UX designers who work for a well-established company cannot work in isolation, but need to work closely with a Product designer. A lot of people confuse these two roles, for the simple reason that there is a lot of overlap between them. However, we can summarise the distinction in one simple sentence:
Whereas a UX designer focuses on making the website as user-friendly as possible for the customer, a product designer takes into account the demands of both the customer and the company.
Let’s take an online casino as an example. The web design team behind the best online casinos will focus on creating a site that inspires customers to play, by making it easy to navigate the website and making sure that the site loads fast. On the other hand, the Product team would have a say on which games they should feature more prominently than others on the website, depending on which one of the company’s partners would pay the biggest commissions. So product would take things like budget, marketing and other business objectives into consideration, then work closely with web designers so these business priorities can be implemented in the site’s design.