Why UED Matters: Defining Its Role and Boosting Product Success

UED's Positioning: On the basis of serving product commercial goals, UED controls and promotes the product's user experience.

Relationship with Product Management (PD): PD aims to drive commercial value, while UED focuses on user value; the two are complementary because satisfying user value is a means to achieve commercial value, though not the only one. Other departments such as development, operations, and BD also contribute.

Using an analogy, PD is like a president, and other functions are like economic, military, and foreign affairs departments. The president makes decisions based on professional advice, and everyone must cooperate to execute those decisions and advance the nation's development.

UED's Concerns:

1. Feeling dispensable: The industry now expects product managers to understand user experience, and many companies emphasize UX across all levels. However, UED remains essential because it provides specialized research, decision‑making support, and performance accountability that product managers alone cannot fully cover.

2. Why the feeling arises: It often stems from insufficient UED capabilities. If a UED professional lacks deep requirement‑digging skills, user insight, thorough preparation, or strong communication and persuasion abilities, product managers may distrust or ignore their recommendations, rendering the UED role invisible.

How to Realize UED Value:

1. Recognize the core essence described above.

2. Be more perceptive and thorough: Quickly uncover the true nature of needs, the product manager’s real goals, and user pain points. Go beyond surface phenomena to identify underlying problems and propose solutions that are more rational and impactful.

3. Possess strong driving power: Understand that unimplemented proposals are ineffective. Ensure your solutions are well‑grounded, clearly articulated, and convincingly presented to product managers, downstream teams, and leadership, especially when balancing commercial and user value conflicts.

4. Build trust to enable cooperation: Like a reputable consulting firm, consistently demonstrate reasoned, reliable solutions in both work and daily interactions, because trust is the foundation for collaborative success.

In conclusion, many UED practitioners, including the author, have yet to fully embody these principles, but continuous learning and sharing can help the community advance together.