The Agentic Trio has no delivery-only roles

Agentic development makes it possible for a small trio to own not only discovery but also delivery, as a fully autonomous unit. The Agentic Trio is an evolution of the Product Trio that Teresa Torres describes in Continuous Discovery Habits: a product manager, a UX designer and a developer make discovery decisions together, while the whole team takes care of delivery. The Agentic Trio keeps the same roles and extends their responsibility to delivery.

In the Agentic Trio, all members of the trio participate in discovery and delivery, without support from additional team members who are not involved in discovery work.

This changes not only how teams work, but also how large they need to be. Smaller, more autonomous units with genuine end-to-end responsibility become possible without sacrificing discovery quality. The capacity freed up by faster and cheaper delivery does not flow into more output, but into a deeper understanding of the problem, within the same small unit.

How this differs from Team Topologies: The Agentic Trio and stream-aligned teams are orthogonal. Team Topologies answers how an organization is structured into teams. The Agentic Trio answers how discovery and delivery are organized within a team. A stream-aligned team is a necessary but not a sufficient condition: following Torres, part of a stream-aligned team could form the trio while the others only deliver. The Agentic Trio removes this internal split. Anyone who says “but that’s just a stream-aligned team” has described the outside view correctly and missed the inside view.