Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

In contrast, in strong product companies, teams are instead given problems to solve, rather than features to build, and most important, they are empowered to solve those problems in the best way they see fit. And they are then held accountable to the results.

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There are generally three types of data and tools that the new product manager will need to achieve competence on. There is typically one tool that contains the data about how users interact with your product—user analytics. Another tool typically contains data about the sales cycle for your product—sales analytics. And a third typically shows how this data is changing over time—data warehouse analytics.

If you are to empower your product person to solve problems in the best way her team sees fit, as a leader and manager you must provide her with the strategic context.

What does it mean to act like a product person? Listening. Collaborating. Shared learning. Evangelizing. Inspiring. Giving credit and accepting blame. Taking responsibility. Knowing what you can't know and admitting what you don't know. Demonstrating humility. Building relationships across the company. Getting to know customers on a personal level. Leading.

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.

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).

Accountability for a product manager of an empowered product team means a willingness to take responsibility for mistakes. Even when fault may lie with others, she always asks what she could have personally done to have better managed the risk or achieved a better outcome.

A final note on decision making: Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape Communications—and a very big influence on me (Marty) and the many others who worked for him—was famous for voicing his three rules of decisions: If you see a snake, kill it.1 Don't play with dead snakes. All opportunities start out looking like snakes.

The first thing to understand is that the biggest pain about meetings is that they are synchronous. This means that every attendee needs to stop whatever they are doing, wherever they are, and meet—either in person or over a videoconference or the phone. That is rarely easy, or even welcome, so the meeting organizer needs to keep this in mind at all times.

Stephen Covey explained that: 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.

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.

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? The surface value of this question reveals how a candidate engages in a conversation that is ultimately about their self‐assessed weaknesses.