You'll learn: How to change your collaboration model for PM, engineering, and design as teams grow How to define responsibilities, cadence, and activities across every layer of a product organization How Shopify tackles multi-disciplinary collaboration across product teams

1. Davis Neable
Three’s a Party:
How Trifectas Help Product, Engineering,
and Design Work Together

2. It takes two to make a
thing go right
three

3. Trifectas are not new

4. But everything else is

5. What is a trifecta?

6. - David O. Russel
“The trifecta of directing is
character emotion, camera
movement, and music. When you
hit those three, that's magical.”

7. Viability Feasibility Desirability

8. Product Engineering User Experience

9. Trifectas at scale

10. Product
Trifecta responsibilities are assumed within small teams
PM
UX
ENG

11. One trifecta guides a small number of projects
Project teams
Product
PM
UX
ENG

12. Product and domain trifectas steer large organizations
Project teams
Domain
Product
PM
UX
ENG

13. Product managers
A snapshot of the current Shopify Plus RnD organization
Developers
UX folks
(Design, user research,
content strategy,
front-end development)
= 4
6%
65%
29%

14. • Freedom and autonomy for project teams to move quickly
• A defined pool for resource sharing at scale
• Stability for building rich domain expertise and role specificity
• Foundation for spinning up new domains and projects
Trifecta model provides:

15. Trifectas provide
structure, vision, and
flexibility so product
organizations can
execute efficiently and
effectively.

16. • Only for product organizations
• Just balanced skill representation
• A gatekeeper (even though it can feel like that sometimes)
• Easy
What a trifecta is not:

17. Trifectas have clear
responsibilities and should
demand accountability.
1

18. Dreams in years, acts
in quarters.
● Resourcing
● Identifying new
investment areas
● Organization
design
● Set strategic
priorities
● (re)Prioritizing the
roadmap
Product trifecta
Responsible for the outcome of the entire product offering

19. Dreams in quarters,
acts in months.
● Lead a team of teams
● Alignment and health
of project teams
● Maintenance
decisions
● Kick off new
projects
● Release planning
● Define project type
● Milestone changes
Domain trifecta
Responsible for the outcome of a set of projects, typically grouped
by a product theme

20. Dreams in months,
acts in weeks.
● Executing against
the project brief and
vision
● Keeping domain
trifecta informed
● Sprint planning
● Retrospectives
● Demos
● Milestone reviews
Project teams
Responsible for an individual project’s outcomes.

21. Product Trifecta Domain Trifecta Project Team
Roadmap definition
Project kickoff
Execution
Maintenance decisions
Milestone change
Project involvement varies across layers
Actor
Stakeholder

22. 2 Trifectas can be leveraged as
organizational structures.

23. Trifectas used to model the organization of projects
PM
UX
ENG
Project teams
Domain
Product

24. Trifectas used to model the organization of projects
PM
UX
ENG
Project teams
Domain
Product Shopify Plus
Automation
Shopify
Flow
Plus Services
Migration Billing OnboardingShopify
Scripts

25. Trifectas can also double as clear reporting structures
UX
Project teams
Domain
Product
Director level
Senior leads & leads
Individual contributors

26. Trifectas help gain insight into
organizational health.
3

27. Identify missing roles
PM
UX
ENG
Project teams
Domain
Product

28. PM
UX
ENG
Improve communication efficiencies
Project teams
Domain
Product

29. .

30. Team
Have we
assembled the
right team?
Alignment
Do we agree on
the goals and
metrics?
Quality
Does it solve
customer
problems and will
it delight them?
Scrappiness
Are we being
opinionated and
saying “no” to the
right things?
Keep score
Can we tell if the
project and team
are hitting their
goals?
Asking effective questions

31. • Project rituals, such as spring planning, demos and retros (weekly)
• Project milestone reviews with trifecta (varies)
• Organization-wide project leads synch (weekly)
• Cross-domain trifecta synch (weekly)
• ...
Leverage trifectas to gain context:

32. Lessons learned

33. Photo by Cynthia Andres
Organization
changes should
come after a trifecta
has been stabilized
to minimize thrash.

34. It takes time to build
the trust necessary for
a trifecta to be wholly
effective.
Photo by Sebastian Grochowicz

35. Photo by Cynthia Andres
As the organization
grows, identify the
magnitude of the
change and respond
appropriately.

36. Scaling product groups is
hard work

38. Thanks!

39. Q&A
Just at @davisn