What is a product trio?

Your team works hard to build great products, but coordinating between product management, design, and engineering can be challenging. That's where product trios come in - small, focused teams that bring these key roles together to make better decisions faster. Variations of product trios can include roles such as Data Analysts, User Researchers, or Product Marketing Managers, depending on project needs.

Product Discovery Framework

We've built this playbook using proven frameworks from experts like Teresa Torres to help your trio work smoothly together. You'll learn practical ways to understand your users' needs and test solutions efficiently, without getting bogged down in complex processes.

Playbook Limitations

This playbook won't tell you exactly what's wrong with your product - that's unique to your situation. But it will give you the tools and techniques to find those answers yourself through effective teamwork and user research.

Example Week of a Product Trio

From user research and data analysis to ideation and prototyping, you'll see how each day contributes to the overall product development process. This overview will provide practical insights into running a good product discovery workflow within your own team.

In this section, we'll walk you through a typical week in the life of a product trio engaged in product discovery. Let's break down the week day by day:

Day 1: Kickoff and User-Centric Goal Setting

The day begins with a crucial meeting that sets the tone for the entire week. Each member of the product trio has specific responsibilities:

• Product Manager: Lead the kickoff meeting to establish shared objectives and define user-centric goals based on market research and previous feedback.

• Designer: Prepare user personas and journey maps to present during the kickoff, gathering visual aids that highlight user pain points.

• Engineer: Assess technical feasibility of potential goals and identify any immediate technical constraints that could impact objectives.

Key action for day 1 is taking a look on product analytics.

Creating Metrics in LiveSession for Feature Adoption Assessment

To effectively assess the adoption of the new project management feature, we'll create three different metrics in LiveSession:

1. Feature Interaction : Measure the total number of users who visited the url with a feature. This helps gauge initial curiosity and engagement.

2. Task Completion:  Create a number metric with custom event to track the number of users who successfully complete a task using the new feature. This metric indicates how well users understand and utilize the feature.

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💜 Collaboration Opportunity: Product Manager x EngineerDefine what constitutes a "completed task" and work together to implement custom event tracking for each step of the task flow.

3. Clicks or Rage Clicks on a feature page: Create a number metric for number of clicks or rage clicks and apply the segment of users who visited the feature page you’re interested in.  This will help you analyze the average engagement of users interacting with your app. This can help identify whether users find value in the feature or if they're struggling to use it effectively.

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Remember, the key to successful analytics is flexibility. As new use cases arise, be prepared to create new dashboards quickly. Ensure that your team has quick access to LiveSession, allowing for quick adjustments to your dashboards.

By consistently monitoring these metrics and creating new dashboards for emerging use cases, you'll gain valuable insights into how users are adopting and interacting with the new project management feature. This data-driven approach will inform your product decisions and help guide future improvements.

Day 2: User Engagement Data Collection

On Day 2, each member of the product trio focuses on gathering and analyzing user data:

• Product Manager: Keep analyzing existing data from user sessions to identify patterns in feature usage. Consider scheduling calls and conducting interviews with your users. Use these insights to prepare for the future meetings and set goals for improving feature engagement.
• Designer: Observe user interactions with the new feature through session replay tools, noting areas of confusion or difficulty, and create quick sketches or wireframes based on insights from user feedback about the project feature.

💜 Collaboration Opportunity: Product Designer x Engineer

• Engineer: Collaborate to evaluate technical aspects of usability issues identified during session observations and analyze system logs to understand how users are navigating the new feature.

Key action for day 2 is Identifying User Frustrations

Leveraging LiveSession Metrics for User Frustration Analysis

To gain deeper insights into user interactions and potential pain points with the new project management feature, we'll create additional metrics in LiveSession:

1. Total Rage Clicks: Define a number metric that counts all rage clicks across the feature. This provides an overall measure of user frustration.

2. Rage Clicks by Page: Duplicate the above metric and transform it to a dimensional metric grouped by URL or page title to identify specific areas causing the most user frustration. This helps prioritize which parts of the feature need immediate attention.

3. Problematic UI Elements: Set up a metric based on events where the rage-clicked CSS selector matches any element users are struggling with. This pinpoints exact interface components causing issues.

By analyzing these metrics, the product trio can quickly identify and address usability issues, leading to iterative improvements in the project management feature. Remember to review these metrics regularly and adjust your feature design and implementation accordingly.

Once this work is done you are ready to brainstorm solutions.

Day 3: Ideation and Opportunity Mapping

• Product Manager Actions:
  • Facilitate Ideation Workshop: Lead a brainstorming session in the morning  to generate potential solutions for improving feature adoption.
  • Prioritize Ideas: Use a structured method (e.g., ICE scoring) to prioritize ideas based on user feedback and business impact. Each team member submits 2 ideas for this workshop.
• Designer Actions:
  • Develop Prototypes: Create low-fidelity prototypes for the top ideas generated during brainstorming.

💜 Collaboration Opportunity: Product Designer x Product Manager Sync to review the design prototypes you were able to draft during the day

• Engineer Actions:
  • Assess estimate scope: Provide insights into which proposed solutions are technically feasible and scalable. Draft Technical Requirements: Outline any technical requirements needed for implementing prioritized ideas.

Key action for day 3 is Drafting Prototypes

While Day 3 primarily focuses on ideation and prototyping, there are still valuable analytical activities that can enhance your team's understanding and decision-making process:

1. Product Designers: Review session recordings from users analyzed on Day 1 and Day 2 to gain deeper insights into user behavior and pain points while designing prototypes.

2. Developers: Build segments to search for optimization opportunities. Yes, devs can navigate your analytics app smoothly too and be more user-oriented.

Segments to filter users experiencing technical issues: Users who encountered console errors or error clicked while using the app. You can apply the segments later to the metrics created with your team this week. Purpose: To prioritize bug fixes based on real user interactions and ensure that technical issues do not hinder feature adoption.

Create 2 segments. Error clicks and console errors. Screenshots and definition below.

Device-Specific Behavior

Users segmented by device type or system (e.g. IOS vs Windows) to see if there are differences in how they interact with the new feature.

PRO Tip for Product Managers: Present user session recordings as context in conversations with executives to improve cross-team collaboration and decision-making.

Day 4: Development and Planning

On Day 4, we'll refrain from suggesting additional actions as there's ongoing work. However, product managers might consider these valuable practices during any downtime:

• Define Success Metrics:
  • Establish clear, measurable success metrics for new solutions. These could include user engagement rates, and task completion times, or adding new custom events to analytics. Use these metrics to guide development priorities. Consider this guide for setting up custom events in LiveSession
• Data-Driven Roadmap Creation:
  • Update your roadmap outlining the next steps for development, including timelines for testing and implementation. Ensure each milestone is tied to specific metrics that will be evaluated post-launch.

Day 5: Testing, Review, and Retrospective

• Product Manager Actions: Coordinate usability testing with focused session recordings, collect and analyze data using analytics dashboards, and use heat maps to visualize user behavior and identify patterns related to success metrics.
• Designer Actions: Analyze usability test results by correlating qualitative feedback with quantitative data, and create a comprehensive report documenting findings with visual representations of data.
• Engineer Actions: Evaluate technical performance using analytics insights, and participate in a retrospective meeting focused on data-driven improvements, discussing challenges and proposing solutions based on analytical insights.

Key Actions for Day 5 are Reviews and Retros

Schedule review sessions where team members watch recorded usability tests together, discussing observations and insights collaboratively.

Summary

In conclusion, this playbook outlines a comprehensive weekly collaboration workflow for product trios, emphasizing data-driven decision-making and user-centric design. Key points include:

This guide provides a practical weekly workflow to help product teams work more effectively together. By bringing product managers, designers, and engineers closer, you'll make faster decisions based on real user insights instead of guesswork.

Hopefully, after analyzing the playbook your team will be able to:

• Analyze user data daily and strategically
• Quickly turn insights into product improvements
• Track feature performance with meaningful metrics
• Understand how users actually interact with your product

The goal isn't just collecting data, but using it to create products people genuinely want to use. These strategies will help you move beyond assumptions and build solutions that truly solve user problems. Remember it’s a continuous process of product discovery so keep iterating on your frameworks and playbooks found in our resources.

By following this workflow, product teams can ensure they're making informed decisions based on real user data and feedback. To supercharge your product development process with powerful analytics and user behavior insights, sign up for LiveSession today. Start uncovering valuable user insights and drive your product's success with data-driven strategies.

To apply the tips from this playbook Sign up for LiveSession and unlock the power of user behavior analytics shared across your teams