How to help a development-oriented Product Manager understand that UX is important?
I work as a UX Designer in an IT company. The company is still very developer-oriented with a low level of UX Maturity. The team consists of two designers (me included) and 4 developers.
We have been building a software using the Scrum method, and a new manager (from a developer background) has just arrived a couple of months ago. He has pressure from above to keep adding new features to the software, but as we had rushed to finish the 1st version of the software for its launch, there is a lot of UX debt to cover (we want to improve most of the pages and improve+align our style guide across the site).
The stakeholders themselves want the software improved but the manager has not included time in the roadmap for such improvements and has suggested, in order to keep up with the roadmap for the new features, that developers work directly on them without any wireframes from our part!
How can we make the manager understand the value of our UX work and the importance of accounting for continuous UX improvement of the software?
Some things I have already been doing in the past months for this project are:
- Sharing usability testing results with stakeholders+developers
- Explaining (to stakeholders) the reasons behind design decisions/changes when presenting new wireframes
- Gathering stakeholders' feedback on the current version of the software
- Talk about our design process and its steps in general