I told her what’s happened today and yesterday, and told her about my concerns and frustration.

She said, “That team is malfunctioning. They need to sort it out.”

She said, “You did nothing wrong.”

She told me that I should not feel bad about what’s happened in the meeting because I did nothing wrong.

I am so glad that she is my manager.

Of course we want to do more than just reskinning, but I wasn’t given the chance to. The PM managing this product (PM S) obviously cares more about the “outdated look”, while yesterday his manager said it shouldn’t be just about making things pretty and he’s fine with how it is right now if it works.

I agree, but we need DATA to identify improvement opportunities.

I’ve been so frustrated because it’s really hard to do any real design improvement without any user data. After the meeting yesterday, although I didn’t look good, at least all the resources seem to be within reach suddenly.

I was still frustrated that I wasn’t able to make the influence myself though.

But today, another PM (PM N) told me that the conclusion of the meeting today should be that we’re going to shift focus to the new platform and put the redesign aside.

Wait, then what about the opportunities we talked about yesterday that could help us really improve the UX of the product?

I asked if the users of the new platform are the same as the other product, he said no, which means I cannot gather information from those users to help me design for the new platform.

He said he’s working on the documentation, and he wanted my next step to be designing the first module of the new product.

How… how am I supposed to design a product that I don’t really understand? Even the PM of it doesn’t really have a full picture of it, right? He just said he’s going to write the doc.

I spent time on reviewing my notes taken from the meeting this morning and organized it in a FigJam file. After doing these, I still didn’t feel comfortable designing any mockups for it. That’s when I decided that I should ask my manager for help.

She responded instantly, so we had a call.

I told her about the meetings today and yesterday, and told her what I thought about these things. She then asked me what I felt.

I honestly told her that I was frustrated after the meeting yesterday because I was unable to navigate through the challenges by myself, but I was also glad that, because of the PM S’s manager’s intervention, all the resources I’d been longing for seemed to be available now.

So I spent the rest of yesterday on planning what I should do next, thinking that I could discuss more with PM S in the meeting today. However, I only remembered that S was going to be out the entire next week, and forgot that he’s actually out starting TODAY.

In the meeting this morning, PM N talked about the new platform. After asking him lots of questions to understand this new thing, I asked if we’re going to shift focus to this platform or we’ll do it and the already ongoing redesign in parallel. He said the new platform should be our focus now.

PM C, who reports to PM S, was not in the meeting yesterday, and I don’t know how much he knows about it. He said we could still work on the redesign and we could review updates in the regular meetings next week even if PM S would be out. PM N said he thought the redesign should be put aside now.

So… yeah it seems like there’s a problem with their team communication. They’re not align on priorities.