EMPOWERED — Marty Cagan

All my notes from the book and workshops with the master of product development, Marty Cagan.

Basic Principles

Products are built by Product Teams. “Goal is to create this environment.”

Power Dynamics Have Changed

Feature teams are a subservient model. Empowered teams are equal partners to the business. Empowered teams: giving the problem to the team to solve, e.g. too many customers churning every month.

3 Things That Matter for Empowered Product Teams

1. Address Product Risk Early

• Value Risk — will they buy/use it?
• Usability Risk — can they use it?
• Feasibility Risk — can we build it?
• Viability Risk — will it work for our business?

2. Define Products Collaboratively

Product Management + Product Design + Engineering. If you use your engineers only to code you only get half of it. “Work on problems instead of solutions.”

3. Focus on Results, not Output

Shipping code is not enough; we must solve the problems we’ve been asked to solve.

Empowered Product Team Checklist

• Small
• Durable
• Clear
• Ownership
• Cross-Functional
• Empowered to Determine Solutions
• Accountable for Outcome

Team size: 1 Product Manager, 1 Product Designer, 3 Engineers, 2 Other roles.

“Lead with context, instead of control” — giving strategic context through coaching, product vision, team topology, product strategy, team objectives, and evangelism.

Good product companies do not outsource their engineers.

Coaching

Helping employees reach their potential — NOT a performance evaluation. Combine with self-assessment and 360 reviews. Create gap analysis and coaching plans to close gaps.

“You join a company, but you leave a manager.”

The Written Narrative

“Writing the six-page narratives forces the author to conduct complete analysis, to distinguish between subtle nuances, to articulate the inner logic and set priorities for various ideas, and take full accountability for specific proposals.”

Amazon made decisions based on 6-pagers read in 20 minutes at the start of every meeting. No PowerPoint. This increased quality of decisions significantly.

The Empowered Model

First Product-Market-Fit, then Product Vision. Nothing else in product pays off like Product Vision.

Lead with context, not control — the opposite of command & control. Get the most out of your talent.

Product Strategy

• Product vision describes the future you are trying to create
• Product strategy helps us decide which problems to solve
• Team objectives assigns those problems to specific product teams
• Product discovery helps us discover a solution
• Product delivery builds that solution to bring it to market

Elements of Product Strategy

Focus — Selecting a small number of key levers for the business. Saying no to the hundreds of other good ideas (Steve Jobs). Too many things is often fear of missing out.

Insights — Where you spend most of your time:

1. Insights from data — what people are actually doing
2. Insights from users and customers — be in front of users multiple times every week
3. Insights from enabling technology — Mobile, Cloud, Machine Learning
4. Insights from industry — analysts and thought leaders

Action — When you have a problem, place the team on it.

Team Objectives (OKRs)

It’s leadership’s job to come up with the objectives. Key results come from the teams. OKRs were literally invented for the Empowered Team Model. Cascading OKRs are NOT fine in Product organizations.

1-2 objectives per team per quarter, per objective 1-2 key results.

Team Topology

Prefer a smaller number of large teams over a larger number of small teams. Scope should not be too narrow. Netflix principle: “Highly Aligned; Loosely Coupled.”

Trend in the industry is to invest in the platform — 50% of engineers in platform teams. Platform teams are prestigious, staffed with the best engineers, and serve as force multipliers.

Key Success Factors

• Senior Leadership Support
• Strong Product Leaders (Coaching, Vision, Topology, Strategy, Objectives, Evangelism)
• Empowered Engineers — “Nothing is more important than an empowered engineer” (Bill Campbell)
• Insight-Driven Product Strategy
• Business Collaboration
• Constant Evangelism — “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries” (John Doerr)
• Corporate Courage

“If you want to make everyone happy, don’t be a leader — sell ice cream.” — Steve Jobs