Botify On the Road to the Product Trio
Botify’s first product team was made of 4 product people (2 designers, 2 product owners) and 10 engineers. Today, we are 14 product people (7 designers, 6 product managers, 1 technical writer) and 36 product engineers. Along the road, we had to learn how to collaborate effectively and cross-functionally.
This is how we met the concept of the product trio: What is it? Where are we? What is Botify’s approach?
What is a product trio?
Have you ever thought: “If only they had been with me in this interview, they would understand the importance of solving this need!”? At Botify, we’ve said it to ourselves many times.
At Botify, the Product Manager and the Product Designer are always together during user interviews. Why? To get the user feedback together, to be at the same level of empathy, and to challenge each other on our understanding. This allows us to avoid a single role being responsible for defending the user’s point of view and sharing knowledge.
As time went on, we realized that this level of empathy could be extended to other roles. Wouldn’t it be a dream if developers told us on their own “We’re going to push this solution even though it’s more expensive because the user value is strong and it would help this customer we met.”?
Well, at Botify it happens sometimes! We try to create multiple opportunities for collaboration early in the process and divide our tasks in a flexible way. We believe that just because a task is the responsibility of one role doesn’t mean that others can’t do it and/or participate.
Most of the time, the small organization change it requires is rewarded a hundredfold: collaborating early with the maximum relevant stakeholders, as the product trio concept recommends, not only saves time (avoid bottlenecks, duplication of tasks, sharing of information) but also provides well-being (delegate a task, learn, be autonomous).
We would be wrong to deprive ourselves of it.
As the product trio is a new way of collaboration, implementing it in an organization requires:
- Avoiding the feeling of overlap and replace it with opportunities for task sharing
- Communicating information at the right level with the right people as soon as possible
- Defining several opportunities for collaboration in the product process
What is Botify’s statement on the product trio?
Today, Botify has six squads led by outcomes. We were interested in how we could improve our collaboration and chose to make a statement and knowledge share on the product trio during a Meetup.
It was the occasion to conduct internal interviews to learn more about how the stakeholders of different trios were feeling about it:
These findings were presented to the Product team, so we decided to share it with Botify’s engineers. During this talk, we launched live questions:
- “Are you familiar with the term product trio?” : on 13 answers, 46% answered “No”, 38% answered “a bit”, and 15% answered “yes”.
- After the presentation of the maturity model that our VP of Design built, we asked “What would you say about the maturity of the trio you experience in your squad (as a participant or an observer)?”. In order of evolution, the 11 responses were: 9% for “absent”, 45% on “emergent”, 36% on “structured”, 9% on “integrated”, and 0% on “optimized”.
The statement today is that some squads achieve good things and that a lot of people think our maturity on product trios can grow. Botify definitely faces an opportunity of sharing best practices to start improving the trio’s collaboration.
What will Botify do to grow trios in all squads?
By starting with internal interviews, a presentation to the Product team, an open audience through a Meetup, and finally, to our Engineering team, we gathered feedback that helped us define where to start to implement great trios.
It helped us identify our first axes to work on:
- establishing good communication
- getting aligned on the squad outcome
- integrating the maximum number of people in the discovery
- mapping skills accountability at a trio level
We ended up with slides of actionable tips that we shared with everybody. We launched a vote to learn which ones to start with and ended up with the following three first candidates:
1️⃣ Having a discussion, a coffee, or a workshop to position each stakeholder (from a trio, but why not from the entire squad?) on their do & don’ts regarding oral, written, critical communication or presence and roles in meetings
2️⃣ Aligning together (once again, as a trio or a squad) on the outcome by validating it together in a meeting and regularly sharing metrics to follow our goals
3️⃣ Integrating the maximum number of people in the discovery by trying different levels of implications: sharing, short impactful verbatims & videos to the squad and/or inviting them to shadow a client interview
Our next steps
You can find here the last presentation we made and a focus on each tip. Next steps:
- Create some Miro boards as support for the discussions
- Show the example by sharing together the different candidates we tried and the learnings from each squad
- Gather feedback and consider our other candidates
- Maybe write our next articles about our learnings! 🚀
