Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

transforming to a strong, confident, inspiring leader can take effort and personal courage. These are four key skills that each leader needs to complete that transformation.

Self‐Awareness It begins with being honest with yourself and understanding what behaviors or traits might be getting in your own way, or in your team's way.

Courage

It takes courage to make space for teams to learn and make mistakes. It takes courage to give meaningful and honest feedback. It takes courage to take this leap of faith that trusting your team will have better results than just trusting in yourself. It takes courage to leave your tactical skills behind and move into the world of strategy. It takes courage to be vulnerable.

Courageous leadership is going forward despite the discomfort.

Rules of Engagement For many leaders, learning to trust their teams can take a very big leap of faith.

Rules of engagement are simply an agreement with the teams on what type of visibility the leader needs in order to give the teams the space they need to work.

Disrupting Yourself Even if the leader is self‐aware, has the personal courage to make the necessary changes, and has agreed to rules of engagement, it's no secret that long‐held habits can be very hard to break.

there is often very fundamental confusion about what to look for when hiring strong product people.

the best product companies hire competent people of character, and then coach and develop them into members of extraordinary teams.

in far too many companies, the leaders equate staffing with hiring. But it's a much larger problem than just hiring, and in fact, if you focus just on hiring, you will dramatically reduce your chances of building the organization you need.

staffing is the responsibility of the hiring manager.

The most important decision at Amazon, has been, and remains, hiring the right talent. —Jeff Bezos

Laszlo Bock's Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

Trust is a function of two things: competence and character. Competence includes your capabilities, your skills, and your track record. Character includes your integrity, your motive, and your intent with people. Both are vital.

“A's hire A's, but B's hire C's.”

A manager that is not an accomplished product manager, designer, or engineer herself is ill‐equipped to assess a candidate, and it is easy to see how the company can end up hiring someone that is not competent at the job.

the “No Assholes Rule.”2 They understand that it doesn't matter how exceptionally skilled a player or coach may be, if he's an asshole, then he will be toxic to the team overall.

competence and character are all‐important to establishing the necessary trust,

One of the unintended and damaging consequences of hiring people like us is that they too often think like us.

we really need are people that think differently from us.

Bob Sutton: The No Asshole Rule: Building A Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't

While a coach might get an occasional “walk‐on” (the rough equivalent of someone sending in their resume), mostly the coach actively works to recruit the necessary talent: visiting prospects, getting to know them personally, and working to persuade the desired talent to join their team.

recruiting rather than sourcing is the fastest way I know to improve diversity.

Building your network of potential recruits is an ongoing activity—

You have the opportunity to begin a mentoring relationship that can hopefully develop into a coaching relationship when the time is right.

hosting talks at your offices with selected industry speakers who can attract candidates, and also help build the reputation of your organization.

Your products are the lifeblood of your company, and these skills must be core competencies. Your customers depend on these products and services. Outsourcing these things will almost certainly kill any chance you have of teams of missionaries.

you think you'll save money by hiring some low‐cost, offshore firm. I promise you that you will end up spending much more and getting much less for it. The amount of overhead in terms of time and communication—and even more important, the opportunity cost of losing your ability to innovate—makes this a very poor investment.

a smaller group of missionaries will always outperform a larger group of mercenaries, especially if you consider the need for both discovery and delivery.

the hiring manager needs to take responsibility for the interview effectiveness of the interview team, and the interview experience for the candidate.

Your overarching goal is to ensure you hire competent people of character, and that every hire—at least for product managers, product designers, and tech leads—should raise the average.

for product managers, product designers, and tech leads—since there is just one each per team—it's critical to ensure a high standard of competence. Those are not “junior” roles.

the hiring manager should very carefully select and curate the interview team. Each person should be selected both for her competence and for her character.

Your objective during the series of interviews is to ensure that any open questions are resolved by the end of the interview day.

always remind the interview team that we are not looking for more of the same. Innovation thrives with people who think differently. So, candidates with different education, different life experiences, different cultures, or different approaches to problem solving are highly desired.

stack rank them in order of strongest to weakest.

Now for the four attributes, in no particular order. I (Chris) usually describe them this way: Execution — how well do you get things done, do the right thing without being asked, and track lots of simultaneous targets? Creativity — how often are you the person in the room with the most or the best ideas? Strategy — how well do you get up above what you're working on and put it into a broader market or vision context and then make this clear to others? Growth — how good are you at figuring out ways to multiply effort through smart use of process, team management, and so on?

I put a lot of importance on a product person's level of self‐awareness and her ability to identify and admit areas of growth.

An excellent book to help you learn how to identify competence during interviews is Geoff Smart and Randy Street's Who: The A Method for Hiring

if you have found a truly strong candidate, then it's critical to move quickly. Strive to produce an offer in 24–48 hours.

take reference checks seriously, and do them personally—don't delegate this to anyone else. Be sure to ask if the person would hire the candidate again.

identify candidates that are going to prove toxic due to their personality.

go beyond a reference check. One of the surest ways today to spot toxic personalities is to explore the candidate's behavior on social media. Find their profiles and look at how they interact with others.1 Do they have thoughtful, respectful interactions or do they assume the worst and respond before thinking? If the candidate is consistently rude in public on social media, it is very likely they will eventually act the same at work.

explicitly tell the candidate that if she joins and commits to putting in the effort, then you will promise to personally invest in coaching and developing the candidate to reach her potential.

If the candidate is especially good, it's very possible that she will receive multiple offers, and this is when I would typically request that the CEO or other key leader reach out and offer to talk.

while an offer for employment is made on behalf of the company, the hiring of talent is personal—a personal commitment from a manager to the personal and professional growth of an individual, and the personal commitment of the new hire to contribute to the vision and success of the company.

Every people manager's first responsibility is to coach and develop her people; however, depending on the type of people being managed, the amount of time required for that coaching can vary substantially.

Level of Operational Responsibility If your role carries significant operational responsibilities, such as product strategy, design strategy, and architecture/tech debt strategy, that will consume real time.

Level of Experience of Employees Many companies have little choice but to hire people that are inexperienced in their new roles and to coach them to success.