“Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products” By Marty Cagan is a highly recommended read for Product Leaders - leaders and managers of product management, product design and engineering.
“Leadership is about recognizing that there’s greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.”
This book is all about identifying what makes such an environment.
This blog is the first part of a series of the key points from the book that resonated with me.
What is missing in not-so-great product companies?
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Technology is still being viewed as a necessary cost rather than enabling the core business.
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Lack of coaching of the people on the technology teams.
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Lack of the right staff and inability to fill the gap
- Lack of an inspiring product vision.
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Team Topology such that the teams feel like they aren’t responsible for anything meaningful
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Lack of Product Strategy
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Not effective use of Team Objectives
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The stakeholders and executives have little or no trust in the technology teams.
- The teams are not empowered to solve problems in ways customers love, yet work for the business.
The Product Manager is really a Project Manager, shepherding the backlog items through the process.
In most companies, the tech teams are not empowered product teams, they are feature teams.
| Feature Team | Product Team | |
|---|---|---|
| What are they | Are cross-functional (with a product manager mainly doing project management, a product designer and some engineers) | Are cross-functional (with a product manager, a product designer and some engineers) |
| How they operate | Are assigned features and projects to build rather than problems to solve | Are assigned problems to solve and then empowered to come up with solutions that work |
| What is success | Are all about output and not business results | Are measured by the outcome and are held accountable to results |
The author says that the answer is to move to empowered product teams. The book is about guiding the reader on how to make this transformation.
Strong Product Leadership
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| Photo by fauxels from Pexels |
The heart of this book is the importance of strong product leadership.
By “product leadership”, the author refers to the leaders and managers of product management, product design and engineering.
We look to leadership for inspiration and managers for execution.
The Role Of Leadership - Inspiration
The purpose of strong leadership is to inspire and motivate the organization.
The 4 explicit responsibilities of product leadership are:
- Defining the Product Vision (“North Star”) and Principles
- Defining the Team Topology (how the product teams are segregated to best enable them to do great work)
- Defining the Product Strategy (how we plan to accomplish the product vision)
- Product Evangelism - communicating the product vision, principles and product strategy.
The Role Of Management - Execution
My managers, the author is referring to the director of product management, the director of product design, and the managers and directors of engineering.
The 3 important responsibilities of managers are:
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Staffing - sourcing, recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, evaluating, promoting and when necessary, replacing the members of the teams.
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Coaching - understanding the weaknesses of the individual and helping them improve, providing guidance on lessons learned, removing obstacles and “connecting the dots”.
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Team Objectives - ensure that each product team has 1, 2 clear objectives they have been assigned (typically quarterly) which spells out the problems they are being to solve. These objectives derive directly from the product strategy.
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).
It takes a strong manager to be self-confident and secure enough to truly empower the people the work for them and to stand back and let the team take credit for their successes.
Hope you found these notes helpful. Do checkout Part2 of this series too.