Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

Similarly, there is nothing wrong with asking multiple teams to collaborate on the same team objective. It's not unusual to ask multiple teams to work together—especially when the problem requires different sets of skills. A common situation is asking a platform team and an experience team to collaborate on a difficult problem. For product teams to come up with key results, it's essential that they understand the level of ambition you want from them. We need to be clear with teams when we want them to be very ambitious (aka moon shot), when we want them to be conservative (aka roof shot), and when we need them to make a high‐integrity commitment. Product teams can only be accountable to the results if they are empowered to figure out a solution that works and if they are the ones to come up with the key results. The product leaders have to realize that while team objectives are critically important, they are not the only things that the product team is working on. Every team has some level of ongoing “keep‐the‐lights‐on” activities. This includes such things as fixing critical bugs, handling customer situations, and so forth. Normally, these team objectives are created or updated every quarter. That gives teams enough time to make real progress, yet not too much time that the business can't adjust to changes. There may be occasional situations where team objectives need to change during the quarter, but these should be the exception rather than the rule.