How Product Design works with Product Managers and Engineers

The Triforce

When interviewing designers, PMs or engineers, I’ll usually get asked “how do you all work together?”. How does engineering work with PMs? PMs with design? Design with engineering?

My response goes something like this…

p.s. if you like this content, subscribe to my newsletter, or follow me on X/Twitter

When building great products, collaboration between designers, product managers and engineers is crucial. Often referred to as the trifecta, triad, EPD or 3 legged stool. I like to call it “Triforce”.

I love this talk by Marty Cagan on the root causes of product failure. He highlights why companies slide into waterfall, & products fail. Instead the best teams are learning together, focused on continuous discovery & delivery, responsible for outcomes.

At OneSignal we have cross-functional product teams that have focus areas.

Each team has at least a PM, DL (Design Lead) and TL (Tech Lead).

Each of these represents important aspects of the product. The business value, the user experience, the technical feasibility.

Examples of things teams do together to ensure shared understanding:

• Engineers join customer calls & usability tests
• Engineers take part in design studios & early brainstorms
• Designers join sprint planning
• PMs join architecture reviews
• Collectively review customer insights & roadmap in Productboard
• Collectively conduct retrospectives to improve how we work together
• Collectively measure and iterate on what was shipped, tracking adoption, addressing polish & enhancements

We have a “How we build” doc, as well as “How to work with…” guidelines.

For new team members this is required reading as part of onboarding.

These are just a few examples of the things that give us that shared understanding, enable us to make decisions together & ship product.

We’re currently hiring software engineers to scale & build our customer engagement platform. Come join us.

If you like this content, follow @OneSignalDesign and subscribe to my newsletter http://leemunroe.com/subscribe