What is a Product Trio?
How a Scrum Master can help the trio collaborate better?
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Recently, a reader sent me this question:
Q: My organization is looking to implement the 'Product Trio' model in order to break down silos between business, tech, and design. How would you recommend integrating this model within existing Scrum teams? What role should the Scrum Master play to support effective collaboration within the trio while preserving team autonomy and staying aligned with the Scrum framework?
For those unfamiliar, the Product Trio is a dynamic model that helps align on product strategy, usability, and technical feasibility. When done right, this trio can drive innovation and deliver exceptional outcomes.
But!
The trio comes with challenges.
Collaboration within a trio isn’t automatic. Misaligned priorities, unclear roles/responsibilities, and communication breakdowns often derail the trio's work.
This is where the Scrum Master’s role becomes crucial.
Beyond facilitating the team’s usual Agile practices, the Scrum Master can help the trio overcome challenges and build a collaborative rhythm that benefits the entire Scrum team.
In this post, we will go through the following:
What is a Product Trio?
The key challenges trios face when working together
Things Scrum Masters can do to ensure seamless trio collaboration
Different ways to integrate Product Trio in Scrum
Let’s get started.
What is a Product Trio?
In one of my earlier posts, I talked about a simple equation for building successful products:
Successful Product = BusinessValue x Technology x EndUserValue
This formula highlights the 3 essential ingredients that must come together for a product to thrive:
business value
technical feasibility, and
end-user value
Each of these ingredients represents a critical perspective in product development, and when combined effectively, they create products that are both impactful and sustainable.
The Product Trio is expected to bring these 3 ingredients/perspectives together.
Typically, it consists of:
A Product Manager (or PO): Represents business goals and priorities. They focus on ensuring the product delivers value to the organization and aligns with strategic objectives.
A Designer: Advocates for the end user. They ensure the product is usable, accessible, and meets the needs of its target audience.
A Senior Engineer or Tech Lead: Represents technical feasibility. They assess what’s possible within the constraints of time, available resources, and available technology.
However!
Just assembling a Product Trio, often, is not enough.
The trio must collaborate in a manner that ensures each member has an equal voice in product decisions, creating a balanced perspective that prevents any single dimension from overshadowing the others.
This balance helps avoid common pitfalls like:
building technically impressive features that users don't want
creating beautiful designs that can't be implemented, or
pursuing business goals that sacrifice user experience
But!
It is frequently found that the “trio” does not collaborate effectively to achieve this balance.
Why?
The reasons are rooted in the history of these roles.
Why do Tech, Product, and Design often struggle to collaborate and align?
Historically, organizations planted these 3 roles (tech, product and design) in separate “silos.”
Over time, this resulted in systemic (and mental) barriers, making collaboration a challenge.
Here are the key reasons why alignment among these three roles is so difficult:
1. Functional Silos & Organizational Goal Structure
Each silo was optimized for its own goals:
Product chased the roadmap delivery
Design pursued perfect user experiences
Engineering focused on technical excellence
Without a focus on “shared” end-to-end customer outcomes, these silos often worked in isolation.
Hand-offs became the default: Product wrote specs → design mocked it up → tech implemented.
2. Misaligned Incentives & Metrics
Each silo measured success differently:
Product Managers chased revenue targets
Designers tracked usability, NPS
Engineers tracked code quality and system performance
Without a shared KPI like “customer value delivered per quarter,” each silo pulled in their own direction, creating friction instead of alignment.
3. Different Mindsets & Languages
It’s not just goals that differed. Each trio member spoke a different language:
Product Managers talked business cases and ROI
Designers focused on empathy maps and user journeys
Engineers discussed scalability, architecture, and technical debt
These vocabularies didn’t overlap and led to misunderstandings. Conversations derailed before real collaboration began.
4. Unclear Power & Decision-Rights
Who makes the final call? Without clear decision-rights:
Product Managers often forced features, leaving designers feeling steamrolled
Engineers vetoed solutions late, frustrating Product Managers
Designers pushed back on timelines, leaving development in confusion
Unclear roles generated mistrust, as each discipline wondered: “Am I just here to execute someone else’s plan?”
5. Timing & Process Mismatched
Each discipline worked at its own pace:
Designers needed early time for exploration
Engineers preferred well-defined requirements
Product Managers wanted solid estimates to plan releases
When these timelines didn’t align, collaboration suffered.
6. Over-Reliance on Documentation
Heavy documentation often became a substitute for conversation.
Detailed specs or extensive decks transformed into "contracts" rather than collaboration starters. Changes often triggered "scope creep" debates.
7. Lack of Regular Collaboration Cadence
Without regular joint activities (e.g. co-facilitated story mapping with engineers in the room), these silos defaulted to ad hoc check-ins that occured too late to be truly effective.
And…
8. Stereotypes
Stereotypes between the silos made things worse:
"Design is just making things pretty"
"Engineering always says no"
"Product keeps changing requirements"
These biases created invisible walls between silo members.
When people considered forming the Product Trio, they wanted to remove these siloed walls between these 3 roles.
And they were successful…except that…they didn’t realize that the long history of siloed walls resulted in even higher and invisible MENTAL WALLS.
Product Trio often unknowingly brings these MENTAL WALLS with them to modern Agile Product teams.
These Mental Walls cause collaboration issues.
Let’s look at an example to see how…