From Silos to Partnership
Creating the PM + PD Discovery Framework
Role: Director of Product Design
Partners: Product Management Leadership, Sr. VP of Product (Executive Sponsor)
Impact: 124% increase in discovery output — research became a shared practice, not a design afterthought
The Problem
Product designers and product managers didn’t know how to partner on discovery. Where does PM’s work end and PD’s begin? Who leads interviews? Who owns the research plan? Without clear boundaries, teams defaulted to extremes, PMs doing all the discovery while designers waited for requirements, or designers running research in isolation. Either way, we stayed stuck in reactionary design, jumping to solutions before understanding the problem.
How We Approached It
I co-created a framework with a product management leader, with our Sr. VP of Product as executive sponsor, signaling this mattered to both design and product leadership. We talked to designer/PM pairs across the org and found they wanted structure, not more process — clarity on who owns what, without rigid steps that slowed them down.
So we built Discovery/Research Swimlanes — a visual showing PM and PD responsibilities across four phases of discovery, from planning through documentation. We tested it with a few teams, refined it, then my product peer and I co-led the rollout together. That joint ownership at the top set the tone for how teams should partner.
What Changed
Over the following year, discovery output rose 124% as teams made research a habit instead of an afterthought. The question shifted from “do we have time for research?” to “what research do we need?”
“We’ve effectively moved away from reactionary design and actually getting research done before the work needs to start.”
What I Learned
Co-creation builds adoption. When leaders from different functions champion something together, teams take it seriously. And clarity beats flexibility. Teams don’t need freedom to invent process, they need clear guardrails they can adapt to their own context.