What product managers actually do and why they important for understanding the user experience? We will present our paper, “Strategies of Product Managers: Negotiating Social Values in Digital Product Design” at CHI’2024.

The paper is published and can be accessed here.

The paper, written by Eilat Lev Ari, Maayan Roichman and Eran Toch, describes a mixed-methods research that analyzes the decision-making processes of product managers with regard to users’ well-being and other ethical decisions.

Product managers coordinate digital development teams, design and prioritize features, but the extent of their influence on user experience, particularly in embedding social values into product architecture, has been under-explored.

We used a mixed-methods approach, with semi-structured interviews (n=20) and an online survey (n=81), with product managers based in Israel (yeah, and you can imagine the review).

We identified four unique strategies used to balance the inherent tensions of their work. The survey data substantiates the prevalence of these strategies across diverse sectors, confirming they reflect industry-wide approaches in the Israeli tech sector rather than isolated practices.

A concrete contribution of our work is to identify and quantify the use of KPIs that measure ethical and wellbeing outcomes of the product managed by our participants.We found several cool ones, such as a startup that measures and minimize the harm to traditional industries.

More information on the CHI program and in this blog post.