Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan

The technology people are divided up into teams where they feel like they aren't responsible for anything meaningful, they can't do much without depending on changes from several other teams, and that they're just a small cog in a giant wheel.

It wouldn't be fair to say that most of these companies have a weak product strategy, because in truth, most have literally no strategy at all. They are just trying to please as many stakeholders as they can with the people and time and skills they have.

Most of these companies have heard that Google and others use the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) technique to manage their work, and the CEO watched a video or read a book and thought it sounded easy. So they adopted the technique—layering it on top of their existing product roadmaps and culture—and every quarter there's a planning exercise that consumes a few weeks and is then largely ignored for the rest of the quarter. Most of the people on the teams say they get little if any value out of this technique.

The product manager is really a project manager, shepherding the backlog items through the process.

The designers and engineers are there just to design and code the features on the roadmap.

Motivation is low, sense of ownership is minimal, and i...

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

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.

strong product companies, technology is not an expense, it is the business. Technology enables and powers the products and services we provide to our customers. Technology allows us to solve problems for our customers in ways that are just now possible.

In most product companies, the role of true product leadership is largely missing in action. Instead, they are mainly there as facilitators, responsible for staffing the in‐house (or even worse, outsourced) feature factory, and keeping the trains running on time.

strong product companies, the product leaders are among the most impactful leaders in the company. They are responsible for staffing and coaching the product teams; they are responsible for the product strategy and converting the strategy into action; and they're responsible for managing to results.

The feature teams get to work first designing the features on the roadmap, maybe doing a little usability testing, and then proceeding to building, QA testing, and deploying the features (known as delivery).

These feature teams sometimes claim they're doing some product discovery, but they rarely are. They've already been told what the solution should be; they're not empowered to go figure out the solution themselves. They're just there to design and then code.

In these feature teams, there is usually a person with the product manager title, but they are mainly doing project management. They are there to ensure the features get designed and delivered. N...

Because the teams are provided, or are pressed to provide, roadmaps of features and projects, the focus of the team is delivery—delivery of t...

In contrast, in strong product companies, teams are instead given problems to solve, rather than features to build, and most important, they are empowered to solve those problems in the best way they see fit. And they are then held accountable to the results.

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).

Feature teams are cross‐functional (a product manager doing mainly project management, a product designer, plus some engineers), and assigned features and projects to build rather than problems to solve, and as such they are all about output and not business results.

Empowered product teams are also cross‐functional (a product manager, a product designer, and engineers), but in contrast to feature teams, they are assigned problems to solve, and are then empowered to come up with solutions that work—measured by outcome—and held accountable to results.3

Roughly a decade ago, Marc Andreessen published what I consider one of the most important essays of our time, “Why Software Is Eating the World.”

Engineers in a CIO's organization play a very different role than engineers in a CTO's organization. It's the difference between feature teams and empowered product teams.

1 https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world/. 2 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers. 3

Overall, we look to leadership for inspiration and we look to management for execution.

The purpose of strong leadership is to inspire and motivate the organization.

the purpose of the business (the mission)

The product vision describes the future we are trying to create and, most important, how it improves the lives of our customers.

Some companies refer to the product vision as their “North Star”—in the sense that no matter what product team you're on, and whatever specific problem you're trying to solve, you can all see and follow the North Star.

The product strategy describes how we plan to accomplish the product vision, while meeting the needs of the business as we go.

Another critical role of leaders is communicating the product vision, principles, and product strategy—both to the internal product organization, and also across the company more broadly.

If you want to have truly empowered product teams, then your success depends very directly on these first‐level people managers.

It is important that these managers understand—and can effectively communicate—the product vision, principles, and product strategy from the senior leaders.

It is the most important responsibility of every people manager to develop the skills of their people. This most definitely does not mean micromanaging them. It does mean understanding their weaknesses and helping them to improve, providing guidance on lessons learned, removing obstacles, and what is loosely referred to as “connecting the dots.”

More generally, every member of a product team deserves to have someone who is committed to helping them get better at their craft. This is why, in the vast majority of strong tech product organizations, the engineers report to experienced engineering managers; the designers report to experienced design managers; and the product managers report to proven managers of product management.

The third responsibility of the people managers is to ensure that each product team has one or two clear objectives they have been assigned (typically quarterly) which spell out the problems they are being asked to solve. These objectives derive directly from the product strategy—it's where insights are turned into actions.

The litmus test for empowerment is that the team is able to decide the best way to solve the problems they have been assigned (the objectives).