The product triad reimagined: how designers lead across product, engineering, and business
Consisting of the product manager, designer, and the engineer, the product triad represents the three core functions that shape the product development for major businesses.
But the design function has found itself sitting in a strange place in modern times—one that directly affects business revenue. According to a study, over 70% of businesses see an increase in revenue as a result of boosted design efforts.
On paper, the design manager’s scope is clear: ship intuitive, on-brand experiences that users love. In practice, design collaboration work spills into business roadmaps and commercial outcomes. You are expected to argue for desirability while also understanding feasibility and viability.
So, how can design managers embrace their newly-found role in leading product development? The answer lies with real customer insight.
By incorporating human feedback and user analytics, design managers can mediate between product goals, design collaboration, technical constraints, and business goals confidently.
The Total Economic Impact™ Of UserTesting, a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of UserTesting (August 2025), reveals how much organizations could potentially stand to gain by approaching user experience with UserTesting. The findings show that organizations investing in better usability and customer understanding have seen measurable business returns: a 415% ROI and $7.6 million in net present value over three years, and a payback period of less than six months.
Design’s new superpower: aligning desirability, viability, and feasibility (DVF) with real user data
Designers are trained to work across multiple constraints at once: human behavior, systems complexity, and brand expression. But the missing piece in all of this is evidence.
That is where continuous user feedback, captured and analyzed at scale, becomes a design superpower.
In many teams, the triad maps like this:
- Design: primarily accountable for desirability
- Engineering: primarily accountable for feasibility
- Product/business: primarily accountable for viability
In reality, these responsibilities overlap, and successful products sit in the intersection of all three.
GUIDE
How to enhance design efficiency through continuous user feedback
Desirability: anchoring on real user behavior
Desirability is more than aesthetics. It’s whether people understand, trust, and choose your product over alternatives.
Designers can lead here by:
- Running discovery and prototype tests and unmoderated usability tests early, before requirements harden
- Watching how people navigate flows, not just what they say
- Surfacing patterns in confusion, hesitation, or delight that directly inform product decisions
With user insights, design teams can recruit target users and observe their behavior through video feedback. This allows teams to capture think-aloud commentary around key journeys, like onboarding or checkout.
Leveraging AI tools, teams can also summarize key learnings and friction points across sessions so designers can quickly translate raw feedback into clear recommendations.
As a result, desirability is no longer “what design thinks looks good,” but “how customers actually respond.”
Feasibility: framing constraints without limiting creativity
Feasibility is where many designers feel least confident. Technical complexity and legacy constraints can make it difficult to push for better experiences.
Yet designers can strengthen feasibility conversations by:
- Bringing engineers into early discovery and ideation sessions so constraints surface early
- Prototyping multiple levels of solution fidelity, from low-cost experiments to production-like flows
- Using research to rank which usability improvements matter most, so engineering capacity is spent where it counts
Continuous feedback helps here, too. When engineers see real users struggling with specific interactions, it becomes easier to argue for refactors or tech investments that might otherwise be deprioritized.
Instead of “we need to rework this flow,” designers can say, “In 8 out of 10 sessions, users failed to complete the core task without backtracking. Let’s watch the video.”
Viability: translating UX into business outcomes
Viability often feels like “product and business territory.” Despite this, design has a direct line of sight into behaviors that drive or destroy value:
- Drop-offs during onboarding or checkout
- Misunderstandings that trigger extra support costs
- Features that exist but are never discovered
Designers can lean into viability by:
- Tracking how experience changes tie to key metrics like activation, completion rate, or support tickets
- Using research findings to build simple, causal stories: “When we simplified this flow, time-on-task dropped, and completion increased”
- Presenting design options in terms of risk reduction and opportunity creation, not only usability
Analytics and visualizations can help connect these dots by detecting friction patterns in behavior (repetitive scrolling, rage clicking) and cross-referencing them with verbal feedback.
This makes it easier to show how specific UX issues map to measurable business impact.
How to transform the product triad with continuous feedback (a quick guide)
Here’s a quick, actionable workflow you can apply in your own triad.
1. Reframe your role with the triad
Start by repositioning design within your triad from “service provider” to “evidence-led mediator.”
In practice:
- Agree on shared outcomes: Align on a small set of outcome metrics (for example, successful activations, qualified feature usage, or reduced support contacts) that all three roles care about.
- Clarify decision forums: Identify where design will present user insight as input to decisions (roadmap reviews, sprint planning, discovery rituals).
- Name the tension: Talk openly about desirability, feasibility, and viability as shared responsibilities, not silos.
You are not claiming ownership of viability or feasibility. You are offering a way to see tradeoffs earlier and more clearly.
2. Use continuous insight to resolve subjective debates
Designers often get stuck in subjective territory:
- “This feels cluttered.”
- “That color does not match the brand.”
- “I do not think users will understand that.”
Instead of debating taste, shift the frame to “let us see how real users respond.”
You might:
- Prototype both versions of a contentious flow
- Run a quick side-by-side test with your target audience
- Compare comprehension, time-on-task, and self-reported confidence across both options
Once feedback comes in, you can sit down with product and engineering and say, “We all had different preferences. Here is what our customers showed us.”
The conversation moves away from who has the loudest opinion and toward shared accountability for what users actually need.
3. Close the loop and show impact
Finally, design’s influence grows when you can show a pattern:
- Before: We observed this friction.
- Action: We changed the experience in this way.
- Result: We saw this shift in behavior and outcomes.
Design leadership is the anchor the modern triad needs
The product triad works best when every decision is grounded in real user insight—and designers are the ones who can bring that clarity. With continuous feedback, debates shift from opinions to evidence, and tradeoffs across desirability, feasibility, and viability become easier to align on.
With user insights, design leaders help the entire triad move faster, reduce risk, and build products that truly work for the people who use them.
Key takeaways
- Design’s role in the triad is expanding: modern product triads still combine product, design, and engineering, but complexity and AI are pushing designers into a more strategic, cross-functional role where they mediate between user needs and business decisions.
- DVF gives designers a shared language with product and engineering: framing work through desirability, viability, and feasibility helps designers move beyond aesthetics and speak directly to technical and business tradeoffs.
- Continuous user feedback turns opinions into evidence: recurring tests around critical journeys, summarized with AI, allow design leaders to show real user behavior instead of relying on subjective arguments.
- Decision-ready stories make research actionable: structuring insights around problem, impact, options, and recommendation makes it easier for triads to act quickly and confidently on user evidence.
FAQ
Q: What exactly is the product triad?
A: The product triad—sometimes called a product trio—brings together a product manager, designer, and engineering lead as shared owners of product success. It’s a common Agile structure because it creates a clear space for balancing user needs, technical feasibility, and business goals.
Q: I am a design manager. How can I start shifting my team into this leadership mode?
A: Start with projects where design already has influence. Use DVF language in critiques, run recurring user tests on a high-impact journey, and invite product and engineering to observe. Turn those insights into one or two clear triad decisions to build trust through visible wins.
Q: How does UserTesting fit into our existing research and analytics stack?
A: UserTesting complements—not replaces—analytics and surveys. Analytics show where users struggle; UserTesting reveals why. AI summaries and patterns make qualitative insight fast to interpret and ready to use in triad decisions.
Q: We already have more tools than we can manage. How do we avoid tool overload?
A: Use UserTesting as your central hub for qualitative insight. Consolidate scattered interviews and tests into one repeatable workflow. Over time, this reduces tool sprawl by centralizing planning, sessions, analysis, and highlight reels in a single platform.
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