Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

1:1 should be no less than 30 minutes, once per week, and that this session is sacred and not to be another one of those “You okay with skipping this week?” kind of meetings. You may need to occasionally reschedule, but don't cancel. Please consider the message this sends.

Providing Feedback Also known as “tough love” or “radical candor,” honest, constructive feedback is the main source of value you provide as manager.

people learn in different ways, and you'll learn that by listening not talking.

Manager Doesn't Provide Difficult Feedback It's true that learning to give frank, honest, constructive feedback is hard for many people.

Just to be perfectly clear here, at the performance review, nothing should be a surprise—everything should have already been discussed in depth, likely for months.

writing out a narrative explaining your argument and recommendation.

roughly six‐page document that describes in narrative form the problem you're trying to solve, why this will be valuable for your customers and for your business, and your strategy for solving the problem.

Hopefully everyone understands that these company objectives must be outcomes (business results), and not output (such as delivering on specific projects).

creating empowered product teams involves giving product teams ownership of a problem to solve, so that they have the ability to solve problems the best way they see fit.

innovation depends on true collaboration with design and engineering, which is a peer relationship and not a reporting relationship

work will always expand to fill whatever time is available,

Building the Foundation for Trust Modern product work is all about relationships. This is particularly true for product managers.

imposter syndrome is a very healthy and necessary emotion, and an important signal from our minds.

Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose

Disagree and Commit

A final note on decision making: Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape Communications—and a very big influence on me (Marty) and the many others who worked for him—was famous for voicing his three rules of decisions: If you see a snake, kill it.1 Don't play with dead snakes. All opportunities start out looking like snakes.

While there are, of course, an infinite number of possible reasons for a meeting, in practice, in product organizations, there are generally three types: communication, decisions, and problem solving.

the four big risks that every product team needs to consider are: Will the customer buy it, or choose to use it? (Value risk) Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk) Can we build it? (Feasibility risk) Can the stakeholders support this solution? (Business viability risk)

Should we build it? (Ethical risk)

Rob Chesnut's excellent book, Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution (New York: St.

Meaningful Work Most people in the product world want their work to be meaningful.

in my experience, pretty much everyone wants to feel valued. Especially by people they respect.

Promotions, compensation, and equity are obvious ways to recognize someone, but beyond that, I'm a big fan of more frequent and more personal forms of recognition, especially once I've come to know their interests: A nice bottle of wine A book I think she would enjoy A ticket to an industry conference or event A gift certificate for a nice local restaurant A weekend getaway for two Most of the time, I've had sufficient budget to just cover these things, but there have been a couple of companies I've worked where I had to pay for them myself.

any good manager knows that they are only as good as their people, so helping my people feel valued helps me as well.

if you truly care about the happiness of your people, you know your actions speak louder than your words.

The manager needs to be sensitive to this, and in fact go out of her way to share how and when she's personally recharging, being conscious about when she's sending emails, and how she's managing her time.

Bill coached, and put together a book of his leadership and coaching principles called Trillion Dollar Coach.1

Bill would say that he had a different way of measuring his impact, his own kind of yardstick. I look at all the people who've worked for me or who I've helped in some way, he would say, and I count up how many are great leaders now. That's how I measure success.

Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle, Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Legendary Bill Campbell

Leader Profile: Lisa Kavanaugh

What has always defined Lisa, however, was her passion for coaching, and for continuously improving both herself and those who worked for her.

For the past several years, she has dedicated her career to coaching others, helping technology leaders to become the leaders their companies need them to be.

Self‐Awareness It begins with being honest with yourself and understanding what behaviors or traits might be getting in your own way, or in your team's way.

It takes courage to make space for teams to learn and make mistakes. It takes courage to give meaningful and honest feedback.

It takes courage to be vulnerable.

Courageous leadership is going forward despite the discomfort.

the empowered team model is truly a people‐first model. You are hiring capable people and giving them the space to do remarkable things.

Laszlo Bock's Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2015).

Competence Stephen Covey explained that: Trust is a function of two things: competence and character. Competence includes your capabilities, your skills, and your track record. Character includes your integrity, your motive, and your intent with people. Both are vital.

Stanford professor Bob Sutton: The No Asshole Rule: Building A Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't

We need people with different educations, different approaches to problem solving, different life experiences, and different strengths.

Innovation thrives with people who think differently. So, candidates with different education, different life experiences, different cultures, or different approaches to problem solving are highly desired.

Execution — how well do you get things done, do the right thing without being asked, and track lots of simultaneous targets? Creativity — how often are you the person in the room with the most or the best ideas? Strategy — how well do you get up above what you're working on and put it into a broader market or vision context and then make this clear to others? Growth — how good are you at figuring out ways to multiply effort through smart use of process, team management, and so on?

One of the most important goals of a reference check is to try to identify candidates that are going to prove toxic due to their personality. Most such people can hide the problematic parts of their personality during an interview, but their previous employers know.

Span of Control Span of control refers to how many direct reports a manager

GPM is responsible for at most two or three other people.

Trust Discovery in general, and innovation in particular, depends on the concept of psychological safety.1 This essentially means that the members of your product team feel respected and their contributions are welcome and valued.

Remember that, as a leader, you are only as good as your weakest employee. These people are your product.

Remember: we're not hiring smart product people to tell them what to do—we're hiring them to solve hard problems in ways our customers love, yet work for our business.