Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

as the manager, you should always be seeking constructive feedback on the person—asking the other members of the product team about their interactions and asking senior executives, stakeholders, and business owners about their impressions and suggestions.

force yourself to come up with some helpful constructive feedback every week.

The best product leaders measure their success in how many people they've helped earn promotions, or have moved on to serve on increasingly impactful products, or to become leaders of the company, or even to start their own companies.

this session is primarily for the product person and not for you.

at the performance review, nothing should be a surprise—

not everyone is cut out to be a product person.

the product roles of product manager, product designer, and tech lead are not “junior” roles.

For product leaders, the product team is our product, and this is how we develop a great product.

the single most important thing you can do in the interview process (once you've convinced the company that you have the potential and are worth investing in) is to try to determine if the hiring manager is willing and able to provide you this level of coaching.

my single favorite coaching tool for helping product people become exceptional: the written narrative.

a roughly six‐page document that describes in narrative form the problem you're trying to solve, why this will be valuable for your customers and for your business, and your strategy for solving the problem.

Brad Porter puts it, “Speed and scale are weapons, and Amazon has already told everyone its secret … if only they have the discipline to implement it.”1

This strategic context typically comes from the product leaders of the company but needs to be deeply understood by the product team, especially the product manager.

the strategic context is part of the onboarding for any new product person joining the organization.

If any employee does not know the mission of the company, then that would be an obvious sign that something is seriously wrong in the culture and/or the leaders.

Once we understand the company scorecard, we can discuss the specific objectives the company is focused on for this year.

the product vision is somewhere between 3 years and 10 years out and describes the future we are trying to create, and why that future will improve the lives of our customers.

The product principles complement the product vision by stating the values and beliefs that are intended to inform the many product decisions that will need to be made.

The strategic context provided by the company mission, company scorecard, company objectives, product vision and principles, and product strategy is meant to apply to all product teams in the company.

creating empowered product teams involves giving product teams ownership of a problem to solve, so that they have the ability to solve problems the best way they see fit.

was given to my inevitable questions of “Why?” I was told that, as product manager, to think like an owner meant I needed to feel a real obligation and responsibility to my customers, my product team, my stakeholders, and my company's investors. Why? Because the product team takes their lead from the product manager, and the team and the company executives will judge me by my words and actions. I was told that my product team was counting on me to provide them the

teams do much better work when given the context and a problem to solve, rather than describing to them the so‐called requirements of a solution.

I'd need to “do my homework”—customers, data, business, and industry

designer and engineers need someone on the team with this knowledge and context and this would be my direct contribution to solving the problems the team has been assigned.

commit to figuring out a way over whatever obstacles would arise, and to expect that many would indeed arise.

technology products are never easy.

“There will always be many good reasons not to ship, and it's your responsibility to figure out a way over, around, or through each obstacle.”

performance would be measured by results

we need to be careful never to confuse output with outcome. Our customers care about results, not effort or activity.

to succeed meant that I'd have to work hard to establish and maintain relationships with people from all across the company whom I'd need to depend on—and who would depend on me.

in a company, especially a large company, there are many people there to ensure that the assets are protected—the sales force, the revenue, the customers, the reputation—and getting things done in a company means understanding and respecting these constraints by coming up with solutions that work for the business.

leaders of the company would be continuously judging me to decide if they felt I had done my homework, if I was thinking and acting like an owner, and if the product team was in good hands.

executives of companies with the empowered team model learn that the product manager is the canary in the coal mine.

I'd have to take responsibility when things didn't go well, yet give credit to the team when things did go well.

it was my responsibility to motivate and evangelize my team.

I'd have the responsibility to ensure success but not the authority to direct people.

innovation depends on true collaboration with design and engineering, which is a peer relationship and not a reporting relationship

thinking like an owner versus thinking like an employee is primarily about taking responsibility for the outcome rather than just the activities.

if CEOs want their key people to think and behave like owners, they should compensate them like owners.

An evergreen strategy with equity means that your best people will always feel like they would be leaving behind substantial compensation if they exit before they are fully vested.

one of the most common, and most important, coaching topics is helping a new product manager learn to manage her time.

in the vast majority of cases, I find that the product manager is spending most of her day doing project management work, rather than product management work.

This means working with designers and engineers to come up with solutions that are valuable, usable, feasible, and viable. That is product discovery, and that is what takes on the order of four solid hours a day.

three critical characteristics of strong product teams, no matter what processes they use: the first is tackling risks early; the second is solving problems collaboratively; and the third is being accountable to results.

collaboration is not about consensus.

collaboration is not about artifacts.

collaboration is also not about compromise.

We need to find a solution that works. By that we mean that it is valuable (valuable enough that target customers will actually buy it or choose to use it), it is usable (so users can actually experience that value), it is feasible (so we can actually deliver that value), and it is viable for our business (so the rest of our company can effectively market, sell, and support the solution).

Designers often have insights based on deep understanding of our users and their behaviors that lead us in a different direction in terms of the problem we're solving, or our approach to the problem.

engineers have deep insights into the enabling technology that often leads us to entirely different solutions to the problems we were assigned—often much better than anything the product manager, the designer, or especially the customer could have imagined.