“Technical skills are great up to a certain point in your career. However, When you’re trying to do that jump from senior to lead or senior to manager, that is when you really need to be thinking about these power skills.” – Rochelle Williams, lead product designer at Elsewhen.

In this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris and Rochelle explore a variety of power skills, how to build them and demonstrate them daily. During this conversation, Rochelle not only provides an overview of her winding design career but also gives practical advice to both novice and experienced designers on how to grow their strategic impact and advance their careers.

During this episode, they discuss:

• Why Rochelle urges people to use “power skills” instead of “soft skills” because they “aren’t a nice to have, they are a must-have.”
• How to enable decision-making (aka facilitation)
• Strategies to get more from design workshops
• How to navigate conflict management and self-management
• Ways to start building your power skills today

Learn How to Incorporate Business Strategy into Your Design Role
Discover how to align your design work with business outcomes and demonstrate its value to business objectives in Pragmatic’s Business Strategy & Design course, where you’ll develop skills to participate in strategic conversations, improve cross-functional partnerships and show return on investment.
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“Good leadership really comes down to one thing. Do people want to follow you? And you can’t force people to follow you. So if no one’s following, you’re not a leader.” – Eddie Ishak

In this episode of Design Chats, hosted by Rebecca Kalogeris, we delve into the world of design and its strategic impact.

Our special guest is Eddie Ishak, Managing Director of UX and Product Design at JP Morgan, sheds light on the essence of leadership in design and how it doesn’t necessarily correlate with one’s position in an organization.

Whether you are a seasoned designer or just starting, this episode is packed with insights and stories that will inspire you to think about design more strategically and consider the role of leadership in your career.

Eddie discusses:

• What makes a good leader
• Why it’s so important to connect design to the business goals and how to do it
• How design maturity will impact your effectiveness

Unlock Your Design Potential!
Elevate the impact of your designs by enrolling in Pragmatic Institute’s design courses. Our interactive and actionable courses will empower you to contribute strategically to your organization. Take advantage of this opportunity to transform your design skills.
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Cindy Brummer is the CEO and Creative Director of Standard Beagle Studio, an award-winning UX agency for digital B2B products that she built from the ground up. With a career beginning in TV news, she moved into UX design as the field was burgeoning and went on to teach a UX/UI bootcamp at the University of Texas at Austin.

In a conversation with host Rebecca Kalogeris, Cindy talks about her winding career path, navigating interpersonal dynamics in a consulting environment, and the nuances of UX design in B2B projects – when the end user trying to complete a task might be a developer using a platform to set up an integration or a nurse completing a clinical trial.

The two also discuss:

• Why teaching UX is like chicken sexing
• How Cindy builds alignment and trust with stakeholders, and brings them into decision-making, to ensure a project is successful
• Her guidance for new grads entering UX design, from reading widely to being comfortable with ambiguity
• Why she believes most personas are “total crap” and how she takes a behavior-first approach to creating personas
• The implications of AI on UX roles
• …and more

Are you a designer eager to level up your strategic impact? Pragmatic Institute’s Business Strategy & Design course is tailored to empower designers with the tools and knowledge to align their user-centered work with key business objectives.
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Unlock the power of storytelling in design. Engage teams, create alignment, and craft compelling narratives with Pragmatic Institute’s Influence Through Storytelling course.
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The article explores the challenges and solutions in bridging the gap between product managers and designers to foster better collaboration and improve product development outcomes.

For many product managers, design can feel like a black box. You provide the designer with information about the customer’s problem, wait a while, and—voilà!—creative work issues forth. Sometimes the output is amazing, elegant in its intuitiveness. But sometimes, the output doesn’t even approach the product manager’s expectations, creating a sense of frustration and wasted time. How did the design go off the rails, and how can both teams work together to get it back on track? Without mutual understanding and a focus on collaboration, reaching successful outcomes is harder.

Similarly, the role of the product manager can mystify designers. How do product managers prioritize their decisions and balance different factors based on a product direction? What methods do they employ to gather user insight, and how does empathy play into that process? Inconsistent experiences with different product managers can contribute to designers’ confusion around roles and frustration around collaboration. This “black box” understanding of each other’s functions can create real problems, like poor communication and lack of trust, and result in inferior product outcomes.

Transitioning from Mystery to Collaboration

How did we get here? For one, we’ve reached this crossroads from different paths, bringing along varied skills, vocabulary, and perspectives that muddy the waters of understanding. Plus, organizations often oversimplify the separation of roles and responsibilities. This lack of nuance and an emphasis on ownership can contribute to an us-vs-them mentality. Ideally, both design and product management take an outside-in approach to problem solving.

By breaking down walls and learning about our partners’ processes, we’ll find the key collaboration points that increase productivity and successful outcomes.

Designers and Product Managers Have a Lot in Common

In their ideal states, both design and product management take an outside-in approach to problem-solving. Over the years, both practices have evolved to understand buyers and users better, concentrating on research and problem-framing before building solutions. However, these practices evolved parallel, resulting in somewhat different approaches to identifying, articulating, and solving market problems.

Both practices have also found greater influence within the industry. Neither wants to give up their focus on understanding user problems—and they shouldn’t have to! There’s strength in multiple perspectives. Each group has superpowers that, when combined, act as a force multiplier for the products they work on. But first, they must understand each other better, applying the same curiosity that serves them in research to their cross-functional relationships. For product managers, let’s start by peering into the mysterious world of design.

What Designers  Care About

It might surprise you, but designers and product managers care about some of the same things. Let’s look at some of the common areas shared between these complementary roles.

Understanding People and Their Problems

To do their best work, designers crave a deep understanding of their target users. As Shannon likes to say, “Good designers often begin their work with a deep knowledge of design patterns and best practices, coupled with an intuitive sense of empathy. Over time, good designers become great by developing a rigorous curiosity about people.”

Designers apply empathy to step into the user’s shoes when imagining potential solutions. To activate their empathic powers, designers need deep user context: where the user is situated, what goals the user wants to achieve, who the user must collaborate with, what the user currently understands, and what decisions and actions the user needs to take with the information at hand. This desire for context frequently appears as a request to be “brought in earlier in the process.” Translation: Designers want to be included in discovery or given rich context on the user.

Framing Problems Before Jumping to Solutions

Designers employ problem-framing techniques to explore problems that have been identified and prioritized. These techniques inspire the generation of innovative solutions and offer criteria for evaluating those solutions. A well-framed problem helps designers activate their creative talents. So, designers may want to collaborate with product managers on reframing the market problems they have been given.

Exploring Multiple Potential Solutions

Experimenters at heart, designers pinpoint the best ideas by generating a multitude. Knowing that the first solution is rarely ideal, they try out various ideas and permutations before selecting the right one for the job.

There are specific methods for exploring alternatives individually and techniques for groups to generate and evaluate multiple ideas before settling on one. You can take advantage of this skill by dedicating time to the schedule for this approach.

Narrative and Storytelling

It’s common for both designers and product managers to use narrative and storytelling during product development. When it comes to designers, they craft stories in their heads to help them think through how the user might approach a product or a feature. These narratives are the easiest, cheapest form of prototyping: A designer can write a story that explains how the product helps the user solve a problem, stitch together multiple features into a coherent whole and use it to get others’ feedback—all before committing to build it.

Stories are also a compelling way to present work in progress, communicating the user’s perspective and ensuring the product experience is optimized for their goals.

Feedback and Refinement

Designers need feedback from colleagues and users on their designs to continually refine the solution to achieve the best possible fit. While they try to approach the problem from the user’s perspective, they may overlook some aspects of the problem in their solution. By giving productive feedback—grounded in the user’s context and problem—you help refine the solution.

What Designers Wonder About Product Managers

The role of a product manager comes with different goals, processes, and expectations than that of a designer. Understanding these differences can make it easier for each side to understand the priorities and challenges faced by each.

Business Expectations

Designers are used to adopting the user’s perspective, but only a select few have a deep grounding in business strategy. How can you provide a deeper context on the business goals you want to achieve to ensure the alignment of user and business needs?

Prioritization Approach

How do you decide what problems to solve and solutions to employ? How do you balance market data, business objectives, user needs, and technical considerations when choosing a path forward? Describing how you weigh these factors and, if possible, including them in the process (so they can see firsthand your rigor in understanding and prioritizing market problems) will help designers understand and buy into your decisions.

Data Sources

Product designers and researchers are steeped in user research practices. Consider partnering with designers on NIHITO user research: You’ll reap solid insights, and your designers will be fortified with the deep user context that inspires great work. Designers are less likely to be experienced in buyer research, so share your buyer insights with them, especially in cases where the buyer’s objectives might seem to conflict with the target user’s needs.

How You Like to Collaborate

This is a true unknown area for designers. Some product managers hand off interface sketches with a request to make them real. Others define the problem and simply hand it to the designer to generate the solution. Some are looking for a happy medium: the product frames the problem, collaborates with the designer to find a solution direction, and then leaves it to the designer to perfect the details, with conversations along the way. Start a dialog with your designer about how you both prefer to collaborate, and select a model that makes sense for your working styles, business environment, personalities, and project priorities.

How You’ll Negotiate Conflict Together

Conflict is inevitable, especially when approaching the same problem through different lenses. Making a plan for overcoming conflict ahead of time will minimize the potential stress in your relationship. What happens when the best solution for the user doesn’t address your business objectives? How will the two roles bring this up and work toward a resolution that satisfies all needs? What’s your plan for identifying conflict early, leaving you enough time to resolve it?

An Expanded View of Collaboration

The only way to understand each other is to work together more intentionally. Partner to set up consistent spaces to play in the sandbox together throughout the process—with the necessary tools to achieve alignment.

Create collaboration points as mechanisms for deeper communication and idea-sharing. The key is meaningful collaboration. Everyone is busy, so you’ll all want to be intentional about crafting the right cadence for partnership. Avoid getting sucked into the “quicksand” of over-collaboration. And it’s good to remember that conflict can have its benefits. You can mine diamonds from the pressure of divergent perspectives!

Moving from the black box to the sandbox will require transparency, communication, and effective collaboration. While focusing on relationship-building may require a small time investment upfront, it will pay dividends in the quality of the products you deliver and your team’s efficiency in achieving those market-winning, delightful solutions.

Training that Improves Your Approach to Business Strategy

The Business Strategy & Design course equips you to confidently contribute to strategy conversations by tying your design work to business outcomes and ensuring you can measure and communicate how design fits into the strategic landscape.

Pragmatic Design courses are developed for designers, by designers. They are facilitated by experts and built within Miro—an infinite canvas platform—for an immersive, interactive learning experience.

Learn More about our Business Strategy & Design Course

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Explore the Pragmatic approach to product innovation and learn about the three essential elements that teams need to achieve innovation.

We often mistake product innovation for invention—imagining it as a sudden spark of inspiration that reshapes industries. In reality, the most impactful innovations aren’t just creative or flashy; they solve real, pervasive market problems. Whether through small, incremental improvements or radical breakthroughs, successful product teams follow practical, repeatable processes to drive innovation. In this article, we’ll explore the different types of product innovation (with examples) and outline three essential elements that help teams turn great ideas into market-driven solutions.

Let’s explore how we achieve product innovation. Keep reading or use the links below to junk to a section that interests you.

• Defining Product Innovation
• Types of Product Innovation
  • Incremental Innovation
  • Sustaining Innovation
  • Disruptive Innovation
  • Radical Innovation
• Essential Elements of Product Innovation
  • Culture
  • Strategic Focus
  • Discipline

What is product innovation?

In business, innovation is the ability to conceptualize, develop, and deliver products, services, processes, and business models for customers in the marketplace. More specifically, product innovation involves developing new products or advancing existing products with features, technologies, designs, or other ideas. These innovations should that add value for the customer and solve pervasive market problems.

Pragmatic product development dictates that truly innovative products should be unique in their market, identifying new frontiers for products and advancing beyond what their competitive set has to offer. By putting the market’s needs first, we can develop processes for product innovation that are practical, structured, and repeatable.

Successful product innovation is based on market discovery and research and uses creative problem-solving, impactful design, technological prowess, and effective product management. With these processes, product teams conceptualize effective solutions to market problems and deliver those as finished products. Innovation is driven by a desire to solve customer problems, stay ahead of competitors, and drive business growth.

What are the types of product innovation?

Incremental Innovation: Incremental innovation involves small tweaks, optimizations, or improvements to an existing product. The goal of incremental innovation is to make small enhancements to the performance, usability, or efficiency of a product without fundamentally altering the core product.

Example of Incremental Innovation: While rear backup cameras may seem like a recent innovation, they were first introduced in the early 1990s in the Toyota Soarer sedan. After it was introduced to the market, many other car manufacturers incorporated rear backup cameras into new vehicle models. In 2018, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) required that all new vehicles have backup cameras to enhance visibility and improve safety. Since their first introduction in the 1990s, backup cameras have improved in their visibility, range of view, response time, and durability. These are the types of small, incremental improvements that improve the overall product and, in this case, improve public safety.

Sustaining Innovation: While incremental innovation focuses on making small improvements to improve customers’ experiences with a product, sustaining innovation focuses on enhancing a product to stay competitive in a changing market, meet shifting customer expectations, and maintain a position in the market. Essentially, sustaining innovation helps products stay competitive in changing environments. Without sustaining innovation, products and companies may fall behind and find it difficult to catch up with the rest of the market.

Example of Sustaining Innovation: Apple AirPods Pro 2 have expanded beyond the simple Bluetooth headphone offering that the first generation of AirPods presented. In subsequent generations of the product, Apple has introduced health-related features, such as hearing assistance. This is a continued execution of Apple’s strategy of introducing health-related enhancements to products like iPhone and Apple Watch.

Disruptive Innovation: Innovation that creates new markets or significantly disrupts existing ones by introducing simpler, more affordable, or more accessible alternatives. This type of innovation focuses on addressing the needs of underserved or untapped markets. This should not be an innovation for its own sake, but to significantly improve the available product offerings for existing market segments.

Example of Disruptive Innovation: The investing platform Robinhood disrupted traditional stockbroker services by providing a platform where novice investors could perform their own commission-free trades. This app didn’t fundamentally change the mechanics of investing, but it reconceptualized how stock trading could take place and, in developing a solution, changed who was able to invest in the stock market.

Radical Innovation: Groundbreaking advancements introduce entirely new technologies or paradigms, creating industries that didn’t exist before. To be successful, radical innovation requires careful market validation. Even the boldest innovations should be backed by evidence of pervasive market problems that require an urgent solution for which customers are willing to pay. Simply put, radical innovations are game changers.

Example of Radical Innovation: A recent example of a radical innovation in biopharmaceuticals is the advent of the mRNA vaccine. While traditional vaccines use inactivated viruses or viral proteins to inoculate vaccine recipients against illnesses, mRNA vaccines harnessed a new approach by instructing human cells to produce a harmless piece of the virus to produce an immune response. mRNA vaccines were developed rapidly in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and have demonstrated impacts on the speed to market of vaccines (reducing the timeline for vaccine development from years to months, even for new viruses). Additionally, the mRNA vaccine has applications for diseases that were previously thought uncurable, such as cancer and HIV.

The Pragmatic Approach to Product Innovation

While the types of product innovation are relatively consistent in the views of different frameworks and methodologies, the Pragmatic approach has some important caveats regarding innovation. First and foremost, market problems should be the starting point from which all innovation springs. Identifying market problems, validating them and understanding why they are worth solving, is essential to effectively innovating products. Beyond the mere problems that you want to solve, it’s important to understand who you are innovating for and how buyers and users might experience different problems. All products, features, and innovations should be prioritized according to the urgency and pervasiveness of the problems they solve and weighed against the market’s willingness to pay for a solution. By understanding these key factors, product teams can effectively prioritize

What are the essential elements of product innovation?

So, how can organizations achieve any or all of these types of innovation? There are three essential elements that can help set up organizations for successful, effective product innovation.

Element 1: A Culture of Innovation

A company’s culture is comprised of the behaviors, artifacts, and rules that influence how individuals behave within the company. This might include formal culture, including job descriptions, documented protocols, and organizational charts. Or, it can be informal, such as the social relationships and norms inside and outside the office. Together, these elements set the tone for whether a company innovates.

Effectively, culture is the tangible and intangible factors that influence how people behave. If a company culture encourages collaboration, questioning of norms, and experimentation, it likely has a culture of innovation. Companies with rigid organizational charts that discourage team members from sharing new ideas or testing new things likely do not have innovative cultures.

When companies fail to empower employees to innovate, then all other strategies to drive creative solutions will fail. Additionally, product innovation should be driven by the users the products will serve. Organizations should empower employees to engage with customers, investigate problems, and identify creative solutions to those problems. Individuals can influence culture by prioritizing marketing research and spending time with customers in the field. By spending time in the field, individuals can demonstrate that they prioritize the first-hand feedback and information that drives product innovation.

Finally, a culture of innovation must tolerate failure, because failure can present rich learning opportunities. The velocity of change in the marketplace may require an agile methodology or some other type of iterative process, rather than a long development cycle.

Element 2: Focus on Strategic Objectives

It’s not an effective use of time or resources to try to be everything to everyone. If we say “yes” to every new idea without considering the “why” behind the idea, we will be pulled in many different directions without delivering meaningful solutions.
In these situations, we are often responding to competitors’ actions, customers’ feedback, and higher-ups’ directives. In these situations, we are reactive, not strategic. These are not contexts in which innovation occurs.

There are many possible opportunities to pursue in the marketplace. The most successful organizations can discern what is valuable from what is merely distracting. For example, you might choose to focus on innovating for existing customers, attracting new customers within your target market, or pursuing new market opportunities. So, it’s important to decide where your time and energy is best spent. As a product manager or product marketer, if you respond to every individual request by building features, your strategy is probably reactive rather than focused.

If your company decides that in the next 18 months, 90% of its focus will be spent on existing customers and new customers, then your remaining resources will be focused on developing new ideas. That direction, however vague, provides a target for you to focus your team’s time and resources. When you can answer the question “Who are you going to delight, and what will you build to delight them?”, then you have achieved the necessary focus to innovate.

Element 3: Discipline to Follow Through

In these contexts, discipline is the ability to stay on track, delivering the products and features that meaningfully solve market problems. Even if an organization has an innovative culture, gathers insight and feedback from the market, and uses data to prioritize strategic objectives, that organization will fail to innovate if they don’t have the discipline to follow through on their plans.

Organizations that lack discipline run around in circles. The agile methodology was created to help teams respond to the velocity of change in the marketplace and incorporates requirements, design reviews, and user validation testing to manage those changing demands. Agile frameworks support iterative innovation by failing early, rapidly prototyping, and learning quickly.

However, because agile has so many activities and touchpoints there are incrementally more opportunities for people to come to the table with feedback and derail development. If your team makes changes before you’ve tested the original concept, you might find yourself in a position where you’ll never finish the project! For this reason, it’s essential to fully complete a sprint or iteration before considering new ideas or changes.

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User experience (UX) has many complex concepts, but the core principles are simple: Designers want to help users effectively and efficiently complete tasks. Read one designer’s explanation of how anyone – even kids – can understand UX best practices. .

A few months ago, I was faced with an interesting challenge. How do I explain UX to kids? My son’s kindergarten teacher asked me to share what I do after I drop my son off at school. I had to follow on the heels of one mother who is the vice principal of a middle school and another who is a professional stylist for children. My curious 5-year-old could enthusiastically recount in great detail what the other mothers do for a living and their impact on the world.

Thankfully, I believe my job impacts the way people work—and the world itself—by making workers more effective and productive. But I worried I would not be able to explain this meaningful work to my son and his classmates. After all, Caroline’s mother made her role come to life by taking my son’s class to her middle school, where they saw older students walking through the halls and visited her office. Wren’s always put-together mommy brought in clothes and a makeup bag she uses in professional photoshoots and showed photos and magazines where her work was featured.

Explaining UX to Kids

How could I explain that I create HR enterprise software to a group of rambunctious 5-year-olds? I pondered showing them some of the screens we had usability tested a few weeks back. Nope, that wasn’t going to hold their attention. The standard PowerPoint that I share with clients to explain user-centered design wasn’t going to cut it either.

I figured that I might not be able to explain creating experiences with enterprise software, but I could give the little ones a lesson in the basics of user experience. I decided to take a page (okay, maybe pages) out of Don Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things to aid my discussion and make it more hands-on and interesting for the class.

Here is the primer on how to explain UX to 5-year-olds, with some lessons for enterprise UX design sprinkled within.

UX Principle #1: Usefulness

UX Lesson for Kids: I started by showing the class a picture of a pair of rain boots with the toes cut out. “What do you think of these boots?” I asked the class. The children pealed with laughter. “Those rain boots won’t work!” “Your feet will get all wet!” I explained that these boots are exactly as they noted: not useful.

Lesson for UX designers: Make sure the products you design are useful and solve the user’s problem. Create solutions that don’t force users to use a workaround. This enables users to achieve their goals in a meaningful, productive way.

UX Principle #2: Call to Action

UX Lesson for Kids: Next, I reached for an iPad and showed a screen from a children’s game. I asked the class what they would click on to start this game.The eager class belted out that they would click on the green arrow. Instinctively, the children knew where to press to start the game.

Lesson for UX designers: Using bold, childlike imagery or text isn’t the solution for enterprise software, but the user interface must include a clear call to action for each task so that users may efficiently complete their work in the system.

UX Principle #3: Mental Model

UX Lesson for Kids: Next, we walked over to the light switch in the corner of the room. I asked the children, “How would you turn the light on?”

A number of the children burst out:

“To turn the lights on, you push it up!”

“The light switch works the same in my room!”

“You push down to turn the light off!”

I took a moment to explain that through use, we come to expect certain actions or tools to work in a consistent and known manner.

Lesson for UX designers: Design interfaces and experiences that match the user’s mental models. A mental model is an explanation of someone’s thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts, and a person’s intuitive perception about his or her own acts and their consequences. Mental models can help shape behavior and set an approach to solving problems (akin to a personal algorithm) and doing tasks.

Consistency is critical when selecting widgets or placing navigational objects on the user interface. A user must be able to complete tasks in an efficient manner; having known navigational or gesture patterns in place creates a seamless user experience.

UX Principle #4: Pain Points

UX Lesson for Kids: Next, I passed juice boxes around so they could touch and feel a physical object and provide feedback.

As the children tried to sip their juice, I heard a number of comments:

“Can you help me take my straw out of the wrapper?”

“I can’t put my straw in the box.”

“Can I have a tissue?”

After my end-user observation, I asked the thirsty kindergartners about the issues that arose with the juice boxes. The expert end users described their challenges:

• The straw can be hard to remove from the box.
• Putting the straw in the juice box is difficult; little fingers often tried to insert the wrong side of the straw into the box.
• The juice can easily spill when the student accidentally squeezes it.
• It’s hard to know if you have finished drinking the contents of the juice box.
• You can’t see what the juice looks like.

Lesson for UX designers: Understand your users. For enterprise software, your user might not be the person purchasing the software. Continuously improve the design of your product by testing it with end-users and understanding their wants, needs, and pain points.

UX Takeaways for Kids

My examples were complete and I had a bunch of sugar-happy students on my hands. I took a few minutes to explain the concepts we had discussed and experienced. Then, I summarized what I do at my work to the class: “I make sure that your mommies’ and daddies’ work can be done in the most effective and efficient manner possible.”

When my presentation was done, I left the school feeling that perhaps some design thinkers in the group might just have been inspired.

That night at dinner, my son said, “Mommy, I am glad you make it easier for people to do their work! Did you bring any of those extra juice boxes home?”

It goes to show you that everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten. And once in a while, it’s good to get a reminder of that simple approach to learning.

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