Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

Here are the 10 most important keys to effective team objectives: The most important thing is to empower teams by assigning them problems to solve and then give the teams the space to solve them. For them to make good decisions, they will also need you to share the strategic context, especially the product strategy. We love it when product teams volunteer to work on specific objectives, and we try to accommodate this when possible to leverage their motivation and enthusiasm for the problem. But we can't always do so because we need to make sure we cover everything we need to. Selecting the objectives to be worked on, and ultimately deciding which team or teams works on each objective, is the explicit responsibility of product leadership. However—and this is critically important for empowerment—the key results need to come from the team. It's normal that there's a back and forth—not that the leaders doubt or question what the teams propose as their key results, but rather judging which investments are worth the effort and associated risk. For example, suppose a team believes that, with their other objectives, they can only make a very minimal improvement to a specific, important KPI. The leaders might consider having that team focus exclusively on the one objective or decide to ask a different team to pursue it or help in some way. There is nothing wrong with assigning the same objective to multiple teams—each team tackling the problem from its own perspective and skills. I...