Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

The technology teams are disconnected from the real customers—in fact, they're encouraged to think of their stakeholders as their customers.

Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.

Someone who needs to be told what to do every day is not cut out for the product person role. And this is also not scalable. You need people that can be developed into capable and competent product people—that can be given an objective and then counted on to find a way to get it done.

However, less well known is that, in many parts of the world, the local tax laws make awarding equity difficult. I can't help but notice that I hear a lot more of the dreaded refrain “that's not my job” at these companies.

Your highest‐order contribution and responsibility as product manager is to make sure that what the engineers are asked to build will be worth building. That it will deliver the necessary results.

Most product people have experienced these situations and have struggled to determine a course of action that addresses the immediate issue, yet doesn't derail your longer‐term efforts and also manages to keep your integrity intact.

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

stubborn on vision, but flexible on details. Sharing the vision is fine, but sharing a roadmap is very dangerous.

four things that are not easy for most companies: 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.

A few years ago, one of the execs of the music service Pandora shared the “Pandora Prioritization Process”—the company's process for deciding what to work on and build.1 The process involved letting stakeholders “buy” the features they wanted from the feature teams until their budget ran out. I had not worked with them, but when I read this, I immediately recognized the complete and utter absence of product strategy and especially focus. Not bad product strategy—literally no product strategy. Combined with their dependence on feature teams and their lack of any sign of true product management, it was clear this would lead to many features built, but little in the way of results or innovation, and the company's inevitable decline.

Most important, the product teams are empowered to come up with the best solutions to the problems they've been asked to solve, and they are accountable to the results.

Yeah this is the entire book, on repeat, for hundreds of pages

I hope you will be able to work in a company that knows how to utilize your talents.

I know this book is targeted at leaders for “how to run a company in a non-awful way”, this just comes off to the actual likely reader as “hope you aren’t unfortunate to be at a company that just isn’t good enough”