Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

If you're used to conventional‐style Agile processes, you probably know that coming up with a high‐confidence date is very difficult if not impossible. However, if you're used to the model of doing product discovery in parallel with product delivery, then you know that coming up with a high‐confidence date is not hard, so long as the company is willing to wait until the necessary product discovery work has been done before the date is provided (usually a few days).

These team objective postmortems are not fun for the team, but they are typically very constructive and helpful. Is there some embarrassment at admitting your failures to your peers? Sometimes. But that's part of the feedback we all need to continue to learn and grow.

Empowerment of an engineer means that you provide the engineers with the problem to solve and the strategic context, and they are able to leverage technology to figure out the best solution to the problem.

The best tech companies understand this. They all have dual‐track career ladders for a reason. Their top engineers are generally compensated at the level of a vice president.

The engineers are the easiest way to tell if the company has teams of missionaries or teams of mercenaries.

Note that I'm not suggesting that you put your engineers on a pedestal. They are ordinary people like the rest of us. But I am suggesting that you treat them like the first‐cla...

I insist on speaking to the engineers directly. Much more often than not, this is not at all what the engineers say. In fact, the most common complaint I hear from the engineers is that they are not included until it's too late, and they are forced to deal with the consequences.

But, as I said above, sometimes not even a single one of the engineers has any desire to do anything other than code. In this case, my discussion moves to the head of engineering, and I explain that she has mercenaries and not missionaries, and why she needs to raise the bar on hiring engineers. At a minimum, she needs at least one true tech lead on each product team, and discovery is one of the big responsibilities of the tech lead.