Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

Do your homework. Your team, your executives, and your stakeholders will all be much more likely to follow you if they believe you know what you're talking about. Be an expert on your users and customers, your data, your business, and your market.

Be genuinely excited. If you're not excited about your products, you should probably fix that either by changing what ...

Learn to show some enthusiasm. Assuming you're genuinely excited, it's amazing to me how many product leaders are so bad and/or so uncomfortable at showing enthusiasm. This matters. Absolutely be sincere but let people see you're genuinely excited. Enthusiasm really is contagious.

Spend time with the product teams. If you're not spending face time with every product manager, product designer, and developer on your team, then they can't see the enthusiasm in your eyes. Spending a few minutes with every last person on the product teams pays off big in their level of motivation. It's worth your time.

Experienced product leaders know that you can never evangelize too much. You can change up the technique, vary the customers you cite as examples, and keep updating the prototype, but evangelism needs to be a constant.

My leadership philosophy in an innovation‐driven context can be simplified into three main components: (1) trust and safety (2) freedom and autonomy, and (3) culture and purpose.

A leader is not supposed to have all the answers, but is supposed to ask the right questions, and more important, create an environment where the right questions are surfaced.

A leader should articulate what needs to be done and why, and then let the team decide how to do it. She will set things in motion, guide her team, and clear the obstacles when the team is in trouble.

Good leaders focus on culture and purpose because culture drives innovation and performance. The greatest capital of an organization is its people.

To innovate, people need autonomy and meaning. It is crucial that a leader define what the purpose is to make sure that everyone inside and outside the organization—including customers and partners—knows what they are doing to promote it.

This purpose needs to be clear and consistently communicated in the way it is messaged, as well as consistently reflected in every aspect of the day‐to‐day running of the company—from the types of hires made, to the proce...

Unless the senior leaders understand the true nature and urgency of the threat, they will not be willing to put the organization through the stress of change, despite its necessity—especially if that would cause a short‐term impact to profitability.

Once the teams trust their leaders, they will be more willing to make change, as they won't fear the repercussions of not getting it right the first time.

This trust needs to go both ways, and leaders need to empower their teams to be autonomous, as most innovation comes from those on the frontline and not from the executives or the board.

Once an established company comes to realize that its future depends on significant and ongoing innovation, and it does not believe it has the muscles for this today, then there are really two options: the company can either innovate through acquisition, or it can learn to innovate through its own people.

you don't need to up‐level all teams at once. You just need to be sure that, before you empower a given product team, you have ensured that the team is staffed with people who are up to the task.

remember that this change represents a bit of a give and take with the leaders in the organization. Realize you're asking them to take a pretty big leap of faith. What's in it for them is that the old way of working has never been very effective, so most are willing to at least give it a try.

The company often thinks they're saving money because they look at the loaded cost of an engineer, not realizing that they need many more engineers, as well as the many people to manage these large numbers of engineers.

one I backed wholeheartedly, believing that a progressive but small echo chamber was never going to change the world. Reach first, revenue later.

this rapid influx of smart technologists also created cultural chaos. The Guardian's long‐standing identity as a newspaper was under threat, and like many organizations in rapid transition, the working environment was at best confused and often fractious.

the best single source for innovation is your engineers (because they're working with the enabling technology every day, so they're in the best position to see what's just now possible). The product vision is intended to attract and inspire these engineers. The product strategy is intended to ensure these engineers are working on the most important problems.

Empowerment of an engineer means that you provide the engineers with the problem to solve and the strategic context, and they are able to leverage technology to figure out the best solution to the problem.

If you're just using your engineers to code, you're only getting about half their value.

What's usually going on is that the product manager doesn't want the engineers to be included because she would rather the engineers spend their time coding. So, in this case, the issue is an overzealous product manager—thinking much more like a project manager than a product manager—either hearing what she wants to hear, or not caring enough to even ask.

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.

This book benefited in particular from the insights of a set of proven product leaders and discovery coaches that I admire and respect: Holly Hester‐Reilly, Teresa Torres, Gabrielle Buffrem, Petra Wille, and Felipe Castro each dedicated real time and effort to help me make this book worthy of its subject.