What is the difference between a product manager and an interaction designer?

We in product managers say that if we don’t think about the meaning of requirements, we’re just prototypes.

There happens to be a position where interaction designers just draw prototypes and obsess over them every day.

Students who are new to the product industry always have a question: Should I choose to be an interaction designer? As a product manager?

Or I hate being a product manager, could it be easier to be an interaction designer?

In our daily cooking, suppose we want to make a Sichuan dish (fried pork slices in fat pot). What do product managers and interaction designers do?

Product Manager:

The first step is to determine what ingredients we need for this dish. For example, green pepper, garlic, oil, salt, MONOsodium glutamate, cut pork belly, 5 minutes of time to stir fry, if the dish guests have requirements to put less pepper, then put some sugar to avoid too hot. Finally, the dish is successfully delivered to the guest’s mouth, whether it will receive five-star praise is uncertain, because it may be a fly restaurant.

Interaction Designer:

The interaction designer first gets the ingredients and what to do. Consider whether to cut the garlic sprouts first, green peppers first, or pork belly first.

Then, according to the custom of the guests, we cut down on the chili and gave them a beautiful plate to serve them on. They like it before they eat it. But whether or not you can get a 5 out of 10 rating depends on the taste.

Interaction designer is a position created by the gradual refinement of Internet product development. In domestic, entrepreneurial teams, small and medium sized teams, you can hardly find product managers who need to take interaction apart. Due to the limited cost of development resources and design resources, the product needs to be launched quickly and iteratively, so functions and requirements are the priority of the launch version. As for user experience and better smoothness, they are all considered in the later stage.

The picture above is an interaction draft. The product manager determines the framework layer (button layout), information layer (information flow scope), and scope layer (number of functional modules) of the current requirements, and the interaction designer has to implement the second version of the prototype drawing through the identified requirements, which we call low fidelity.

However, in practical work, interaction designers often have their own ideas and suggestions on requirements, which may lead to the most disputes with product managers. The product manager in the interaction designer team is not only communicating requirements with the development, interaction designers also need to be a part of the requirements communication.

As the product manager works longer and longer, the product manager develops from a single page or feature to a version plan and finally to a product line plan. It all starts with the product manager’s wireframes, features, pages.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Many product managers now become product designers, which is to design the product without thinking about it. The lack of thinking about the future of the product, the lack of thinking about the industry, the lack of thinking about the target users, the lack of thinking about the operation, the lack of thinking about marketing, the lack of thinking about the details of the product…… , etc.

We have to agree that it is getting harder and harder for product managers to create hit products through inspiration. The most reliable or learn from some good products, full groping and their different way may be the most reliable.

Daily project management, product acceptance, and how to solve business problems caused by the launch of products are all the concerns of product managers. Therefore, the core essence of the product manager is to shoulder all the problems of the product.

At the end of the conversation, one friend even cracked a really funny joke: “When I’m not working overtime, I’m a product manager. When I work overtime, I’m an interaction designer.”

In the product manager world, product people may work on a variety of teams. Therefore, no one should think of their work environment as the theoretical type of evening sharing.

Whether you’re just drawing pictures, managing projects, or testing, you’re a product manager. Atypical product manager.

Is each requirement reasonable and should be optimized with a data funnel model? Or directly kill a module, highlighting the business model, etc., are qualified product managers should pay attention to the two points.

Well, today’s original is here, I will update two or two work cases every week

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