Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. I was scrolling through my LinkedIn feed and a post caught my eye. It read: “Marketing owns defining the ideal customer profile.” And then went into details on why.
A quick scan through the comments showed that not everyone agreed with this statement. Some people argued a different role owned defining the ideal customer profile (ICP)—there were votes for product, sales, customer success, and even finance.
A few argued that the whole go-to-market team (sales, marketing, customer success) should define the ideal customer profile together.
And it got me thinking. No one person or role should be defining the ideal customer profile. An ideal customer profile is something that everyone in the company needs to be aligned on.
- Product (and design and engineering) needs to know who they are building for.
- Sales needs to know who they are selling to.
- Marketing needs to know who they are marketing to.
- Customer success needs to know whose success they are driving.
- And yes, even finance needs to know whose money they are trying to earn.
In a customer-centric business, everyone needs to contribute to defining the ideal customer profile. But it rarely happens that way.
In fact, there are dozens of decisions and activities that we do that would be better if we collaborated with our cross-functional peers. But instead, we tend to work on them individually. We might share our final output for feedback from the rest of the team, but so often we get little back.
Why is this?
Cross-functional collaboration is hard. It’s hard to get input from everyone. It’s hard to integrate everyone’s perspectives. It takes time. It feels slow. And we need to move fast. Everything needs to be done yesterday.
But when we take the time to slow down, to get everyone’s input, to put in the work, people are more satisfied with their team and their company.
How do I know? Because I asked you.
In our 2024 CDH Benchmark Survey, conducted from September 11–November 20, 2024, 680 of you told me: if you worked in a product trio, how much time you spent with your product trio, how long you’d been working together, how often everyone has an equal say in your team’s decisions, and how satisfied you were with both your team and your company (among other things).
This wasn’t the first time we asked, either. In 2022, 1,998 of you told us about your product trio habits. In both years, people who reported working in a product trio were more satisfied with both their team and their company.
The more time people spent with their product trios, the more satisfied they were. The more often people said they had an equal say in decision-making, the more satisfied they were.
Before we dive into the specifics, let’s first look at who we talked to.
Who We Surveyed in 2024
We recruited survey respondents here on the Product Talk blog and via the Product Talk social media channels (X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Bluesky, Substack).
We asked a number of demographic, company, and product type questions to understand who we were reaching. The following infographic breaks down who we heard from.
Here’s the breakdown of participants in the 2024 CDH Benchmark Survey based on company size, job function, country, and more. Click the image to see a larger version.
What They Told Us About Working in a Product Trio
The headline finding is that working in a product trio led to higher team and company satisfaction. The more time people spent with their product trio, the more satisfied they were. These findings were consistent with our 2022 survey.
The following infographic breaks down the specifics:
Digging into the results of the 2024 survey, we can see the majority of respondents participate in a trio and about half say everyone in the trio has equal say most of the time. But some of the other results are more nuanced. Click the image to see a larger version.
My Take on the Findings
These findings are both obvious and a little counterintuitive.
Product trios are more satisfied with their team and company.
It makes perfect sense that someone who feels like they have an equal say in their team’s decisions is more satisfied with both their team and their company.
But allowing everyone to have an equal say is hard. It takes effort. Many of us begrudgingly participate in group work. It’s much easier to just do it ourselves.
You might think that the work required to effectively collaborate across our cross-functional roles would lead to dissatisfaction. But it doesn’t (in most cases). Interesting.
Is the reward of cross-functional collaboration worth the effort to get there? It seems so.
The number of people working in a product trio is influenced by our sample.
I was surprised to see that 62.8% of respondents said they work in a product trio. This is also what we saw in 2022 (62.7%). But I don’t think this number represents the industry. We definitely have some sampling bias.
We recruited survey respondents from this blog and through my social media channels. Those are populations that are familiar with the product trio concept and are much more likely to work in a product trio than the average product team. So keep that in mind as you interpret the results.
Product trios are typically comprised of a product manager, a designer, and an engineer.
I often argue that product trios are typically composed of a product manager, a designer, and an engineer. The data confirms this. 68.4% of respondents who said they work in a product trio said their product trio is composed of these exact roles.
Cross-functional collaboration does exist.
And to my naysayers who don’t think cross-functional collaborative decision-making is possible, be sure to check out the 67.6% of people who say they work in a product trio, who also say everyone has an equal say in their product team’s decisions either all of the time or most of the time. There are clearly some strong collaborative teams out there. Nice work!
Some of the biggest impacts on team and company satisfaction were how often teams spend with their product trios and how often everyone had an equal say. It turns out we like working together, especially when we feel heard.
Some things are still unclear.
When I designed this survey, I wanted to understand how different discovery habits impacted business outcomes (like revenue growth, cost saving, customer acquisition) or even product outcomes (like customer engagement). And we did ask our respondents to tell us how their products performed quarter over quarter.
We asked:
- If their product was designed to increase revenue or reduce costs.
- If it was designed to increase revenue, we asked if their product’s revenue grew quarter over quarter.
- If it was designed to reduce costs, we asked if their costs went down quarter over quarter.
- If their total number of customers went up quarter over quarter.
- If their customers’ engagement or usage went up quarter over quarter.
I would have loved to assess how working in a product trio impacted these answers.
But after running the survey in 2022, we found some significant challenges with these questions. In both years, over 50% of respondents indicated that they don’t have access to user behavioral analytics, but they still felt comfortable answering the questions about number of customers and customer engagement. That’s suspect at best.
Several people selected “Other” when asked if their product was designed to generate revenue or reduce costs, and in their verbatims, their answers made it clear they didn’t understand the business impact of their work. Hope Gurion and I recorded a video about this very problem last year.
So I am struggling to find a reliable way to measure the team success of our survey respondents. The data is simply messy.
Even so, we ran the statistical analysis for both survey cohorts (2022 and 2024) and this was one of the few areas where the 2022 answers didn’t correlate with the 2024 answers. Little was statistically significant and the items that were didn’t hold from one year to the next.
This tells me we have a measurement problem. I don’t have an easy answer on this one. But for now, I’m not willing to make any claims about how working in product trios impacts business or product outcomes. But I hope to get more clarity on this with future survey cohorts.
I’ll be diving into more of the survey findings in the coming weeks.
Are you new to the idea of cross-functional product trios? Check out our comprehensive guide here.
