When UX Feels Broken, Troubleshooting as a Product Manager

If product managers are plumbers 🪠, then designers are often the water engineers: you shape the flow, PMs patch the leaks. But here’s the thing—sometimes what looks like a “technical bug” is really a UX bug.

A confusing button label, a layout that hides a key action, or a flow that “works” technically but doesn’t work in the user’s head… all of those create the same effect: users feel like the product is broken.

Troubleshooting isn’t just an engineering task. It’s where PMs and designers meet in the messy middle—figuring out whether the pain is in the code, the flow, or the expectation gap.

Here are 5 ways I’ve found design + PM teams can troubleshoot together:

1. Treat UX confusion like any other incident

If users are “misclicking” or “getting lost,” log it. Write a ticket. Reproduce it. Treat usability breakdowns with the same seriousness as crashes.

1. Use customer signals as early warning

Support tickets, app store reviews, or tweets that say “this app sucks” aren’t noise—they’re the earliest signs of friction. Instead of shrugging, translate them into testable hypotheses: what’s the user expecting here?

1. Quick, scrappy usability tests > polished mockups

Polished Figma files can be comforting, but they won’t reveal where users stumble. Five scrappy tests on a prototype (or even a live product) often surface more “aha” insights than weeks of pixel-perfect design.

1. Don’t stop at “user error”

If 10 people misuse a feature, it’s not user error—it’s a design bug. Map out where users go off track. Segment by flow, version, or context. Most “weird behavior” becomes obvious once you zoom in.

1. Close the loop with the user

Fixes aren’t finished when the PR merges. Announce changes, show how you tested, and follow up on feedback. “We heard you, we fixed it” builds trust—and turns frustrated users into advocates.

Why This Matters

In product teams, PMs often chase stability while designers chase usability. But in reality, both break in similar ways: unexpected changes, confusing signals, unclear definitions of “done.”

When PMs and designers treat troubleshooting as a shared craft—not just a firefight—we uncover root causes faster, avoid shallow fixes, and design products that feel resilient instead of fragile.

Try this: Next time your team runs a postmortem, invite design. Ask: was this really a technical failure, or did UX play a role? You’ll be surprised how often the answer is both.