Critiquing design — a guide for product managers

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

A colleague inspired me to read “Discussing Design” by Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry. Really interesting (and quick) read — realized that I have a lot of thoughts on this topic given my own experiences as a product manager. I’ve been guilty of providing bad critique — and have evolved my technique over the years with the help of brutally honest feedback from my design partners. Offering some thoughts here in case my mistakes help others avoid them.

Before we discuss good design critique, I think it’s instructive to look at bad critique as a way to make the contrast clearer. Here are some examples and elements of bad critique:

• “Make it look like apple” (I’m cringing even as I write this)
• “Make it a tab nav instead of a hamburger” — very directive feedback on the design element in question
• “I don’t like it, try again” — no specific direction
• “My wife doesn’t like it” — based on personal biases or anecdotal evidence with low sample sizes
• Offering feedback just to look smart
• Trying to propose completely new alternate ideas
• Most importantly — not providing the why — or specifically the problem you’re trying to solve as you provide the critique

With this as a backdrop — lets take a look at elements of good critique

• The “why” is clear i.e. the critique lays out the problems with the design without necessarily getting into problem solving
• It is actionable — the designer has clear next steps
• It is focussed — on specific design choices and their impact on the goals for the product

Discussing Design offers a specific template for design critique, which I think is very effective:

• State the objective — use personas , scenarios, goals and principles
• Identify the specific design choice
• Is it effective in achieving the objective?
• Rationale for why or why not the choice of effective

Now that we’ve covered elements of good and bad critique — here’s my advice for product managers:

How to make critique more objective:

• As PMs, the single most important thing we can do to improve the design process is to be very clear on the goals for the product and how you would measure success.
• Another important contribution would be to build the tooling and instrumentation necessary for rapid A/B testing of various designs so that the team can quickly learn from real data instead of spinning on subjective arguments.

Ask clarifying questions

• Lead with questions ( on goals, objectives, alternates, constraints faced)
• Ask the designer where they are in the process, what you can help you with the most?
• As a PM — state what you think the problem can be — leave the solution up to the designer (remember — they are the ones with the advanced degrees in this space)

Beware of your own biases

• Beware of HiPPo (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)
• “You are not the user” — while you might identity with the design target, if you’re doing your job well — by definition — you know much more about the product and the space than the average person

How to deal with the emotional and human aspects of critique

• You don’t have to win every debate — pick your battles on what really matters
• Just because the design looks polished and high fidelity should not make you hold back from critique — ask where the designer is in the process, some designers just prefer to work that way
• Build a relationship with your design team — so that “hurting their feelings” doesn’t become a consideration
• Use live meetings instead of email / offline critique as much as possible — because of live nature of conversation and the back and forth required. Leverage video meeting technology in case of remote workers.
• Disagree and commit — your suggestions are not always going to be taken into account.
• Also talk about strengths of the design — I like the sandwich method (positive elements, opportunities, positive elements)

Finally, some advise for designers on how to work with product managers on critique

• Make sure that you internalize (and agree with) the goals of the product, timelines for the design and use cases / scenarios for the feature.
• Don’t become defensive during the critique
• Educate PMs in best practices for critique (they are not going to magically learn it on their own)

Signing off with one my favorite quotes about design