Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

You can't take your old organization based on feature teams, roadmaps, and passive managers, then overlay a technique from a radically different culture and expect that will work or change anything.

Great teams are made up of ordinary people who are inspired and empowered.

We need a product that our customers love, yet also works for our business.

Similarly, product managers must be problem solvers as well. They are not trying to design the user experience, or architect a scalable, fault‐tolerant solution. Rather, they solve for constraints aligned around their customer's business, their industry, and especially their own business. Is this something their customers need? Is it substantially better than the alternatives? Is it something the company can effectively market and sell, that they can afford to build, that they can service and support, and that complies with legal and regulatory constraints?

Trust is a function of two things: competence and character.

The famous computer scientist Melvin Conway coined an adage that is often referred to as Conway's Law. It states that any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure mirrors the organization's structure. Another way to say this is to beware of shipping your org chart.

I have never seen more waste than I find in large companies that are running feature teams. This is especially the case when that company has outsourced significant parts of their engineering to one of the big firms.

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.2

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.

high‐integrity commitments and deliverables should be the exception and not the rule. Otherwise, it is a slippery slope and pretty soon your objectives become nothing more than a list of deliverables and dates, which is little more than a reformatted roadmap.

A manager that is not an accomplished product manager, designer, or engineer herself is ill‐equipped to assess a candidate, and it is easy to see how the company can end up hiring someone that is not competent at the job. Moreover, without the necessary experience herself, the hiring manager is not able to coach and develop that person to competence.

if you temporarily move someone to another team to deal with an urgent priority. These moves are hard on the person moving as they must adjust to a new team and new work. It's also hard on the team that was left behind as they are often forced to find a way to fill the void.

to be clear, a product manager that does not have this level of knowledge has no business serving as product manager for her team. And the responsibility for ensuring this level of competence is squarely on her manager.

Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.

thinking like an owner versus thinking like an employee is primarily about taking responsibility for the outcome rather than just the activities.

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

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.

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When I coach product managers on competitive analysis, I like to ask the PM to evaluate the top three to five players in the space and to write up a narrative comparing and contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of each player—highlighting opportunities.

Nurturing a team that allows for diverse points of view begins with the hiring process where you consider your team as a portfolio of strengths and backgrounds.

Why is thinking so important? Because at its core, product teams are all about problem solving.

When we empower product teams, we are giving them problems to solve, and we are giving them the context required to make good decisions.

Empowered teams that produce extraordinary results don't require exceptional hires.

the hiring manager needs to take responsibility for the interview effectiveness of the interview team, and the interview experience for the candidate.

The companion to empowerment is accountability.

if you can't manage to clear four hours a day during your workday, then I only know of two possibilities: either you extend your workday, or you fail to deliver results and so you fail at your job.

I look at all the people who've worked for me or who I've helped in some way, he would say, and I count up how many are great leaders now. That's how I measure success.

Coaching might be even more essential than mentoring to our careers and our teams. Whereas mentors dole out words of wisdom, coaches roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. They don't just believe in our potential; they get in the arena to help us realize our potential. They hold up a mirror so we can see our blind spots and they hold us accountable for working through our sore spots. They take responsibility for making us better without taking credit for our accomplishments.

During this session, you'll hear about issues or obstacles, and you'll coach on the best way to handle them. In some cases, you'll need to help by talking to a key stakeholder, or finding an additional engineer, or talking to another team about their need to help with a problem, or a hundred similar things. Please don't confuse this with command‐and‐control management. You are not taking over control and telling the teams what to do—you are responding to their requests for help. It's more accurately described as servant leadership and you're being asked to help remove an impediment.

The product strategy describes how we plan to accomplish the product vision, while meeting the needs of the business as we go. The strategy derives from focus, then leverages insights, converts these insights into action, and finally manages the work through to completion.