Bringing quality products to market requires the collective input of the engineering, product, and design teams. Here’s how this trifecta model can make your company more effective and efficient.
Key takeaways:
- A trifecta brings the engineering, product, and design teams together to ensure effective and efficient product delivery.
- It clarifies responsibilities and the direction of the project to ensure everyone does their job well.
- Because a trifecta model encourages autonomy and resource sharing, your organization can move quickly when building and operating products at scale.
- The best way to build an intuitive product is to involve all three teams from the start while always paying attention to different users’ perspectives.
- Identifying dependencies that can go wrong with your trifecta and planning around them can ensure the smooth execution of your strategy.
- Companies must adopt emerging technologies like AR and AI and make them part of their strategy to stay competitive in the long run.
Product development can be a lot like spinning plates. Not only must you design and build software correctly, but you must also ensure it’s a good fit for the target market, encourage new and existing users to adopt it, and confirm proper customer support and documentation is in place. As such, things can quickly get overwhelming without clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
At Shockoe, we build our teams around the concept of trifectas, with three leads – across the product, design, and engineering functions – that have clear accountability. We believe aligning these roles at all times is essential because pretty much every decision you make impacts them.
In this article, we’ll walk you through what a trifecta structure looks like and how to effectively bring products to market. Let’s dive in.
What is a trifecta?
A trifecta is a model where a product manager, tech lead, and design lead work closely to ensure their respective teams are doing their jobs well and moving in the right direction to achieve a common goal. It consists of three autonomous teams:
- Engineering: The tech lead, together with the engineering team, ensures the product is being built correctly – this includes everything from what needs to be done from an architectural level to the quality of code and tests.
- Product: Led by the product (or project) manager, the product team identifies the right opportunities and decides which problems to solve. This can include building a new product or iteratively improving an existing one.
Other activities that the product team performs include roadmap and milestone planning, prioritization of software efforts, running retrospectives, estimation, backlog refinement, and linking the trifecta to the broader organization to identify and solve issues. - Design: The design team focuses on delivering the right experience for users. Usually, this means building a product that’s intuitive and easy to interact with.
Adopting the trifecta model can ensure you have the vision, structure, and flexibility to execute your product development strategy effectively and efficiently. First, it gives your teams the autonomy to move quickly and build and operate products at scale without relying on top-down decision-making.
Second, it enhances stability by building role specificity and expertise while providing a solid foundation for building new products through a defined pool of resource sharing.
Finally, an engineering, product, and design trifecta creates transparency and clarity, helping all stakeholders understand the requirements and direction of a project to drive the desired results.
How can you build more intuitive products?
Building intuitive products is a shared responsibility of the engineering, product, and design teams. So, it’s essential to involve all stakeholders from the start. While many companies only involve the design team – UX and product designers – after the product manager has developed a plan for functionality and features, the best approach is to make design central to the product throughout the development pipeline.
Even with the strengths of the trifecta model, coming up with the right design can still be daunting as there’s no universal solution to every user’s needs. While there’s no hard and fast rule for building intuitive products, it’s usually a good idea to get a sense of the product from the perspective of different users.
Getting your intended users to try the product can help you understand how people will interact with it, how they handle the experience, and what’s important and unimportant to them while ensuring your product achieves its metric goals.
For example, if they’re paying a bill, buying groceries, or following a golf tournament, how are they viewing the world when they’re doing it? Are they having trouble finding the tools they need to complete tasks?
Your product should be easy to use regardless of the complexity of the problem it solves. Customers must understand how a product works with little effort for successful adoption. Otherwise, they’ll just use it once and switch to a better alternative.
Shockoe can help you become more innovative in keeping customers first. Schedule a call with our experts to learn how we can help you build intuitive products.
How should you plan for dependencies that are out of your control?
In any environment, dependencies that aren’t within your control – such as another team delivering on schedule, a technology becoming available, or even the risk of attempting things you haven’t done before – will always cause issues. Therefore, it’s a good idea to be ready for potential delays. Usually, the best way to mitigate these dependencies is to identify what could go wrong and strategize around it ahead of time.
How will emerging technologies impact app design and development?
We are entering a fascinating stage with the advent of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR). These new technologies are changing how we work and unlocking previously unseen product design and development opportunities.
PwC predicts the augmentation of product design and enablement of new techniques will simplify and shorten development pipelines, increasing GDP by at least $359.4 billion by 2030. AR not only makes it possible to organize workflows and processes more efficiently, but it also improves collaboration by facilitating location-independent interactions.
Similarly, AI will significantly accelerate design exploration and improve curation ability. With generative tools built around AI, the time spent on exploration can go from a week to five minutes, allowing you to generate, pick, and test design ideas faster.
What does this mean for the future of your business? For starters, you must look at how to incorporate these emerging technologies into your strategy to stay competitive in the long run. In addition, you must adapt to designing and developing products at a faster pace.
If this sounds challenging and you’re unsure where to start, partnering with a digital products expert can help get your foot on the right track.
Introducing trifectas into your organization
The trifecta model is a simple but powerful tool. Designing your team around it can ensure everyone is on the same page from the beginning and help you bring quality products to market quickly. It boosts collaboration across the engineering, product, and design teams and can also breed accountability and clarity about decision-making and responsibility.
If you would like to introduce trifectas into your organization and build products the right way for your target market, Shockoe can help. Schedule a call with our experts to learn more.
