The trifecta — who owns what?

In most organisations that I have witnessed or been part of, leadership is often designed around the trifecta of engineering, product and design. This is a repeatable pattern of org design all the way up the hierarchy often culminating in the executive level with engineering reporting to the CTO and Product and UX often reporting into the heads of the business units respectively.

It is interesting to document the mandate and areas of ownership around each of these functions. However, it is important to add a few caveats.

• It is being seen increasingly as a standard practice to have cross-functional teams- with all three functions being embedded within the team.
• The idea here being that when you embed all competency within the team, there is less communication overhead and more sense of alignment towards a common vision
• A lot of effort needs to go into alignment and coordination at all levels in order to ensure a clear vision and smooth flow for the teams.
• It is important to everyone on the team to commit to a common goal. In the events that this does not happen, confusion and tensions arise within the team which ultimately leads to lower engagement and productivity for the whole team.

UX

Clearly, as the name suggests, they own the User experience of the feature that the team wants to develop. UX’ers need to have a high level of context and product knowledge. They need to be well cognizant of the flows and the edge cases that could occur.
UXers work closely with the Front end engineers on the team to create a smooth, intuitive and feel-good experience of the app.

Engineers

Engineers are responsible for converting product requirements into actual user features. However, many times, there are a lot of NFRs or (Non-functional requirements) which also need to be considered. Here is where the experience of an engineer comes into play. An experienced engineer is good at voicing these NFRs before the build phase. Shifting left on functionalities like performance, availability, resilience and security helps the team hugely in avoiding costly mistakes on production.

Engineers are also responsible for the quality of the code, technical debt resolution and deploying and maintaining the code on production and fixing bugs and issues.

Product

Product is responsible for deciding what needs to be built. Product will remain closest to the customer and understand their pains and needs the best. They will read the market and the competition and try and release features that the customers might want and set the overall direction.
They are responsible to coordinate between engineering and UX on product features. They also decide on when they want to run experiments on features and plan the experiment to collect metrics around it.

Common dysfunctions

• Product is always concerned about releasing new features but not paying the technical debt. This can lead to a team eventually slowed and bogged down, and sometimes even exposed to security vulnerabilities.
• Engineers in the team are inexperienced and so are less aware of the non-functional rewrites, leading to painful mistakes and rewrites
• UX is less aware of the product functionality which leads to different variants being overlooked, leading to longer build time when things are discovered during build.

In the end, the success of the team is dependent upon all functions being equally aligned and focused on the goals. A healthy tension and sense of boundaries balanced with trust and respect in mutual competence can lead to productive conversations on when conflicts arise, and also a satisfactory path forward. This trust and sense of boundary takes time to build. As a team leader, it might be well worth your while to do this.