If I was to predict one thing you’re going to hear a lot of over the next few months, it’s that artificial intelligence is going to kill (or at least fundamentally change) the ‘triad’. The triad, for those not familiar, comprises a product manager, a designer and an engineering manager. Together, they lead, shape and influence product development and product teams, and the same structure is replicated at increasing levels of seniority as companies scale.
The argument for the redundancy of this model is logical enough. Artificial Intelligence tools have reduced the skill and experience needed to create, if not fully polished designs and engineering products, then at least very impressive prototypes. Suddenly, product managers can bring their ideas straight into design or code. Designers can go directly from design to fully functioning prototypes, blurring the line between the two, and engineers can easily produce and amend their own designs.
So, the argument will go, the requirement for three separate people with three different skill sets is reduced. The incentive will inevitably be to reduce the triad to just one or two ‘hybrid’ roles: Product managers who work comfortably using AI to produce UX. Designers who happily use generative AI to take designs directly to prototypes. And so on.
This approach will no doubt be cheaper, and it may also be faster, but if there’s one thing we all learnt early in our careers it’s that when something is faster and cheaper, it’s usually not as good.
If you ask me, there’s a flaw in some of this reasoning. It presupposes that the reason for having three people in these roles was always about technical ability. That the skill sets were so specialist that they could only be done by different, highly specialist, individuals. And I’m not sure that’s the case.
We have always had product managers who come from engineering backgrounds. We’ve always had designers who can code, engineers who can design, and people in both roles who are more than capable of product thinking, strategy, and business analysis. Keeping the roles separate was never – or should never have been – purely about technical skill.
The benefit of structures like the triad is that having different people accountable for different (sometimes competing) considerations creates better work. I like to refer to ‘strength through tension’. Like a bridge that stays up because the two ends are pulling in opposite directions, a product is often better because of the healthy tension between members of the triad.
Psychological research has shown that individuals tasked with balancing competing demands make worse decisions, often becoming overloaded and reverting to cognitive biases. Whereas, distributing responsibility across individuals and encouraging them to advocate for their area of responsibility leads to better overall decisions, made more quickly and effectively.
This is precisely why cross-functional teams, and especially teams led by equal partners across design, product and engineering, work so well. The reduced cognitive load of having specific areas of responsibility, and the better decisions generated through healthy tension and debate, are valuable even where – perhaps especially where – one single individual has the skills, or the AI tools, to allow him to do all the jobs.
The way to tread this difficult line, I would argue, is to separate capability from accountability. Blurring one line is no bad thing, but blurring the other is much more risky. In my product organisation, we use the ‘desirability, viability, feasibility’ model as a useful shorthand for assigning and understanding the accountability of each member of the triad.
In the design world, to take an example, more people than ever before will be capable of producing highly polished UI layouts. We should embrace that and the new efficiencies and opportunities it brings. But we should be much more cautious about making someone else accountable for the desirability, usability or accessibility of products, or assuming that we can vest accountability for everything to do with the product in a single person, and not suffer any adverse consequences.
