You'll learn:
How to change your collaboration model for PM, engineering, and design as teams grow
How to define responsibilities, cadence, and activities across every layer of a product organization
How Shopify tackles multi-disciplinary collaboration across product teams
11. One trifecta guides a small number of projects
Project teams
Product
PM
UX
ENG
12. Product and domain trifectas steer large organizations
Project teams
Domain
Product
PM
UX
ENG
13. Product managers
A snapshot of the current Shopify Plus RnD organization
Developers
UX folks
(Design, user research,
content strategy,
front-end development)
= 4
6%
65%
29%
14. • Freedom and autonomy for project teams to move quickly
• A defined pool for resource sharing at scale
• Stability for building rich domain expertise and role specificity
• Foundation for spinning up new domains and projects
Trifecta model provides:
16. • Only for product organizations
• Just balanced skill representation
• A gatekeeper (even though it can feel like that sometimes)
• Easy
What a trifecta is not:
18. Dreams in years, acts
in quarters.
● Resourcing
● Identifying new
investment areas
● Organization
design
● Set strategic
priorities
● (re)Prioritizing the
roadmap
Product trifecta
Responsible for the outcome of the entire product offering
19. Dreams in quarters,
acts in months.
● Lead a team of teams
● Alignment and health
of project teams
● Maintenance
decisions
● Kick off new
projects
● Release planning
● Define project type
● Milestone changes
Domain trifecta
Responsible for the outcome of a set of projects, typically grouped
by a product theme
20. Dreams in months,
acts in weeks.
● Executing against
the project brief and
vision
● Keeping domain
trifecta informed
● Sprint planning
● Retrospectives
● Demos
● Milestone reviews
Project teams
Responsible for an individual project’s outcomes.
21. Product Trifecta Domain Trifecta Project Team
Roadmap definition
Project kickoff
Execution
Maintenance decisions
Milestone change
Project involvement varies across layers
Actor
Stakeholder
23. Trifectas used to model the organization of projects
PM
UX
ENG
Project teams
Domain
Product
24. Trifectas used to model the organization of projects
PM
UX
ENG
Project teams
Domain
Product Shopify Plus
Automation
Shopify
Flow
Plus Services
Migration Billing OnboardingShopify
Scripts
25. Trifectas can also double as clear reporting structures
UX
Project teams
Domain
Product
Director level
Senior leads & leads
Individual contributors
30. Team
Have we
assembled the
right team?
Alignment
Do we agree on
the goals and
metrics?
Quality
Does it solve
customer
problems and will
it delight them?
Scrappiness
Are we being
opinionated and
saying “no” to the
right things?
Keep score
Can we tell if the
project and team
are hitting their
goals?
Asking effective questions
31. • Project rituals, such as spring planning, demos and retros (weekly)
• Project milestone reviews with trifecta (varies)
• Organization-wide project leads synch (weekly)
• Cross-domain trifecta synch (weekly)
• ...
Leverage trifectas to gain context: