Categories: Agile
By Soma Bhattacharya
When it comes to working on larger projects that combine multiple teams spread across locations with a tight timeline, formalizing a triad is one of the easiest ways to streamline the process. While working with everyone is required in all projects, a triad can help you and your team irrespective of the role you play in the project. 
The simplest things create the most impact. A triad involves bringing together the product, UX and development teams. You can change the composition of your triad based on your project and invite various functions to the core team.
Once that’s finalized, the triad is responsible for the project moving forward in a timely manner. It adds accountability at all levels and requires unanimous decision making, thus removing uncertainty and the multiple approvals that often lead to a back-and-forth dialogue.
When done at all levels, decision making in a triad takes care of strategic, tactical and operational issues for the project. To ensure that the triad is efficient at all levels (from planning to implementation), it can be created at multiple levels (from governance bodies to scrum teams). This ensures the right group is involved with making decisions.
Here are few ways to involve the triad throughout the release:
- Release/Big Room planning: The goal is to ensure that the triad is available at all levels for planning. This ensures that all requirements and risks are covered and ready while we initiate the project and continue with planning. For quarterly planning, triad leadership is involved to ensure requirements for the upcoming quarter are discussed beforehand—and everyone comes ready with the work done for the teams to start pulling in features and stories for the quarter.
- Discovery calls: These calls can help the triad come together to plan for the upcoming quarter. They can be attended by the leadership triad as well because it involves decision making on prioritizing and reviewing features like design and architecture.
- Team meetings: Ensuring the triad is available at the team level keeps everyone onboard and prevents unwelcome surprises. This involves the scrum team-level triad and leads to better acceptance and demos because the triad is constantly working and reviewing things together—and not waiting on last-second feedback or blockers that need discussion or escalation. These include anything from design reviews to regular standups.
- Retrospectives: These provide a good way to understand the pain points from everyone—and start working on them through the sprints, especially when you are constantly learning and innovating as a team (whether it’s the process or technology).
Of course, there are problems that can happen throughout, but the triad allows everyone not to just function as a team, but also feel like a team. And as we all know, happier teams can better resolve complex problems.
Do you think a triad can help your teams?
