Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

we'll get more work done (throughput) if we limit the number of things our product team is working on at any one time.

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.

Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action, How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

my favorite, yet the most difficult, aspect of product strategy, which is to generate, identify, and leverage the insights that will provide the foundation of the product strategy.

Good strategy … does not pop out of some “strategic management” tool, matrix, chart, triangle, or fill‐in‐the‐blanks scheme. Instead, a talented leader identifies the one or two critical issues in the situation—the pivot points that can multiply the effectiveness of effort—and then focuses and concentrates action and resources on them.

this never happens without real preparation.

The information that's in the strategic context—the company objectives, the company scorecard/dashboard, and the product vision—is the foundation for any kind of significant insight.

these insights can come from anyone or anywhere.

without that preparation, you probably won't recognize the insight—

four consistently effective and valuable sources of insights,

the big insights that form the foundation of successful product strategies come from an analysis of the product data. Especially related to your business model, your acquisition funnel, your customer retention factors, your sales execution data, and hundreds of other important indicators of the state of your company.

Qualitative Insights User research is all about insights, which is why I'm such a fan of having strong user researchers in the organization.

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?

generative. This means, did we uncover any new opportunities that we aren't pursuing, but maybe we should?

sometimes we discover even bigger opportunities than the ones we're looking into at the moment.

they are not set up to leverage the insights that are generated

empowered engineers that often identify these enabling technologies and proactively bring the possibilities to the leaders, usually in the form of a prototype.

There are always some number of analysts covering nearly every space, and you should be following those whom you consider to be among the best.

half the battle, especially in larger organizations, is getting the relevant insights into the right minds at the right time.

The insights that are generated need to be shared and communicated.

The product leader or design leader is often the first person to connect the dots between learnings of different teams and see real opportunities.

leaders are given the data they request, not the data they need—especially to make insightful strategic decisions.

leaders need to take the learnings and pass them along to other teams that may benefit from these insights, and more generally, help to build their understanding of the holistic business.

head of product should aggregate the key learnings and insights from all the different teams in her areas, and at the weekly or bi‐weekly all‐hands.

it helps the broader organization—including the other product teams, but also stakeholders—get a better understanding of the learning and insights that happen every week in the product organization.

it ensures that the leader is truly grokking all the key insights and not just passing along some status in an email.

is very hard to anticipate exactly where key insights will have the most impact, so it's very important ...

Jeff Bezos says, “We need to be stubborn on our product vision,”

The vision pivot is most relevant when our insights lead to a larger opportunity. Not when we realize that the problems are harder than we thought (which is pretty much always true).

In the empowered team model, our intention is to provide the teams with the set of specific problems they each need to solve, and then give them the space to determine the best way to solve those problems.

The objectives are the customer or business problem we need solved, and the key results are how we measure the progress.

All that's really required is for a knowledgeable leader to sit down with the relevant product teams, explain the strategic context—including the product strategy—and then tell each team which problems you need them to work on, and what business results they should measure.

we have focused the organization on a small number of truly important problems, we have identified the key insights that we will leverage, and we have converted these insights into actions in the form of objectives for each product team.

weekly tracking and coaching is so important.

coaching and the management of the strategy are not so much different responsibilities as they are two sides of the same discussions.

innovation comes from empowered teams of strong people working in a trusted environment.

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.

Feature Teams vs. Product Teams

OKRs are first and foremost an empowerment technique.

Manager's Objectives vs. Product Team Objectives

The Role of Leadership

in terms of actually getting the benefits of OKRs, there are three critical prerequisites: Move from the feature team model to the empowered product team model Stop doing manager objectives and individual objectives, and instead focus on team objectives Leaders need to step up and do their part to turn product strategy into action

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.

The best people to determine the most appropriate solution are those closest to the problem, with the necessary skills—the product team. We want the team to take responsibility for achieving the desired outcome. If we tell the team the feature we want them to build, then if that feature doesn't provide the necessary results, we can't hold the team accountable. If we give the team the problem to solve, and the space to solve it in the best way they see fit, the product team will feel much more ownership of the problem. If the first solution the team comes up with does not produce the desired outcome, they know they must continue to iterate and/or try alternative approaches until they find a solution that does.

they are problems to solve and not features to build.

objectives are all qualitative.

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.

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

Fourth, we love it when teams express a special interest in working on specific problems.