jira all day long or Figma or OmniGraffle all day long, that's a big difference in the lifestyle of a UX designer and a product manager. But if you're a team director going to the same strategy meetings with the same VP and one of you is running a product team and one of you is running a UX team, I mean you could act like you're completely doing alien things, but you're really talking about 80% of the time the exact same stuff.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We spoke early on in the conversation about your time at Princeton and you spoke about how growing up that you were never part of that prom queen jock kind of crowd and you elected to pursue philosophy instead of Right.
- Christian Crumlish:
- I did peak in eighth
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Grade. Right, okay. So there [laugh]
- Christian Crumlish:
- Downhill had a moment, right,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- All downhill from the rest of it. No, just kidding. But there's this notion that you pursued at college of philosophy of being a bit of a radical in terms of the group that you were part of there. And you've clearly walked a bit of a radical career path. But there is this tension that exists and you touched on it before about the sort of view that UX is more pure somehow than perhaps product management in terms of the business side of things. And I've been wondering, is this symptomatic of an underlying tension between people who have come up through more of maybe a liberal arts background as opposed to people that have come up more through a businessy, analytical, the world as a certain speci looks a certain specific way black and white point of view. And again, I'm projecting a lot into that, but is this a result of where people's origins are and how they fundamentally look at the world?
- Christian Crumlish:
- I'm not sure. I mean it must on some level these things that start to show up as patterns that are associated with career or even hobby or interests. I'm sure there's some kind of correlation when they look at political sensibilities and find that there's certain people who respond more to certain stimuli tend to lean to be instinctively more one political way, people who respond more to other stimulators. So there's probably some stuff at root there. I noticed this, an analogous thing was I was a content strategist when I forgot my first tech job that was my publishing to tech transition was through content. And I noticed the content people I [email protected] worked [email protected] that had a habit that I found self-defeating, that reminds me that I saw again with UX, some UX people in the future, which was almost like an inability to decide between whether what you do is a unique and special and valuable skill and that it's completely reasonable not to have that skill.
- People who don't have that skill are perfectly decent, normal people who are just fine, who will pay you because you're a professional at this great thing or everybody else is an idiot because how come they can't copy edit like me and aren't as good at writing. And so if you're going to act superior in some ways and the other people are deficient, that's having the chip on your shoulder and gets you excluded from the conversation because you're sort of annoying to deal with. You're arrogant. And here Jake, if you recognize, hey, not everybody's supposed to be a writer. Not every, a lot of people think they are cuz we all write emails or whatever, but if you recognize I have a valuable professional skill, I'm great at crafting language that's meets the needs content design nowadays, content strategy, that's a whole profession, much more mature than what I was having that title.
- Then at the same time, you need to treat the people with respect who don't have those skills or else you're saying this isn't just scamming you, I just think everybody should be able to do this and I'm making a living cuz you're also stupid. I mean that that's really not a nice way to work with other people. And I'm not saying you have people go around doing that, but I think inherently if you've built your self-esteem around how special what you do is then it can creep in that other people are not as special as you and they understand that you feel that way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's a very fragile way to move through the world and strikes me to be quite a limiting way. Now I'm reluctant to bring Apple into this conversation as Apple is often thrash to death in terms of a case study. But I am curious about someone in Apple who again is probably thrash to death in terms of a case study, but Steve Jobs and I wanted to ask you about your perspective on Steve Jobs. Was he someone that was more akin to a product manager or more akin to you a UX designer?
- Christian Crumlish:
- Oh, that's a really great question. I think he was probably more like a product manager. I'd say the thing that he did, as I understand it, that was most like what a product manager does or a product leader, anybody taking responsibility in product is I think that he provided focus, clarity and expectations. He defined good enough. He said it really high bar for good enough, but regardless, he said there was a bar and he determined whether it'd been met or not. And I think he was able to mobilize teams or say, we're going to do this moonshot, we're going to solve this problem. And that is what a product manager or product manager should be bringing to the table is all the things we could do. We figured out that we're going to do this now and it's the exclusion of other things and making difficult choices so that we can do something very challenging at the limits of our ability that's worth spending our time on.
- I think if the thing is, he was the boss though too, it's easier to do that when you can fire everybody and product managers famously cannot fire everybody. That's almost the definition of the job is that nobody reports to you. So it's a metaphor, right? I mean he was a more producty c e o I think than a design c e o. And in the same way that I think a very good practitioner of product should have an exquisite sensibility about design and really high expectations and standards and then should find brilliant designers probably like Johnny I or whoever to, and the real everybody else who did all the work on those teams and empower them and set goals for them, et cetera. And the truth is, I think he was a marketing
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Guy. Now that's a dirty word in some circles.
- Christian Crumlish:
- And I would challenge people to rehabilitate their stereotypes about marketing too.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. You've talked about in the past how product and UX actually share, I believe you have, so let me know if I'm putting words in your mouth here, that they actually share a common heritage in terms of both of them being somewhat attributable back to marketing as a profession.
- Christian Crumlish:
- Yeah, I think that that's true both literally that I think that's a lineage that you can probably trace back with some of the roots of UX drawing on some marketing traditions and absolutely product management has a marketing genealogy contributing strain along with others that goes into it. It it's coalescence as a job. And I'd say even more so that marketing and product management and UX are all, I'd say manifestations of attempts to get serious about making products for people. So marketing as a 20th century scientific business practice emerged to say, Hey, let's actually do research. Let's do surveys. Let's segment the population, figure out the kind of communications that will drive sales or build awareness in all these sorts of things that we kind of take for granted now. And if you came up doing UX in a world where the marketing team owned the website and they fought with it over it and they just saw it as a communications vehicle and they wanted to print the org chart as the navigation, then sure, it's understandable to say marketing that's this terrible discipline that totally doesn't get UX and shouldn't be anywhere near the internet or something like that.
- And which is silly because going to the market is, you know, can't sell your stuff if you don't have an approach. So to getting to the market, clearly you need to be working with those folks and maybe some of them got communications degrees and we're the king and queen of the prom and maybe they're not your cup of tea, whatever the still they're doing work that you're all interdependent on each other. And growth is just, sometimes people often joke that growth hacking was just guys doing marketing or something like that. And that's a bit of, that's reductive, but it's this idea, it certainly growth hacking or growth product work is analytical, is uses experiments, it's this whole practice, they're trying to grind out results. And so it has a different style than the way a lot of marketing is practiced, which is often let's plan the campaign and get the assets together.
- And however, I, I've been in shops where marketing was practiced with a lot of rigor and a lot with goals that were then measured and outcomes. And so as that converges, it seems very similar. So anyway, yeah, I think that there's this ongoing history of trying to get better and better at tuning what you're making for actual people. And I think marketing was part of it and sure all disciplines get genericized over time and kind of lose some of their oomph from when they started. It'll happen to UX due I suspect eventually, but there's probably some, I'm I'm sure, cause I'm not deeply in this role, but there's probably some corner of the marketing wall right now that is full of vitality and very excited about how it's embracing new technologies and is valid.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Christian, you spoke about rigor and that's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately as well, especially when it relates back to the research practice in UX and how researchers use to inform design and product decisions. And I wanna segue away from that just briefly and perhaps come back to it because you've also said that leadership has somehow said these designers and these creative people and these engineers, they need a manager. And that term nowadays is product manager. And when I heard you say that, and again I don't wanna sort of hammer this point too hard, but it certainly made me feel, or it sounded like you felt that leadership, which I'm associating with the business, didn't want the lunatics running the asylum.
- Christian Crumlish:
- Well that's interesting. I'm trying to think of the source where I said it was on
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The
- Christian Crumlish:
- Thrive
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Podcast, that interview you recently did.
- Christian Crumlish:
- Interesting. Okay. Yeah, and I think it probably goes back to that idea of the product management role being one that I think was cooked up inside the organizations rather than fought for in a kind of insurgent way where UX kind of had to break into the organizations on some level. Whereas I feel like product management was framed as a role that in some ways probably started to take the place of a program management. Or there were people called producers in the early internet and some of them were starting to do these, keeping their eye on everything role. So I think some people just looked more like the point person to relay all the news through. And that role got defined as product management from above I. And I don't think that mean if that were happening now, UX people could probably jump in and go, that's me and say you don't need another job, I'll do it.
- But I don't think that, I mean, don't know. When I was at Yahoo, our UX practices called U E d use your Experience Design and it was part of the product organization, and if you went up the org chart, you hit a product person usually pretty quickly. So that subordination existed from fairly early on, even though the product management profession keeps changing and evolving, whatever was being called product back then was a already had the upper hand. And I think it is because the leadership org structure saw these people as sort of little accountable nodes in the network.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I had a conversation with Marty Kagan last year, and he has a similar career path to you in some respects where he came up through engineering and then seems to have seen a similar thing that you saw in terms of being able to have more influence over how things actually get done, get that seat and transition into product management. From there, I think he came up through hp. I just wanna come back to IA and your role in the Information Architecture Institute and your time in that space. And I want to come back to a keynote address that you gave in 2020 where you were talking about the responsibility, the ethical responsibility that ias, and I'm going to make this synonymous with UXs and perhaps even product people, but for this particular question with UX, this responsibility that we have to our users in the spaces that we're creating for them, and I'll just quote you again now, Christian, you said information architects have a huge responsibility to think about what we are building and not just how effectively we are doing it. And this why this is something that I'm asking you is we've been exploring this role that UX E that plays or doesn't play in making those important decisions in those conference rooms that we were talking about earlier. And so my question is, if we are not the ones in that conference room making those decisions on business strategy and product strategy, how can IAS or UXs be responsible for the ethical implications of the strategies and the actions that fall outta those strategies?
- Christian Crumlish:
- And I think you're saying, if I understand the question correctly, you're sort of saying if UX people are responsible, what agency do they have to actually take that responsibility
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Or I suppose the way that I'm framing this is if UXs are not represented at the table for whatever reason, then how can they be called upon to be responsible for the outcomes of the decisions that are made at those tables in those conference rooms?
- Christian Crumlish:
- So I think that there's the concept of above my pay grade, right? It's like, oh, I don't make those decisions, I just do what I'm told or I, I don't know what the bosses are planning next quarter. I'm got some stuff to design it. And I think certainly even on that level, whatever scale you're working on, whatever problem you're working on, you can be the person who is widening the lens, who is looking at the systemic picture and not just the kind of point solution that you're working on who is exploring possible consequences and ad even adverse side effects of the cluster of things that you're doing, kind of kick the tires ethically in a sense. And then you can say, well, you run into a problem, but now you're not. It's already been decided you're going to ship this feature even though you've just discovered it can be used to abuse people or something, or it's dangerous in some way.
- I think those are the kinds of moments in our work lives where we have to assess the relative importance of something of value we have and the other real considerations in our lives like, well, I need this job, or no one listens to me anyway, or things like that. But there are moments where you might have to say, this is what I'm here for. I'm a user-centered designer. If I don't say this, who, well, as you said, who else can? You might say, I don't have the power, I'm not in the room where this is decided. But also they didn't do this research. They don't know that we accidentally created a gun near something like that. So there are times when I think the job is to kind of knock on the door of the room or schedule time with the product manager, whoever does whoever's adjacent to you and say, I'm worried we're making a terrible mistake.
- Or I think there's a problem here. I've put together diagram using my amazing diagramming skills. Or I've written something with my good way with words or whatever to help make this case and then am, give ammunition to this person who represents me in that room. I mean, none of us are complet, we don't work in isolation. We're part of a system where we work. So this is idealized. You might not have good relationships with those people. You might not have no one listens to you. But I think that's a larger question. Then you have to say, why am I working in a place where I have no say and nobody cares when I notice something bad? You said, oh, we're dumping toxics in the river. It's the same question in some way. It's like, do you alert the bosses? And they go, oh no, that's terrible.
- Or do they go fire him and then you guys, this is an evil corporation. I can't work for these people anymore. Not everything's got cut and dried, obviously. And there are ethical considerations or more subtle considerations where you're like, well that, is this good or bad? I'm not sure, but I think you can be the person making sure it's always part of the conversation. You can make sure that you don't, don't create zoos with open line cages just because it looks cool, the open plan or whatever you do the math on. What would that be like for human beings being put into that environment? Worst case, I often feel like if you can't change something or you don't have the saying on it and you can't leave or you don't believe, that would be the most effective thing to do, you can kind of put a marker down and say, all right, no one's listening to me.
- But I predict that if we do this, this will happen. And I think that in six weeks we should come back and see whether I'm right or I was just crying wolf and it was all good. And now maybe people say, well, I don't wanna hear it, but I mean, if you're right, why not? Why shouldn't they be willing to check late? They didn't do your idea. They did it anyway. If you were wrong, then just admit it. Okay. I was a little too worried. It seems like people know how to run past the line cage fast enough and no one's died yet. Iss fine. But I think I'm kind of playacting out how some of these things may work, but I think that the idea is that you have ways to influence works through adjacency, right? I mean I remember a great presentation Luke Ruski did when we were both at Yahoo once to designers, helping them learn how to influence the company.
- And one of the things that he said was that influence really only, it's only very strong to people who are directly above, directly below or directly adjacent to you. And it's a little bit less the next level out. And it's a little bit, and that's true for everybody. It's not. So the CEO, likewise has very little influence over the line worker. They influence the C-suite and the SVPs and after that it's at, they don't see that, they see a summary or something like that. But the reverse of that is therefore you do influence the people who are around you. And that's your job. Maybe you're not in the room that you don't get to decide, but you can be the person pushing these ripples of insight through the org and hopefully you develop those channels and you manage up and things like that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That is such an important reminder. And I think what you've just touched on there is it's really on each of us to define our sphere of influence, to understand what the dynamics are between the people that we're adjacent to. And also, I suppose not to be too fatalistic when it comes to whether we can or can't change the status quo. There's a lot of power that is tied up in the stories that we tell ourselves and a lot of disempowerment that is tied up in those stories as well. So that was a really refreshing take to hear Christian. And I'm just mindful of time. I wanna bring us down to the close to the show, and I'm going to quote you again. I know I've been doing a lot of that lately, but you've had so many great quotes. I love
- Christian Crumlish:
- It. It's very flat.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So
- Christian Crumlish:
- Who is this guy
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That you've said that writing is absolutely a core skill of mine. The connection between it and what I do in the workplace is that I think and communicate as a storyteller, a big part of how I lead resolve conflict bring groups to consensus and focus on action is through articulating clear and compelling narratives. So to finish our conversation today, what's the story, the narrative that you want the people in product and in UX to start telling themselves about the work they do together?
- Christian Crumlish:
- And some of this I think I've touched on already, but I would like people working in product roles and in New York's roles to first of all recognize very strong potential, let's say at least for kinship between those roles, for the, there's a strong basis for collaboration and alignment. And I don't mean that in a Pollyanna sense where it will just happen because some things are aligned. I think that what I mean is that there's the beginning of that, there's the opportunity for alignment because of so many shared concerns and that there's friction there. There's translation across language, terminology, and even priorities and sometimes even values that mean that this is not a seamless linking arms and marching off to the horizon together. There's work to be done, creative work like the work we do on designing systems, but around designing our work, designing our relationships or surfacing issues and working through them rather than wishing the boss would fix it or just hoping that person leaves or something like that.
- And probably, if I had to really boil it down, I have this kind of message that has come up so often in my coaching and advising and just general talk around this space. And there's a version of it for both of the roles that's very similar. And we hinted at this already, UX people, Hey, UX people, you say you're the empathy people, you say you're the compassion people. You've got all these amazing skills. You've developed proficiencies for recognizing why people are stuck, why they're unhappy, why things aren't working well for them, why they're ending, why they're conflicted. And understanding, exploring better ways that their workflows could go or that their days could go and learning their words and their concepts, and then designing things that bridge the gap between what you think would be good for them and what they want and presenting it to them in a way that's desirable to them, that they recognizes the thing that they want.
- But that over time of course, helps them evolve towards the way you believe it could be better for them. And I think that it's probably always what I'm saying at this point, which is that you can do that same work with product managers that you work with. You can treat them like a person who is having an experience who isn't always happy, who's not maybe conflicted, who may be causing problems or having problems. And you can learn their language and their concepts and you can think about the experience of working with you and working in a team. And you can apply those kind of what I call your superpowers to that, framing it in a way where they can enter into your world and get the value from it that they really would. That your ability to diagram your ability to contextualize, synthesize, draw inferences, have creative leaps of insight that solve a gestalt problem.
- Those are all things that were huge assets to a product person who understands that they can get that by partnering with UX people. But if you say, well, they gotta come to me and you cross your arms, that may never happen. Whereas if you're willing to bridge the gap and sort of think of it as a UX challenge, an experience challenge, I think you'll find you have all the tools you need to figure that out. Same thing over to my product brethren, inces and I, of all stripes, I would say it's a little bit more of a stretched metaphor metaphor, but if you think of working with you as a product, what's it like to work with me? What's the experience of what's the first time user experience of being working with me as a product manager, especially for these UX people who maybe aren't fully bought into product management, just they might not have been fully bought into some product I'm trying to sell.
- So how do I figure out what they do want and what they're looking for and how do I present and help them understand what I'm doing as a product manager? And particularly how do I help help them understand constraint real constraints that they're not always privy to that I see in talking to the sales folks and talking to the chief technical architect of the company and things like that, that would help them do better UX work. Cuz they might not go down a road that's never going to pan out, or they might just be better informed about we're all getting fired if we don't sell more of this stuff next year, so let's just fix the design on this thing. There's an element where it's like, it would help you to know that sometimes those things, and you might not wanna live in that world cuz you wanna do your UX and you wanna focus on the end user, but these are material considerations about whether your design will ever ship and what it has to get through to actually reach the market and stuff like that.
- So I think if product people can do that, their own version of they don't call it empathy, they call it like customer obsession or something like that, but get obsessed with your UX people for a little while and think of them as people who are looking for solutions, looking for ways to get their jobs done and stuff like that. And create the product management experience has something as a product for them that they wanna buy over and over again. I mean, at this point, it's kind of silly stretching the metaphor so far, but what you find is that there's a huge toolkit there and it's just sitting unused often, you know, throw the kitchen sink at the end user to get any little clue about them. And you remain very ignorant about the people on the other side of the cubicle, often
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Christian, that's such an important point and it's also a really important bridge to be building. So I was so stoked when I saw that's New Zealand Speak four, really pleased when I found that your book had come out because it was actually one of the bridges I was attempting to build on this podcast between these adjacent fields. So thank you for putting all your expertise and your energy into this book and to sharing it with both of these communities. And thank you for such an enjoyable conversation today. Certainly plenty of things in there for people from both communities to think about. I really, really appreciate you spending some time sharing your insights with me today. And also the insights that you've shared over the years in this profession or this field or the fields that you've stra straddled. They've been excellent and they've made a lot of difference.
- Christian Crumlish:
- It's very kind of you to say that. And thank you. I had a really good time with our conversation. I look forward to other people getting a chance to listen in.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're most welcome. It was my pleasure and Christian, if people wanna find out more about you, about product management for UX people, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Christian Crumlish:
- Well, probably you can come to DesignInProduct.com. That's Design in Product. I'll run together .com. That's both the website for the consulting work I do. And it links to the book page and things like that. And it's also where, if you're interested in this discussing product management in UX and where they overlap, there's a link to join the community that I host and there's a little form to fill out just so I can figure out, make sure you're not a bot or a spammer. But otherwise I, I'll let you in if you're interested.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Okay, perfect. Thanks Christian. And so everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered, it will be in the show notes, including where you can find that community that Christian just mentioned his book and all of the great things that he's been up to. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX, design and yes product management, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe and also tell someone who you feel would get value from these conversations. Pass the podcast along. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn under Brendan Jarvis. There's also a link to my profile in the show notes on YouTube, and I believe also on the podcast platforms as well. Or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz, that's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.