The product trio in pre-agentic times

The traditional Product Trio as described by Teresa Torres consists of the roles of product manager, UX designer and developer. This is not a rigid prescription. Depending on the product and context, other constellations are possible. For instance, a domain expert can take on the PM role, and a small B2B application might do without a dedicated UX role. What defines the trio is not the exact staffing of roles, but the principle: a small unit that brings multiple perspectives into product discovery.

Torres’ goal was for all three roles to do discovery together: product manager, UX designer and developer each contribute their perspective, and no role merely receives decisions. In practice, this often failed because the developer was busy with delivery and had less time for discovery than the PM and the designer.

Torres’ Product Trio was a subset of the product team. The trio does discovery and makes the decisions, while the rest of the team is solely responsible for delivery. There was a good reason for this separation: fast decision-making requires small units, but delivery used to require a larger team.