Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

The most common way for a strong platform team to pursue major work is through shared team objectives.

an emerging trend is that a growing number of companies are working to manage their internal platforms more like external platform products.

This is more likely to happen when the scope of ownership for each team follows other natural patterns of the business such as the sales channel, market segment, or user type.

Customer‐enabling product teams create tools and systems that are used by the company's internal employees who are providing some vital part of the customer experience.

topology can empower experience teams by aligning them with the end‐to‐end needs of the different types of company internal users.

a cross‐functional product team, at least for an experience team, includes a dedicated product designer.

it's essential to be “in the room where it happens.”

Design is far too important to be run as an internal service. It needs to be a first‐class member of the product team, just as the product manager and tech lead are.

The design manager can ensure a holistic view of design by establishing design standards, guidelines, and design systems; reviewing the work of the designers; and also by conducting design strategy and review sessions with the broader group of product designers.

Conway's Law. It states that any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure mirrors the organization's structure.

there is no reason that reporting relationships should dictate team topology.

the product manager, product designer, and tech lead sit together, but the rest of the engineers are either working from home or in another office).

When a team is in a remote office or working remotely, the product manager needs to make extra effort to develop and maintain the necessary relationships with the executives and stakeholders.

we try to optimize for the product team as opposed to optimizing for the managers, or for access to customers, or for anything else.

Regardless of the reason for reviewing your topology, you should optimize for the empowerment of the teams by focusing on the dimensions of ownership, autonomy, and alignment.

Here are a few warning signs that can indicate your topology could use some attention: You are frequently shifting developers between teams You must frequently step in to resolve dependency conflicts Your developers complain of too many dependencies on other product teams in order to ship simple things Teams have very limited scope of ownership Developers must deal with too much complexity in too many areas

As much as possible, you should try to keep your existing product teams intact.

wherever possible, it is better to give an existing team a new set of responsibilities, rather than break up the product team and redistribute the people into other teams.

If you're consistently making major changes to the team topology more than once a year, it is a sign that something is wrong.

I begin by talking to people from all across the organization, and listening to what they have to say, and what people think I might be able to do to improve the situation.

Many startup founders or CEOs have never worked with strong engineering organizations, and it's not uncommon to find leaders with fundamental misunderstandings about the role of technology, and the necessary contribution of engineers as a partner to product management and product design.

many founders and CEOs are unaware of the role they play in the challenges and success of the engineering organization.

Building and scaling a successful company is really hard, and every company has far more work they want to do, than people to do the work. So focus is essential, and product strategy is what lets us get the most out of the resources and people we have.

Trying to do too many things at once will damage even the best engineering organizations.

People are the heart and soul of any company. And, trust can enable those people, working together effectively, to create and achieve far more than they ever imagined individually.

I need to work with the engineers to understand that when they make a promise or commitment, it is important they deliver on that promise.

An effective product strategy is absolutely essential to enabling ordinary people to create extraordinary products, because it focuses and leverages their talents.

Not miscalculation, bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy. One common reason for choosing avoidance is the pain or difficulty of choice. When leaders are unwilling or unable to make choices among competing values and parties, bad strategy is the consequence.

Whatever the goal is, your strategy is how you're planning to go about accomplishing that goal.

Strategy is the overall approach and the rationale for that approach.

How do we make the product vision a reality, while meeting the needs of the company as we go?

So many of the companies I meet have a goal (such as doubling revenue), and they have a product roadmap (the tactics), yet no product strategy to be found.

In terms of empowered product teams, product strategy helps us decide what problems to solve, product discovery helps us figure out the tactics that can actually solve the problems, and product deliv...

The first is to be willing to make tough choices on what's really important. The second involves generating, identifying, and leveraging insights. The third involves converting insights into action. And the fourth involves active management without resorting to micromanagement.

Choices means focus. Deciding what few things you really need to do, and therefore all the things you won't do.

While product strategy starts with focus, it then depends on insights.

insights come from study and thought.

Once we have decided what's critically important (focus) and studied the landscape to identify the levers and opportunities (the insights), then we need to convert those insights into action.

My favorite activity is still solving the hard problems (product discovery), but if I had to choose, I'd say product strategy is the more important skill, and certainly the more difficult.

product strategy requires choice, thinking, and effort.

Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy

The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. —Jim Barksdale

I don't just mean deciding what to work on and not work on, but picking the few things that can truly make an impact.

this is a reflection of leaders feeling the need to place a lot of bets—versus the best or most impactful bets—the fear of missing out, and the need to respond to every competitor, every lost deal, every customer request.

they need an intervention and a reset on what focus really means in a product organization.

so many companies have some similar sort of stakeholder‐driven roadmap process, where they basically are trying to find a way to “fairly” divide up the engineering capacity across the different business stakeholders.

it is usually the CEO and stakeholders that want to work this way, and the head of product is forced to serve as the facilitator.

prioritizing but not focusing.

Generating activity is not a problem; in fact it is easy. The fact that it is easy makes the real problem harder to solve. The problem is getting the right things done—the things that matter, the things that will have an impact, the things a company is trying to achieve to ensure success.

By not picking your battles and focusing on the few truly critical problems, most of the work going on does not make an impact. And for the truly critical priorities, there is not enough attention to actually move the needle.