> They act as stand-ins for actual users and will flag all sorts of usability problems

True, but it raises another question, what were your Product Managers doing in the first place if tech writer is finding out about usability problems

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drob518 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, product managers and product owners should also be looking for usability problems. That said, the docs people are often going through procedures step by step, double-checking things, and they will often hit something that the others missed.

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dxdm 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Realistically, PMs incentives are often aligned elsewhere.

But even if a PM cares about UX, they are often not in a good position to spot problems with designs and flows they are closely involved in and intimately familiar with.

Having someone else with a special perspective can be very useful, even if their job provides other beneficial functions, too. Using this "resource" is the job of the PM.

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the_other 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm with the grandparent comment.

> But even if a PM cares about UX,

How can a PM do their job if they don't *care* about UX?

I mean... I know exactly happens because I've seen it more than once: the product slowly goes to shit. You get a bunch of PMs at various levels of seniority all pursuing separate goals, not collaborating, not actually working together to compose a coherent product; their production teams are actively encouraged to be siloed; features collide and overlap, or worse conflict; every component redefines what a button looks like; bundles bloat; you have three different rendering tools (ok, I've not seen that in practice but it seems to be encouraged by many "best practices") etc etc

	▲	dxdm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, I agree completely with you, sorry if that wasn't clear. The PM should, must, care about UX. Still, they don't always do, or at least end up not caring eventually, for various reasons. I'm just responding to this: > what were your Product Managers doing in the first place if tech writer is finding out about usability problems They might very well be doing their job of caring about UX, by using the available expertise to find problems. It's a bit like saying (forgive the imperfect analogy): what are the developers doing talking about corner cases in the business logic, isn't the PM doing their job? Yes, they are. They are using the combined expertise in the team. Let's allow the PMs to rely on the knowledge and insights of other people, shall we? Their job already isn't easy, even (or especially) if they care.

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eszed 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I take your point, but a good PM will have been inside the decision-making process and carry embedded assumptions about how things should work, so they'll miss things. An outside eye - whether it's QA, user-testing, (as here) the technical writer, or even asking someone from a different team to take an informal look - is an essential part of designing anything to be used by humans.