Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

Third, you are largely wasting the talents and capabilities of the people you have hired, and your best people—the ones you desperately need to survive and thrive—will likely leave

It comes down to the views they have on the role of technology, the purpose of the people who work on the technology, and how they expect these people to work together to solve problems.

Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.

At the core, I see three critically important differences between the strongest product companies and the rest: The first is how the company views the role of technology. The second is the role their product leaders play. The third is how the company views the purpose of the product teams—the product managers, product designers, and engineers.

In contrast, in strong product companies, teams are instead given problems to solve, rather than features to build, and most important, they are empowered to solve those problems in the best way they see fit. And they are then held accountable to the results.

In the empowered product team model, the product manager has a clear responsibility, which is to ensure that the solutions are valuable (our customers will buy the product and/or choose to use it), and viable (it will meet the needs of the business). Together with a product designer who is responsible for ensuring the solution is usable, and a tech lead who is responsible for ensuring the solution is feasible, the team is able to collaborate to address this full range of risks (value, viability, usability, and feasibility). Together, they own the problem and are responsible and accountable for the results.2

First, the customers and stakeholders don't know what is just now possible—they are not experts in the enabling technologies, so they can't be expected to know the best way to solve the problems we're focused on, or even if the problem is possible to solve. It's often the case that innovations solve problems in ways that customers and stakeholders had no idea was possible.

Second, with technology products, it's very hard to predict in advance what solutions will work. There are many reasons why product ideas don't deliver the results we hoped. All too often we are excited about some idea, but our customers are not, so they don't buy what we thought they would. Or, we discover the idea has major privacy or security issues. Or we find out the idea will take much longer to build than anyone expected.

What is especially ironic is that these companies are almost always spending far more on technology than they need to. In fact, I've never seen more wasted technology investment than I find in these companies that don't understand the true role of technology.

Rather than outsourcing hundreds or even thousands of mercenary engineers—and providing them roadmaps of features from their stakeholders which rarely generate the necessary business results—I explain to them that they will receive a much greater return from a significantly smaller number of the right employees. Employees who are given business and customer problems to solve and are held accountable to the results.

Engineers in a CIO's organization play a very different role than engineers in a CTO's organization. It's the difference between feature teams and empowered product teams.

To be clear, by “product leadership” I mean the leaders and managers of product management, the leaders and managers of product design,1 and the leaders and managers of engineering.

Overall, we look to leadership for inspiration and we look to management for execution.

The purpose of strong leadership is to inspire and motivate the organization.

Product Vision and Principles The product vision describes the future we are trying to create and, most important, how it improves the lives of our customers. It is usually between 3 and 10 years out. The product vision serves as the shared goal for the product organization. There may be any number of cross‐functional, empowered product teams—ranging from a few in a startup, to hundreds in a large enterprise—but they all need to head in the same direction and contribute in their own way to solving the larger problem.

Some companies refer to the product vision as their “North Star”—in the sense that no matter what product team you're on, and whatever specific problem you're trying to solve, you can all see and follow the North Star. You always know how your piece contributes to the more meaningful whole. More generally, the product vision is what keeps us inspired and excited to come to work each day—month after month, year after year. It is worth noting that the product vision is typically the single most powerful recruiting tool for strong product people.

Product principles complement the product vision by speaking to the nature of the products that your organization believes it needs to produce. The principles reflect the values of the organization, and also some strategic decisions that help the te...

Team Topology The “team topology” refers to how we break up the work among different product teams to best enable them to do great work. This includes the structure and scope of teams, and their relationship to one another.

Product Strategy The product strategy describes how we plan to accomplish the product vision, while meeting the needs of the business as we go. The strategy derives from focus, then leverages insights, converts these insights into action, and finally manages the work through to completion.

Product Evangelism Another critical role of leaders is communicating the product vision, principles, and product strategy—both to the internal product organization, and also across the company more broadly.

If you want to have truly empowered product teams, then your success depends very directly on these first‐level people managers.

If you are wondering why there are so many weak product companies in the world, this would be the primary culprit. And until and unless this is corrected, there's little hope for transformation.

It is important that these managers understand—and can effectively communicate—the product vision, principles, and product strategy from the senior leaders. Beyond that, these managers...

It is the most important responsibility of every people manager to develop the skills of their people. This most definitely does not mean micromanaging them. It does mean understanding their weaknesses and helping them to improve, providing guidance on lessons learned, removing obstacles, and what is loosely referred to as “connecting the dots.”

even if that designer is exceptionally skilled, how can she be expected to keep track of what is going on with all the other product teams? What if the design she is working on right now for her situation is in some way inconsistent or incompatible with solutions underway with other teams? The design manager is expected to flag these conflicts and get the relevant designers together to consider the bigger picture and the impact of the different solutions on the user.

This is how we scale

The leaders don't trust the teams. Specifically, they don't believe they have the level of people on their teams they need to truly empower them. So, along with the other key business leaders from across the company, they believe they need to very explicitly direct the teams themselves. This is also known as the “command‐and‐control” model of management.

having worked with many people at each of these companies, I point out how ordinary the vast majority of the people on these teams actually are. Maybe the important difference lies elsewhere? Maybe these strong companies have different views on how to leverage their talent in order to help their ordinary people reach their true potential and create, together, extraordinary products.

Coaching is what turns ordinary people into extraordinary product teams.

Coaching might be even more essential than mentoring to our careers and our teams. Whereas mentors dole out words of wisdom, coaches roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. They don't just believe in our potential; they get in the arena to help us realize our potential. They hold up a mirror so we can see our blind spots and they hold us accountable for working through our sore spots. They take responsibility for making us better without taking credit for our accomplishments. —Bill Campbell

Developing People Is Job #1

It's amazing and distressing how few managers actually subscribe to this principle—that developing people is job #1. Most say the right things about the importance of the team, but their actions tell a very different story. They see their accountability for aggregate product outcomes as their most important job and treat their teams as a means to an end.

If you are a manager, you should be spending most of your time and energy on coaching your team. This means expending real effort on things such as assessing your team, creating coaching plans, and actively helping them improve and develop.

Christina Wodtke quote "I had to stop trying to be a good designer and start creating a team where good design could happen."

You should measure your own job performance on the successes of your team members, even more than the success of your products.

Empowering means creating an environment where your people can own outcomes and not just tasks. This doesn't mean less management—it means better management.

You must step back to create this space, while stepping in to remove impediments, clarify context, and provide guidance.

Of course, it's important that you support your team both privately and publicly. Even more important is being honest with them in both praise and criticism. Don't hold back if someone is doing particularly well. Similarly, don't sugarcoat areas that need improvement. Always remember to praise publicly but criticize privately.

The key is to ensure that, one way or another, coaching is considered a top priority, and that every person on a product team knows who is specifically assigned to help her develop and reach her full potential.

the three pillars: people, process, and product.

Product Knowledge

User and customer knowledge—

Data knowledge—

Industry and domain knowledge—Is the product manager knowledgeable about the industry and domain? Does she understand the competitive landscape and the relevant industry trends?

Business and company knowledge—Does the product manager understand the various dimensions of your company's business, including marketing, sales, finance (both revenue and costs), services, legal, compliance, privacy, and so on? And do the stakeholders believe that the product manager understands their concerns and constraints?

Product operational knowledge—Is the product manager considered an acknowledged expert on how her product actually works? Would she be able to effectively demo to a prospective customer, train a new customer on how

to successfully use it, and handle live customer support inquiries?

Process Skills and Techniques

Product discovery techniques—Does the product manager have a strong understanding of the product risks and how to address each of them? Does she understand how to tackle risks up front, before engineers are asked to build? Does she know how to solve problems collaboratively? Does she focus on outcome? Does she understand and utilize both qualitative and quantitative techniques?

Product optimization techniques—Once a product or new capability is live and in production, does the product manager know how to utilize optimization technique...

Product delivery techniques—While the product manager's primary responsibility is discovery, she still has an important supporting role to play in delivery. Does she understand her responsi...

Product development process—Does the product manager have a solid understanding of the broader product‐development process including discovery and delivery, as well as the product manager's adminis...