Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

the hiring manager must be skilled at coaching, and willing and able to provide the necessary time and effort. Second, it requires a smaller span of control—for example, the manager might have four to five direct reports rather than six to eight.

Level of Experience of Manager

coaching skills can be developed, and an experienced manager who takes pride in her coaching gets substantially more efficient and effective in developing her staff.

Organizational Complexity Finally, and this is often counterintuitive, in larger organizations the amount of “connecting the dots” and “managing up and across the organization” goes up considerably.

The smallest span of control (within the broader tech product organization) is typically a group product manager, which is a player‐coach role where the GPM is responsible for at most two or three other people.

Most fall in between, somewhere on the order of five to seven direct reports.

At Amazon, a product team has a clear mission, specific goals, and needs to be cross‐functional, dedicated, and co‐located. Why? Creativity comes from people's interactions; inspiration comes from intensive concentration. Just like a start‐up, the team huddles together in a garage, experimenting, iterating, discussing, debating, trying and retrying, again and again.

When people talk about the magic of co‐location, they are mainly talking about discovery, as in the Bezos quote above.

Overall, I find teams with remote employees do quite well in delivery, occasionally even better than when the team is co‐located.

As soon as you separate the product manager from the product designer from the tech lead, a very common anti‐pattern arises.

Discovery in general, and innovation in particular, depends on the concept of psychological safety.

In my experience, most people don't intend to be cruel or insensitive, they just don't have as many social cues to go on. A good manager can coach the employee on her online interactions with the rest of the team and help her realize where she can improve.

When working remotely, it's always better to handle anything that might be interpreted as sensitive over video. It's not as good as in‐person, but it's still much better for including the facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language that are integral parts of communication and so important to developing and maintaining trust.

if you find your distributed team is not delivering the results you are used to, this would be where to focus your coaching.

With the members of the product team being aware of the potential for these problems, and with the managers providing coaching on avoiding or dealing with these problems, you can manage to do good product discovery work in a remote employee environment.

Some helpful checkpoints along the way: At the end of her first day. Has she made at least one hopefully future friend on the team? Does she know what is expected of her? At the end of her first week. How was her first week? Has she had a chance to get to know personally every member of her product team? After she receives her first paycheck. It's normal for the new employee to do a subconscious assessment of the choice she made in joining your company. After her first month. At this point, the new employee has a fairly good idea of the company and her potential in it. After her first 60 days. Has she scored a public “win” that helps establish her value to the company?

you need to establish a relationship based on trust. You're trusting that she will put in her best efforts, and she's trusting you will do everything you can to help her succeed.

As a hiring manager, I learned early on that when I invested in the onboarding of my new hires, it saved me countless hours of grief and damage control.

First, assess the new employee and use that assessment to create a coaching plan.

your focus during this onboarding should be on establishing solid relationships.

For product managers, this typically includes a series of customer visits, with an extensive debrief on the learnings afterward.

Whatever onboarding you decide on, I strongly encourage you to have deep exposure to true users and customers at the foundation. This applies to all members of the product team—including your engineers.

be sure to check in with these leaders and stakeholders to track how their experiences with the new employee are going, and any areas they'd like to see further developed.

Entry to the APM program gives the lucky aspiring product manager entrance into a two‐year coaching program to learn how to become an exceptional product manager and eventual product leader.

you can only do this program if you have very strong and proven product leaders who are both willing and able to spend intense time coaching.

you can consider engaging with an external, proven product leader who is willing to provide this coaching for you. Give the person at least a year to demonstrate results.

Second, set a very high bar for acceptance into this program.

Third, for everyone in this program, do a thorough assessment to identify the necessary areas of skills development. Update this assessment throughout the year.

Fourth, put an individualized, one‐ to two‐year coaching plan in place to help these people reach their potential.

product people don't start at a new company with everything they need to succeed, no matter how successful they've been in the past.

New‐hire orientations, while they're great for helping a new employee feel welcomed and integrated into the organization, fall far short in preparing product people on some of the more important aspects of their role. Things like making hard decisions and gaining a high level of trust among peers.

product managers need to be able to contribute a deep knowledge of the customer, the business, the industry, and their product. Their first day on the job, or even their first month, won't give them this type of knowledge unl...

On day 1, we talk about understanding the customer.

we bring them through our own company history and put everything into context. We share our vision, financial models, talk through our customer discovery, and who our customers have been in the past—and who we want them to be in the future. The rest of the week we talk through validation, building and prioritizing, learning and measuring, and going to market.

Right after Strategic Context, we bring in a product person from the company who can speak to each topic and tell stories from her own personal experience.

customers, collaborate with stakeholders, and navigate an often‐complex company environment. After lunch, we enter the Product Workshop, where participants take what they learned in the morning and apply it practically, as if they were on the job.

This is how we empower product people—by providing them with the information they need to succeed and then trusting them to do the right thing.

the annual performance review should never be the primary feedback tool.

the best way to avoid terminations is to develop your skills in effective recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and especially ongoing coaching.

the most visible and tangible sign of success as a manager was when your people were promoted.

As Tom Peters said, “Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.”

“People join a company, but leave their manager.”

if the people you really don't want to lose are consistently leaving, this is a real sign of a potential problem in management.

Functional breadth is a prerequisite for moving beyond product leadership to company leadership.

The best product leaders are not just great at defining and building products—they understand that a product is only as good as a target customer's understanding of why they need it.

A good product vision keeps us focused on the customer. A good product vision serves as the North Star for the product organization so that we have a common understanding of what we are hoping to accomplish together. A good product vision inspires ordinary people to create extraordinary products. A good product vision provides us with meaningful work. A list of features on a roadmap is not meaningful. How you can positively impact the lives of users and customers is meaningful. A good product vision leverages relevant industry trends and technologies that we believe can help us solve problems for our customers in ways that are just now possible. A good product vision provides the engineering organization with enough clarity about what's coming in the next several years so they can ensure they have in place an architecture that can serve the need. The product vision is a primary driver of the team topology.

strong product vision serves as one of our most powerful recruiting tools

most powerful evangelism tools to enlist the necessary help and support of colleagues from all across the company—ranging from senior executives, to investors, to sales and marketing staff.

The product vision is one of our primary tools for keeping the organization truly focused on what the customer cares about.

all of the benefits derive from providing real value to our customers.