The Product Triad: Design’s Role

The product triad (also called the product trio or three-legged-stool model) is likely the most common pattern for organizing product teams in Agile organizations. Its fundamental goal is to structure collaboration between design, product, and engineering. The triad is composed of one representative from each function, working together on one product as equal partners.

Origins of the Product Triad: Desirable, Viable, Feasible

The product triad takes its roots from the early 2000s, when a set of principles for innovation began to emerge. These principles established that, to be successful, business ventures had to address three critical aspects: 

• People who would buy the product
• Process that would provide the product
• Technology that would make the product work 

IDEO popularized these principles in its DVF (Desirable, Viable, Feasible) framework: 

• Desirable: Any successful new product needs a market of people willing to use it.
• Viable: The business model needs to be sound over a long enough term to be profitable.
• Feasible: The company should be able to execute the idea behind the product.

The product triad has evolved since the 2000s (and will no doubt continue to evolve in the future), but the principles behind it have remained consistent. Understanding those principles is key for effective crossfunctional collaboration.

Defining the Product Triad

The product triad is a subset of a product team responsible for ensuring that the product covers all three of the DVF framework’s aspects. As its name suggests, the triad consists of three members: a designer, a product manager, and a software development lead. This is why the triad is sometimes called the three-legged-stool model — in contrast to a wobbly “two-legged stool” supported only by engineering and business.

There is a common misconception that the members of the triad each own one of the three aspects of the DVF framework: designers own the desirable component, developers own the feasible one, and the product team owns the viable component. In reality, the purpose of the product triad is to dissolve siloed ownership. Effective triads collaborate on achieving all three aspects; while one individual may lead on ensuring that the necessary decisions get made, the team owns the decisions jointly.

Understanding the Other Roles in the Triad

If you’re the designer in a product triad, it’s important that you understand the other two roles involved in the triad so that you can effectively collaborate across functional silos. Far from being impediments to realizing the design vision, the software engineering lead and product manager are your most valuable partners in creating value for your users.     

The Software Engineering Lead

The engineering lead will be the most senior engineer on the development team assigned to the product. In addition to writing code, the engineering lead will also represent the product team when coordinating with other software engineering teams across the company.

The engineering lead will be the main voice when estimating the complexity of any development work that needs to be done. This is not solely an issue of feasibility — a lot of engineering work is feasible with unlimited time and budget, but it’s also about understanding viability — whether the necessary amount of work would be justified by the business value produced in the long run.

As a result, the engineering lead has a lot of influence when it comes to determining the final state of the user experience, through establishing the possible scope of what can be achieved.

The Product Manager

The product manager is the main interface between the product team and the rest of the business. As such, they are responsible for keeping the product viable from a business perspective. On revenue-generating products, this means ensuring that the product is paying for itself. On other products, such as internal tools, this means justifying the investment in the product through visible productivity increases or the support provided to profit centers within the business. 

To keep the triad aligned with business strategy, product managers collaborate extensively with business stakeholders to define success criteria for the product. These criteria take the form of metrics and requirements: 

• Requirements are specific outputs that stakeholders expect from the product team. 
• Metrics are measurable outcomes of the team’s work. 

Most metrics track user behavior, so a product manager needs to have a good understanding of how users interact with the product and how changes to the product will impact that interaction. On product teams with no dedicated user researcher, some product managers take on this role to ensure that the product is desirable to customers.

The product manager is responsible for determining what the team should work on to achieve the established success criteria. Their work involves scoping (deciding how much work needs to be done on a feature) and prioritization (deciding when that work should get done). Typically, the priority and scope of work will be recorded on a product roadmap, which the product manager negotiates with business stakeholders.

Design’s Role in the Product Triad

While many specializations of design exist within the industry, the designer in the product triad is most likely to be a product designer — bringing a holistic design skillset that encompasses both user research and high-fidelity UI design. Depending on the structure of the company, the product designer may be able to rely on specialist support from researchers, content designers, design ops, and other related disciplines.

In the same way that the product manager keeps the product aligned with the goals of the business, the designer keeps the product aligned with the needs of the user across all touchpoints of the user journey. The designer is responsible for defining the desired experience, and making sure that the experience delivered by the product team conforms to that vision. While the designer in the triad will not need to build any part of the product themselves, they do have to work closely with every role involved in doing so, including business stakeholders. 

An effective product designer is key to the autonomy of the product triad. The designer must demonstrate that the team is capable of identifying and addressing user needs. Triads in which the designer does not use user-centered insights to drive stakeholder alignment end up acting based on stakeholder assumptions and building the wrong thing.

As the three aspects of the DVF model (desirability, viability, and feasibility) are still frequently used throughout the industry, it’s useful to break down how design contributes to each one.

The Role of Design in Desirability

Desirability is the value of the product to the user. To be desirable, the product must be both usable and useful — meaning that it should allow the user to solve a relevant and important problem. Products that rely entirely on visual appeal to attract and retain users rarely succeed. 

For the product to be useful, the product team must understand a range of user problems and choose the most important one to solve. Since this is a prioritization task, it naturally falls under the product manager’s area of responsibility. Product managers attempt to balance business value with user value when framing a problem for the product team to solve.

In that context, the responsibility of the designer in the product triad is to articulate that problem for the rest of the triad and become the authority on user needs. Through sharing a clear picture of user needs, the product designer ensures that the team prioritizes work capable of creating user value, and therefore business value.

Conducting user research is critical for discovering user problems and assessing their importance. The product designer may do the research themselves or serve as the product triad’s interface with a user researcher. 

The Role of Design in Viability

A viable product needs to be profitable — that is, it needs to enable revenue-generating user behaviors. Depending on the business model, that revenue could be either linked directly to user behavior (e.g., ad views from visiting a page) or indirectly linked to it (e.g., a user enjoying the product and, therefore, renewing their subscription). Since product viability is impacted by user behaviors, it falls partly within the product designer’s area of responsibility. At a minimum, the designer must understand the business objectives so that they can make informed design decisions. 

This also means that, as the designer develops the design vision, they should make clear the connection between the product and business objectives. If functional requirements drawn from stakeholder assumptions conflict with those objectives, the design vision will be the first opportunity to expose that conflict, as a step in persuading the stakeholders that their requirements need to change.

The Role of Design in Feasibility

The implementation of a product vision can be a source of significant conflict. Software engineers will push back against a vision that is unclear or overly ambitious. Mismatches between the designer’s vision and the engineering team’s understanding of that vision can also lead to unnecessary rework and delays. These issues frequently arise when teams practice a handoff approach, with completed high-fidelity designs being handed to engineers for implementation. Part of the product triad’s effectiveness comes from involving the lead software engineer directly in the design process, to ensure that the final vision is both clear and achievable. The flipside is that the product designer also needs to be involved in the definition of the backend, to make sure that it will successfully serve frontend needs.

The design vision will always need to evolve alongside the development work. As the engineering team works through the technical requirements for implementing the design vision, it will inevitably discover edge cases or exception states that the product designer has not anticipated. Only close collaboration can ensure that the designer catches and fixes these gaps in a timely manner.

Conclusion

The three functional roles — product, design, and engineering — have many responsibility overlaps when it comes to delivering valuable products. This means that any one role’s range of responsibilities will flex depending on circumstances. To maximize the value of the product, designers should embrace opportunities for collaboration, rather than attempt to establish hard role-based boundaries for individual ownership of the three aspects of product value.