Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

At the core, I see three critically important differences between the strongest product companies and the rest: The first is how the company views the role of technology. The second is the role their product leaders play. The third is how the company views the purpose of the product teams—the product managers, product designers, and engineers.

In the empowered product team model, the product manager has a clear responsibility, which is to ensure that the solutions are valuable (our customers will buy the product and/or choose to use it), and viable (it will meet the needs of the business). Together with a product designer who is responsible for ensuring the solution is usable, and a tech lead who is responsible for ensuring the solution is feasible, the team is able to collaborate to address this full range of risks (value, viability, usability, and feasibility). Together, they own the problem and are responsible and accountable for the results.

We refer to this as product discovery to acknowledge that we understand what we can't know in advance, and to emphasize that our task is to discover a solution that is valuable, usable, feasible, and viable.