Learnings from the Product Trio

I started working with the concept of Product Trio a couple of years ago after reading Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres. I has previously stumbled upon it in Marty Cagan's book Inspired but didn't have a framework to apply it. The concept is that you gather a Product Manager, Designer and Engineer in your cross-functional product team to guide the discovery work. It is supposed to enhance efficiency and make sure the work and direction is grounded in Business viability, Value, Usability and Feasibility.

Who should be in the Trio

Each member of the Product Trio brings a unique and essential perspective to the discussion.

Together, these roles form a balanced decision-making body, ensuring that the team’s efforts are both ambitious and achievable while maintaining user-centricity. This should be the base of your Product Trio and therefore the name.

Product Trio can be expanded

You might also want to expand the Trio depending on your business and the team formation. For example in a growth team you might want to include your data analyst. In a highly domain specific space, such as an accounting product, you might want to involve a domain expert such as an accountant or similar to be the expert of that aspect.
Don't strive to include to many though since it will be more slow moving. You want to get forward in these discussion and not having them being an administration project with to many voices.

Why have a Product Trio?

The reason why the Product Trio has been a great addition in my team stem from the fact that as a PM it's hard to know when to take time from the team. Both designers and engineers have a great need to have their focus time to get work done so you want to keep respect of that. But if you try to plan forward without the experts in usability and feasibility you will end up having to guess a lot which make that planning quite ineffective and less valuable.
So when you have a recurring time and place for a Product Trio session you don't need to constantly think about when it's the best time to discuss these matters and try to get everyone in the same room.

What Product Trio is so important for me is that I know that I first hand discuss feasibility and usability with these two people and that they are in the room with me at the same time. That doesn't mean that you need to wait until these times to discuss them but if it's not urgent and a bit more proactive then I sometimes wait to bring it up with these people during the Product trio.

Product Trio vs The Team

My strong belief is that every engineer in the team could contribute to the discovery. But to involve all engineers for all planning is not the most efficient way of moving forward in the best way. So choosing the Tech lead to be part of the Product Trio will make sure that the team can focus without being disturbed with future planning constantly.

Make drafts and suggestion, let the team challenge it
My mental model is that the work that gets done in the Product Trio is the draft to move forward. Whatever is suggested or decided I view as something that can still be challenged when we run it by the team for validation and input. From my experience by having a suggestion of moving forward is easier to give feedback to than doing everything by the team from scratch. This way we get a direction forward that can be tweaked together with the team in other sessions such as stand up's, sprint planning, product discovery meetings.

Focus on Transparency.
If would suggest to make it a habit to run by important direction and ideas from the Product Trio in the following Stand up for transparency. You don't want to make the team feel like they are in the dark on what's goes on in these session but rather saves them time and make them be able to focus on their work and give their input where it matters the most.

How to run a Product Trio session?

This is what I think all the books often leaves out because it is so specific. The authors of books often needs to be a bit more generic because they know Product teams works in many different way. So the first Product Trio session I had this was on the topic of discussion. How do we actually run these session? What should I add as the meeting note for our recurring session?

Keep it simple
What we have as a standing agenda in the top of our document is the following bullet points:
1. OVERVIEW OF OBJECTIVES AND KEY METRICS
‍2. HOW DO WE MOVE FORWARD?
‍This seemingly simple questions will make sure you know what you are working towards and the secondly, question how we move forward.
They way we run the session is that before the session everyone can add their own topics on a backlog list. When we start the session we go through the agenda and reorder the topics based on importance. Then we start discussing them.

You as a PM should run the session
I think it's important that it's the PM who run this session. But that doesn't mean that they do all the talking but they are responsible that the discussions are on topic and make sure the meeting run smoothly.

Discovery + Delivery: Two Parallel Tracks

The dual-track agile approach keeps both Product Discovery and Delivery in motion simultaneously. Discovery focuses on what to build, while Delivery brings those insights to life by actually building it. This synergy ensures that the solutions delivered are user-focused and practical.