Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

Lessons

This book is dedicated to Bill Campbell (1940–2016), known with affection as the Coach of Silicon Valley.

I realize how many of the important lessons I've learned about leadership, empowerment, teams, and strong product companies can be traced back to Bill.

The most striking thing we learned was that in so many companies—even companies trying to do true, technology‐powered products and services—product teams were too often not allowed to work the way they needed to.

The product manager is really a project manager, shepherding the backlog items through the process. The designers and engineers are there just to design and code the features on the roadmap. Motivation is low, sense of ownership is minimal, and innovation is rare.

transforming is hard, and they just don't know how. Or even what it really means to transform.

“product culture,” but strong product companies often have very different cultures from one another, so it clearly goes beyond that.

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.

the vast majority of companies view technology as a necessary expense.

in most companies, technology teams exist to serve the business.

in strong product companies, technology is not an expense, it is the business.

the purpose of the product team is to serve customers by creating products customers love, yet work for the business.

the “product strategy,” if you could even call it that, is really about trying to please as much of the business as possible.

in strong product companies, the product leaders are among the most impactful leaders in the company. They are responsible for staffing and coaching the product teams; they are responsible for the product strategy and converting the strategy into action; and they're responsible for managing to results.

Empowered product teams depend on skilled product managers, product designers, and engineers, and it is the leaders and managers who are responsible for recruiting, hiring, and coaching these people.

Feature teams look superficially like a product team. They are cross‐functional, with a product manager, a product designer, and some number of engineers. The difference is that they are all about implementing features and projects (output), and as such are not empowered or held accountable to results.

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).

Feature teams are cross‐functional (a product manager doing mainly project management, a product designer, plus some engineers), and assigned features and projects to build rather than problems to solve, and as such they are all about output and not business results.

Empowered product teams are also cross‐functional (a product manager, a product designer, and engineers), but in contrast to feature teams, they are assigned problems to solve, and are then empowered to come up with solutions that work—measured by outcome—and held accountable to results.

First, the customers and stakeholders don't know what is just now possible—

Second, with technology products, it's very hard to predict in advance what solutions will work.

product discovery is about discovering a solution that our customers love, yet works for our business.

Marc Andreessen published what I consider one of the most important essays of our time, “Why Software Is Eating the World.”

The automotive industry has suffered from this mindset for decades,3 until Tesla came along and proved what is truly possible when technology is at the core of the car, rather than treated as just a necessary cost.

a Tesla actually improves over time rather than simply depreciating.

One very common manifestation of how a company views the role of technology is whether the engineers building the company's products report up to a CIO (chief information officer)/head of IT, or whether they report up to a CTO (chief technology officer)/head of engineering.

the CIO truly is there to serve the business.

The heart of this book is the importance of strong product leadership.

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.

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.

The product vision describes the future we are trying to create and, most important, how it improves the lives of our customers.

the product vision is what keeps us inspired and excited to come to work each day—

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 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.

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.

“We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.”

If we want teams of missionaries, it's essential that every person in the organization understands and is convinced—they need to be true believers.

This requires an ongoing crusade of evangelizing—in recruiting, onboarding, weekly 1:1 coaching, all‐hands meetings, team ...

evangelism is something that is never “done.”

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

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

It is the most important responsibility of every people manager to develop the skills of their people.

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.”

every member of a product team deserves to have someone who is committed to helping them get better at their craft.

in the vast majority of strong tech product organizations, the engineers report to experienced engineering managers; the designers report to experienced design managers; and the product managers report to proven managers of product management.

The third responsibility of the people managers is to ensure that each product team has one or two clear objectives they have been assigned (typically quarterly) which spell out the problems they are being asked to solve.