Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

product and design should always be partners, and this begins with respect for each other and each other's disciplines. We are better together.

company objectives are coming from the senior executive team, with the support and approval of the board of directors. These are presented here in OKR format, but what is important is (1) their focus on a small number of meaningful objectives, and (2) they are measuring the results based on business results.

the leaders of product management, engineering, and design—and the members of the product teams—had the product vision, product principles, and especially the product strategy in mind as they decided on, and then pursued, their team objectives.

the company had 16 product teams comprised of 60 engineers, 12 product managers,1 10 product designers, 2 user researchers, and 3 data analysts.

Data and Reporting—Many parts of the company depend on reporting of the marketplace activity, starting with the product teams, but also including finance, marketing, sales, and company leadership. This team provides the reporting infrastructure that is fed to the employer and seeker dashboards, as well as enabling self‐service reporting by the rest of the company.

Tools—The Tools team is there to help all the product teams—Employer, Job Seeker, and Platform—with tools and services to help them be more productive and generate more‐reliable systems. This includes site‐monitoring services, test‐and‐release automation (DevOps) tools, and miscellaneous productivity and team collaboration tools.

The team objectives are intended to cover the critical work in support of the company objectives.

these objectives are problems to solve—they are not solutions. The teams are expected to try out potential solutions in discovery and pursue solutions where they have evidence they will work.