By Andrew Park | 2024-11-1
In a recent conversation with David Luke, Agile Alliance board member, he pointedly criticized a common mindset that often divides product and engineering teams: “I don’t tell you how to run the business; you don’t tell me how to code.” This way of thinking fuels a separation that limits collaboration and constrains innovation, resulting in teams that are misaligned and products that miss the mark.
The Problem with “Stay in Your Lane” Thinking
When product, design, and engineering teams work in silos, each focusing on their own objectives without close collaboration, the result is often disconnected goals, limited innovation, and rising frustration. Product managers may feel that engineers aren’t prioritizing user needs, while engineers may feel overlooked in strategic decisions. This lack of alignment frequently leads to rework, delays, and ultimately, products that miss the mark. The product trio model counters this by integrating these roles into a unified team that collaborates continuously, fostering innovation, reducing misalignment, and ensuring that every decision is balanced across user needs, technical feasibility, and business goals.
Breaking Down Silos: The Missionary Mindset
David Luke’s critique underscored the need to break down silos, turning engineers from task-driven “mercenaries” into “missionaries” invested in the product. As legendary VC John Doerr once said, “we need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries”—people who innovate with purpose. Achieving this requires a product trio approach, uniting product, design, and engineering in shared ownership and mission.
Why Dual-Track Agile Isn’t the Same as a Product Trio
Dual-track Agile separates discovery (led by product and design) from delivery (led by engineering), with a typical buffer of 3-4 sprints between the tracks. While this approach keeps a steady flow of refined stories and tasks ready for implementation, it relies on distinct roles and periodic handoffs rather than continuous, integrated collaboration. This separation can make engineers feel more like “mercenaries,” focused on executing tasks without deeper involvement in the product’s vision or purpose, leading to less engagement and alignment.
Furthermore, dual-track Agile can actually reduce agility. With work queued several sprints ahead, there’s less flexibility to respond to new insights or changing priorities. Adjustments often require reworking tasks already set up in the delivery queue, slowing down the process and limiting responsiveness to feedback.
The product trio, by contrast, brings product, design, and engineering together as a single, collaborative unit from the outset. This model keeps all three roles actively engaged across both discovery and delivery, functioning as a unified team that continuously iterates based on real-time feedback. Instead of preparing stories in separate tracks and then passing them along, the product trio works together to shape solutions from the start, making early and frequent adjustments without the need for handoff between discovery and delivery phases. This continuous collaboration fosters a “missionary” mindset, with each team member fully invested in the product’s mission and aligned in their efforts, enabling greater agility and responsiveness.
Moving Beyond Handoffs: The Product Trio as a “Synchronized Dance”
In traditional product development, work often flows like an assembly line, with handoffs occurring primarily between product, design, and engineering teams. Product managers typically begin by writing user stories, which are primarily intended for engineers. These user stories capture requirements from a user’s perspective, describing the “what” and “why” behind a feature without specifying “how” it should be built. This approach guides engineers in developing functionality that aligns with user needs and business goals, offering clarity on the feature’s value and objectives.
While designers may reference user stories to understand functional requirements, they generally work from separate design briefs or use cases. These documents provide deeper insights into visual and interaction elements, allowing designers to focus on the aesthetic and user experience aspects of a feature. Once the design team has created user flows, wireframes, and prototypes, their work is handed off to engineering. Engineering then builds the product according to both the technical requirements and the design specifications. This segmented, sequential process often limits early cross-functional input, leading to misalignment, rework, and missed opportunities for collaborative problem-solving.
The product trio, however, operates more like a synchronized dance. In this model, product managers, designers, and engineers move in harmony, anticipating each other’s needs, balancing each other’s strengths, and collaborating continuously. The trio’s joint participation ensures that every decision reflects a balance of user needs, technical feasibility, and business goals, creating a unified approach that aligns with Doerr’s vision of mission-driven teams, where each team member is fully invested in the outcome.
Real-Time and Simultaneous Collaboration Across Roles
The product trio model replaces sequential handoffs with real-time, simultaneous collaboration across product, design, and engineering, supported by appointing a “Flex Engineer”—an idea I’ve implemented on my product engineering teams since 2010 after meeting Tom DeMarco, who introduced me to the concept of maintaining spare capacity in development teams. I formalized this role as the Flex Engineer, and since then, it has been a continuous pillar for boosting business agility on my teams. This engineer is available for continuous cross-functional input, ensuring ongoing alignment without involving the full technical team, whose focused work demands minimal disruption. By defining problems together, providing continuous feedback, and refining solutions collectively, the trio maintains alignment and adaptability, balancing user needs, technical feasibility, and business impact while minimizing rework.
Aligning on Shared Goals and Recognizing Cross-Functional Successes
For effective collaboration, the product trio defines shared goals and unified metrics, creating a sense of collective ownership. Regular planning sessions and progress check-ins keep everyone aligned and ensure the team can adapt quickly, with unified KPIs reflecting the trio’s impact on user satisfaction, time-to-market, and feature adoption. To reinforce this collaborative culture, organizations should also recognize cross-functional successes by celebrating impactful projects and rewarding collaborative behavior. Sharing wins and gathering retrospective feedback demonstrates the value of teamwork, encouraging teams to sustain a unified mission and collaborative mindset.
A New Model for Better Product Outcomes
David Luke’s critique of the “stay in your lane” mentality and John Doerr’s call for “teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries” underscore a valuable insight: the traditional, siloed approach limits what product, design, and engineering teams can achieve. Moving beyond handoffs and embracing the product trio model allows teams to collaborate more effectively, making each step of the product journey informed by all three perspectives.
In this unified approach, product, design, and engineering don’t simply complete isolated tasks. Instead, they function as a cohesive unit, creating products that are user-centered, technically feasible, and aligned with business goals. Though this transition may require a shift in mindset and processes, the benefits are substantial: a product that reflects the full depth of each team’s insights and delivers greater value to the business and the customer. By evolving from “engineering mercenaries” to “engineering missionaries,” teams can engage deeply with the product mission, creating outcomes that truly resonate with users and stakeholders alike.
If you’re interested in learning how to build teams of “engineering missionaries” and cultivate this transformative approach in your organization, check out my book, Product Oriented Software Engineering (POSE). In it, I share effective strategies I’ve employed since 2006 to create collaborative, purpose-driven teams, including detailed strategies on implementing the Flex Engineer role to support real-time, cross-functional collaboration. Read more here.
