Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

Collaboration means product managers, product designers, and engineers working together with customers and stakeholders and executives to come up with a solution that solves for all of our constraints and risks.

in an empowered product team, the purpose of the product team is “to serve the customers in ways customers love, yet work for the business.”

Collaborating with stakeholders and executives involves listening carefully to try to understand the constraints, and thinking hard about solutions that would work for our customers and our business.

the manager coaching her product people on the role of each stakeholder, and why they are there, what they are concerned about and why, and what they need to succeed at their jobs.

Modern product work is all about relationships.

Try this exercise: Have the PM write down the list of people with whom she regularly collaborates. Add to the list any stakeholders whose input she regularly needs. Next, circle the three to five names that are most important to her having a successful outcome in her work. Finally, circle the names of the one or two people she most dreads having to deal with.

I find it very frustrating, especially in the product and design spaces, how many people on social media, authors of articles and books, and conference speakers are, at least in my personal opinion, advocating nonsense.

fear of looking clueless is also what pushes me to try out my article/talk/presentation beforehand on some people that I highly respect and I know will tell me honestly if I am not solid in my thinking or my delivery.

Whenever I see some product person deliver an underwhelming presentation to an executive team or a conference, my frustration is centered not on the product person, but rather on that person's manager.

REI Hiking Boot Replacement story (described in the movie Wild),

I also recommend a minimum of three, one‐hour customer interactions each week, ongoing, and during the weekly 1:1, I love to ask about these customer interactions and see what the product person has learned.

Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose

An experienced manager can coach a product person through these many types of situations and make all the difference to the career of a new product person: identifying and avoiding the landmines, understanding the priorities and the larger context, and navigating the personalities.

You need to explain that if she misleads the executives, customers, or stakeholders—even with the best of intentions—she may permanently damage her reputation in the company and prevent establishing the trust that is so essential to effective product teams.

if she gives her word on something—to a customer, stakeholder, executive, partner, or her own team—she needs to first be sure she is basing her commitment on informed judgment. And second, she absolutely needs to do everything possible to then deliver on what she or her team has promised.

“If a product team succeeds, it's because everyone on the team did what they needed to do, but if a product team fails, it's the product manager.”

an empowered product team is all about pushing decisions down to the product team level.

good decisions rest on a foundation of integrity—you are perceived as being dependable in your commitments, you are believed to be acting in the best interests of the company, and you're willing to be accountable to the results.

we need to constantly keep in mind the outcome we are striving for when we make a decision.

Good decision making is not about getting everyone to agree (the consensus model), and it's not about pleasing the most people (the voting model), and it's also not about having one person who is expected to make all the decisions (the benevolent dictator model). If the decision is primarily about enabling technology, if at all possible, we defer to our tech lead. If the decision is primarily about the user or customer experience, if at all possible, we defer to our product designer. And if the decision is primarily about business viability, we will depend on the product manager collaborating with the relevant stakeholders.

This topic alone can usually fill up the weekly 1:1 with good, constructive discussions and coaching.

If you see a snake, kill it.1 Don't play with dead snakes. All opportunities start out looking like snakes.

the biggest pain about meetings is that they are synchronous.

If there's a way to serve the purpose asynchronously, then that's generally a better path.

in product organizations, there are generally three types: communication, decisions, and problem solving.

Purpose: First, being very clear on the purpose of the meeting is an important start for the meeting organizer.

Attendees: Next, it's important to decide on the attendees.

Preparation: In all three types of meetings, preparation is essential.

If it's a communication session, do you have clarity on the content?

If it's a decision meeting, do you have the written narrative,

If it's a problem‐solving session, how will you explain the situation or context to the attendees?

Facilitation: Assuming you've prepared, your job as the organizer is to facilitate an effective meeting.

Follow‐up: Once the meeting has reached a conclusion, there is usually some follow‐up that needs to be done.

the four big risks that every product team needs to consider are: Will the customer buy it, or choose to use it? (Value risk) Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk) Can we build it? (Feasibility risk) Can the stakeholders support this solution? (Business viability risk)

First, there are already so many different aspects to business viability—sales, marketing, finance, legal, compliance, privacy, and more—that it's easy for ethics to get lost.

Second, unlike the other areas of business viability, there is rarely a stakeholder explicitly responsible for ethics.

adding a fifth risk: Should we build it? (Ethical risk)

It's important for companies to recognize other stakeholders and understand the implications that each product solution will have on those stakeholders.

If you're not proud of where you work, not proud of how your company is impacting the world, or believe that leadership really doesn't care about integrity, it's probably time to start looking for another job.

the manager focus at least weekly on whether each of her product people feels she is doing meaningful work, progressing in her career, and building the necessary relationships with her team and with the execs that enable her to effectively and successfully lead an empowered product team.

Most people in the product world want their work to be meaningful.

professional relationships are built on personal relationships.

everyone wants to feel valued. Especially by people they respect.

She will explain how easy it is to burn out, how important it is to play the long game, and how the job is essentially creative problem solving, which requires time to recharge.

if you truly care about the happiness of your people, you know your actions speak louder than your words.

The manager needs to be sensitive to this, and in fact go out of her way to share how and when she's personally recharging, being conscious about when she's sending emails, and how she's managing her time.

in order for the product person to be truly happy in her life, it may mean helping her into a different job or even career.

during the early, formative years of their respective companies, Steve Jobs of Apple, Larry and Sergey of Google, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon were all coached by the same person: Bill Campbell, known as “The Coach of Silicon Valley.” Most people outside of Silicon Valley aren't aware of this, and that's largely because Bill did everything he could to avoid being in the limelight. He wanted the attention to be on the people he was coaching.

would argue that even though Apple, Amazon, and Google have very different cultures, they all understand the essential role of product, and they all understand that empowering product teams to do great work is the key.

Bill would say that he had a different way of measuring his impact, his own kind of yardstick. I look at all the people who've worked for me or who I've helped in some way, he would say, and I count up how many are great leaders now. That's how I measure success.