When a startup first takes off, everyone wears multiple hats. The product leader might be drafting wireframes while making key product decisions. Design skills might be outsourced or handled internally by the product leader. It's a phase of necessary sacrifices and blurred roles, typical of startup life. But as the company grows, those blurred boundaries start to become limiting.

At some point, companies recognize that they need to scale their product practice and invest in new capabilities. Once designers are introduced into the mix, it’s common to experience friction. Product managers may still want to design—it’s something they’ve enjoyed and done well so far. But now, their time is better spent addressing broader business needs rather than working on UI interactions or wireframes. It's crucial to draw a clear line between these roles and help everyone make a successful transition into specialization.

So, how do we know where to draw that line? And how can we ensure both roles flourish without stepping on each other's toes?

A Framework for Drawing the Line

Below is a framework to help define the areas of responsibility for product managers and UX designers as an organization matures. It’s not a one-size-fits-all answer, but a starting point to iterate from as you learn what works for your business.

What Designers Do

When a UX designer joins a company, they bring a specialized skill set that focuses on the end-to-end user experience. Their responsibilities often include:

• Prioritizing User Needs: Ensuring the user’s perspective, behaviors, and attitudes inform the design process.
• Developing Content: Crafting interface content, defining content strategy, and conducting content inventories and audits.
• Mapping Information Architecture: Facilitating alignment on taxonomies, navigation schemas, and data models.
• Delivering UI Artifacts: Providing wireframes, mockups, and prototypes to stakeholders and engineers.
• Defining Visual Design: Determining how the product's look and feel reflects the needs and preferences of the market.
• Explaining Design Decisions: Articulating the rationale and impact the design choices have on the users and business.
• Facilitating Evaluative Research: Facilitating end-user research activities, synthesizing insights, and evaluating design choices.
• Optimizing the Design Process: Creating reusable components, patterns, and guidelines for consistency.

Shared Responsibilities

There are activities where the line between product management and UX blurs, and collaboration is key. These shared responsibilities include:

• Facilitating Generative Research: Collaborating in workshops, empathy mapping, user journey mapping, and ideation sessions.
• Planning Evaluative Research: Identifying research questions, deciding on areas of focus, and recruiting participants.
• Aggregating Customer Inputs: Collecting and organizing user data from within and outside the business to inform product and design decisions.
• Prioritizing Accessibility and Localization: Collaborating to ensure the product is usable for a diverse audience.
• Defining Metrics and Success: Defining success metrics that align with both business goals and user intent and demand.

What Product Managers Do

As organizations scale, product managers need to shift focus from executing design tasks to driving the product's strategic direction. Their responsibilities include:

• Defining Business Needs: Understanding the target market, defining requirements, and ensuring business objectives are met.
• Product Roadmap: Creating, maintaining, and communicating the product roadmap to stakeholders.
• Market Positioning: Evaluating competitive positioning and determining the product's differentiation strategy.
• Revenue and Business Outcomes: Determining pricing models, prioritizing features based on business impact, and estimating market potential.
• Feature Prioritization and Delivery: Deciding which features will be implemented, managing scope, and ensuring that development aligns with business needs.

Supporting the Transition

When product managers find themselves handing off design tasks, it can sometimes feel like a loss—a loss of creativity or hands-on influence over the user experience. Some product leaders may even discover they prefer designing over product strategy and choose to transition into UX roles. It’s important for leaders to recognize these feelings and help their teams navigate this transition. Supporting people through specialization means helping them understand the value of focusing on their core competencies.

Not everyone will embrace these changes, and some team members may ultimately decide that they prefer wearing multiple hats. In that case, it might be time for them to find a different organization where their contributions can be maximized. As your company grows, embracing specialization is often inevitable—and so is having a framework in place to define where roles begin and end at different growth stages.

Adapting to Change

This framework is meant to evolve. It’s a starting point for initiating productive conversations between product managers, designers, and leadership. Every company is different, and your approach to defining these roles should reflect the needs and culture of your organization. The goal is to create clarity, foster collaboration, and enable each role to do what it does best: product managers focusing on the business, and UX designers focusing on the end-user.