Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

primary purpose of the 1:1 is not for the manager, it is for the employee.

The most basic skill required for a competent manager is the willingness and ability to provide honest, timely, and constructive feedback to employees.

Tom Peters said, “Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.”

The product vision describes the future you are trying to create. In what ways will you improve the lives of your customers?

the timeframe for the product vision is between 3 and 10 years out.

Remember that customers don't care about our technology—they care about how well we solve their problems.

The visiontype describes the world once the vision is a reality—that may be 3 years or 10 years in the future.

a storyboard focuses on the emotion and the customer experience and not on the details.

as a manager, I am certain that every person on my team is better at a great many things than I am.

Optimizing for empowerment requires balancing three interrelated goals: ownership, autonomy, and alignment.

the two fundamental types of product teams: platform teams, which manage services so they can be easily leveraged by other teams, and experience teams, which are responsible for how the product value is exposed to users and customers.

Conway's Law. It states that any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure mirrors the organization's structure.

Establish Trust People are the heart and soul of any company. And, trust can enable those people, working together effectively, to create and achieve far more than they ever imagined individually. This is the magic of successful companies.

why is product strategy so hard? Because it requires four things that are not easy for most companies: The first is to be willing to make tough choices on what's really important.

Choices means focus. Deciding what few things you really need to do, and therefore all the things you won't do.

smart, engaged leaders practicing servant leadership.

product strategy requires choice, thinking, and effort.

In large part, this is a reflection of leaders feeling the need to place a lot of bets—versus the best or most impactful bets—the fear of missing out, and the need to respond to every competitor, every lost deal, every customer request. These are all understandable reactions.

By not picking your battles and focusing on the few truly critical problems, most of the work going on does not make an impact. And for the truly critical priorities, there is not enough attention to actually move the needle. There is also a very practical reason to focus on just a few truly critical problems.

Richard Rumelt reminds us that every good product strategy begins with this focus: Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.

you never know what might help you connect the dots, so always keep an eye out and an open mind.

qualitative insights are often profound and can literally change the course of your company.

The user research community generally breaks down insights into two types. The first is evaluative, which essentially means, what did we learn from testing out this new product idea? Did it work or not, and if not, why not? The second type of insights are generative. This means, did we uncover any new opportunities that we aren't pursuing, but maybe we should?

vision pivot, and these vision pivots have both saved and created countless companies. Slack, YouTube, Facebook, and Netflix are just a few of the companies that experienced this.

As Jeff Bezos says, “We need to be stubborn on our product vision,” which I very strongly agree with.

Shan‐Lyn in her own words: There's nothing that I enjoy more than building things that the world has never seen before, but once they see them, they're like, “How did we live without it?” Products that bring genuine joy. That is the thing I want to keep doing forever.

In our kitchen you'll find a NO ASSHOLES sign. You'll also find signs emphasizing NO POINTING FINGERS, NO POLITICS, NO GAMES.

We know that innovation thrives in environments where different perspectives are sought out and encouraged, so we made diversity an explicit goal from the beginning, for every open role.

A few years ago, I was in a serious car accident, and the experience made a profound impact on me. I learned to live life more in the present.

Being CEO of a fast‐growing company is tough, the demands are high and increasing, but I get to actually do what I love every day, with people I love working alongside, and I'm thankful to be alive to do this another day.

OKRs are first and foremost an empowerment technique.

The essential point of team objectives is to empower a team by: (a) giving them a problem to solve rather than a feature to build, and (b) ensuring they have the necessary strategic context to understand the why and make good decisions.

What's most important about all of these examples is that they are problems to solve and not features to build.

Some are customer problems, and some are business problems, but in each case, there are any number of potential solutions.

the example objectives are all qualitative.

Key Results While the objective is the problem to solve, the key results tell us how we define success.

it's essential that we define success by business results (aka outcome) and not simply activity or output.

most common reason that teams go wrong with team objectives is that they end up listing activities or del...

it is very easy to ship a deliverable yet not solve the underlying problem.

the goal is to get six referenceable customers on the path to product/market fit. That's a very powerful business result, and it's one of our best leading indicators of future sales.

a good key result would be getting eight prospective customers to sign a non‐binding letter of intent to buy.1

level of ambition as either a roof shot or a moon shot.

a moon shot is when the team is asked to be very ambitious, such as going for a 10X improvement.

High‐integrity commitments are intended for situations where you have an important external commitment or a very important and substantial internal commitment.

The best product teams know that, when it comes to tech companies, we either all succeed, or none of us succeed.

The companion to empowerment is accountability.

But no matter where she worked, she was known for her commitment to coaching and developing the people fortunate enough to work for her.

Which is why I felt she found her true calling joining the faculty at Stanford, where she teaches human–computer interaction and product design.

This is why I've always considered her a kindred spirit.