For product leaders, the product team is the product.  Leadership is about recognizing that there's greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge. People look to leadership for inspiration and we look to management for execution.  To have truly empowered product teams, your success depends very directly on first‐level people managers. If you are wondering why there are so many weak product companies in the world, these first-level people managers would be the primary culprit.

Product Leadership

<ul>
<li>The Role of Technology - Many companies still have the old IT mindset when it comes to technology. It's viewed as a necessary cost rather than the core business enabler. Technology teams are there “to serve the business”.</li>
<li>Leadership - Does not empower the Product Team. Has a command and control style leadership. Acts in service to the business stakeholders, not to the team.</li>
<li>Empowered Teams - Teams are not empowered to solve problems in ways customers love. Feature teams are responsible for pushing out features(output) rather than enabling outcomes.</li>
</ul>

The Challenges In Traditional Organizations

The Purpose - The primary purpose is to help the product person develop and improve. The Relationship - This is a relationship that depends on trust. The Frequency - Should be no less than 30 minutes, once per week, and is sacred and not to be another one of those “You okay with skipping this week?” Sharing Context - If you are to empower you must provide the strategic context. Thinking and Acting Like a Product Person - Mainly about helping the product person learn to think and act like a strong product person.

Keys To An Effective One-On-One Meeting With The Product Person

Give teams problems to solve, rather than features to build. Empower them to solve those problems in the best way they see fit.

If the company is still using feature teams, as most unfortunately are, then the OKR technique is going to be a cultural mismatch, and almost certainly prove a waste of time and effort. In the vast majority of companies that are struggling to value out of OKRs, the role of leadership is largely missing in action. Three prerequisites for OKR's: <ul><li>Move from the feature team model to the empowered product team model </li><li>Stop doing manager objectives and individual objectives, and instead focus on team objectives</li><li>Leaders need to step up and do their part to turn product strategy into action.</li></ul>

Team Objectives: The Right Way

To empower, decisions are pushed down to the product team level. Three Snaky rules of Decision Making:<ol><li>If you see a snake, kill it. (an important decision that has to be made)</li><li>Don't play with dead snakes. (don't revisit old decisions)</li><li>All opportunities start out looking like snakes. (opportunities often look like problems)</li></ol>

Decision Making

<ul><li>You are frequently shifting developers between teams </li><li>You must frequently step in to resolve dependency conflicts </li><li>Your developers complain of too many dependencies on other product teams in order to ship simple things </li><li>Teams have a very limited scope of ownership </li><li>Developers deal with too much complexity in too many areas</li></ul>

Signs Your Team Design Is Not Fit-For-Purpose

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

Empowered engineers are the single most important thing that you can have in a company.

Leaders must focus on:<ul><li>Spending most of their time and energy on coaching the team.</li><li>Being self-aware of insecurities. Insecure managers have a particularly hard time empowering people.</li><li>Cultivating Diverse Points of View </li><li>Seek Out Teaching Moments - Many, if not most, people are not aware of their own potential. As a coach, you are in a unique position to help them see it.</li><li>Continually Earn the Trust of Your Team. Coaching efforts will be ineffective without trust.</li><li>Establishing personal rapport and trust by sharing some personal challenges.</li></ul>

Developing And Coaching: The Main Job Of A Leader

<ul><li>Focus on the outcome</li><li>Consider all of the risks—value, usability, feasibility, and business viability. </li><li>Think holistically about all dimensions of the business and the product. </li><li>Anticipate ethical considerations or impacts. </li><li>Solve problems creatively.</li><li>Persist in the face of obstacles. </li><li>Leverage engineering and the art of the possible. </li><li>Leverage design and the power of user experience. </li><li>Leverage data to learn and to make a compelling argument.</li></ul>

Attributes of Great Product People

A product organization's team topology answers questions such as:  <ul><li>How many product teams should our organization have? </li><li>What is the scope of responsibility of each team? </li><li>What are the skills required for each team, and how many of each skill? </li><li>What are the dependencies between the teams?  </li></ul> Optimise team design for: <ul><li>Empowerment</li><li>Ownership</li><li>Autonomy</li><li>Alignment</li></ul>

Optimized Team Design

Three critical differences between the strongest product companies and the rest: <ul><li>How the company views the role of technology. </li><li>The role product leaders play. </li><li>How the company views the purpose of the product teams—the product managers, product designers, and engineers.</li></ul>

The Three Critical Differences

<ul>
<li>Empowered Product Teams. These teams are the foundations for business success. They serve customers in ways that work for the business.</li>
<li>Eradicate the old idea that "Technology" is in service to the business. With this mindset, your business will not transform into a great Product company.</li>
<li>Coaching is what turns ordinary people into extraordinary product teams. Yet so few product teams get the high-quality coaching they need. Empower Product Leadership to become great coaches.</li>
</ul>

Empowered: The Three Key Tenets Of The Book

<ul><li>Staffing</li><li>Coaching</li><li>Team Objectives</li><li>Deciding which problems should be worked on by which product teams.</li><li>Sharing Strategic Context </li></ul> 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).  Unless leaders trust the teams this empowerment will not happen.

Management responsibilities

Collaboration is at the heart of how strong product teams work. It's a combination of skills and mindset, and it often takes active coaching by the manager to help new product people develop this capability. Characteristics of strong product teams: <ul><li>Tackling risks early</li><li>Solving problems collaboratively</li><li>Being accountable for results.</li></ul>

Collaboration

<ul><li>Company Mission - The purpose of the company.</li><li>Company Scorecard - Key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide an understanding of the overall picture and health of the business</li><li>Company Objectives - Specific objectives the company is focused on for this year.</li><li>Product Vision and Principles - The product vision is how we hope to meet customers' needs.</li><li>Team Topology - Describes how each Product team will organise to deliver value.</li><li>Product Strategy - Specifically how we'll meet customer needs in ways that work for the business.</li></ul>

The Six Types Of Strategic Context

You need to move your product organization from a subservient model to a collaborative model. Four focus areas: <ul><li>The Example Starts at the Top</li><li>Focus and Strategy</li><li>Establishing Trust</li><li>Deliver on Promises </li></ul> Three steps to begin with:<ol><li>Ensure you have strong product leaders in place.</li><li>Empower product leaders with the ability to recruit and develop the staff required for empowered product teams.</li><li>Redefine the relationship with the business.</li></ol>

Start The Transformation

In traditional organisations, Feature Teams focus on features and projects (output), and as such are not empowered or held accountable to results. Empowered teams are given problems to solve, rather than features to build. Empowered Product teams create solutions that are: <ul><li>Valuable (customers will buy the product)</li><li>Viable (it will meet the needs of the business)</li><li>Usable (so users can actually experience that value)</li><li>Feasible (so the company can effectively market, sell, and support the solution).</li></ul>Together, the teams own the problem and are responsible and accountable for the results.

Feature Teams Vs Empowered Teams

We’ve collected a list of our favourites on a range of topics from entry-level to expert.

books

Books

problemsolving

Problem Solving

business

Business

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

communication

Communication

Top 7 books for Product Managers

Understanding Empowered Teams and how they function

What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation? Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products. As legendary Silicon Valley coach--and coach to the founders of several of today’s leading tech companies--Bill Campbell said, “Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.” The goal of EMPOWERED is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create just such an environment. As partners at The Silicon Valley Product Group, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones have long worked to reveal the best practices of the most consistently innovative companies in the world. A natural companion to the bestseller INSPIRED, EMPOWERED tackles head-on the reason why most companies fail to truly leverage the potential of their people to innovate: product leadership. The book covers: what it means to be an empowered product team, and how this is different from the “feature teams” used by most companies to build technology products recruiting and coaching the members of product teams, first to competence, and then to reach their potential creating an inspiring product vision along with an insights-driven product strategy translating that strategy into action by empowering teams with specific objectives—problems to solve—rather than features to build redefining the relationship of the product teams to the rest of the company detailing the changes necessary to effectively and successfully transform your organization to truly empowered product teams EMPOWERED puts decades of lessons learned from the best leaders of the top technology companies in your hand as a guide. It shows you how to become the leader your team and company needs to not only survive but thrive.

What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation? Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products. As legendary Silicon Valley coach--and coach to the founders of several of today’s leading tech companies--Bill Campbell said, “Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.” The goal of EMPOWERED is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create just such an environment. As partners at The Silicon Valley Product Group, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones have long worked to reveal the best practices of the most consistently innovative companies in the world. A natural companion to the bestseller INSPIRED, EMPOWERED tackles head-on the reason why most companies fail to truly leverage the potential of their people to innovate: product leadership. The book covers: <ul> <li>what it means to be an empowered product team, and how this is different from the “feature teams” used by most companies to build technology products</li> <li>recruiting and coaching the members of product teams, first to competence, and then to reach their potential</li> <li>creating an inspiring product vision along with an insights-driven product strategy</li> <li>translating that strategy into action by empowering teams with specific objectives—problems to solve—rather than features to build</li> <li>redefining the relationship of the product teams to the rest of the company</li> <li>detailing the changes necessary to effectively and successfully transform your organization to truly empowered product teams</li> </ul> EMPOWERED puts decades of lessons learned from the best leaders of the top technology companies in your hand as a guide. It shows you how to become the leader your team and company needs to not only survive but thrive.

Marty Cagan is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Marty Cagan has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Marty Cagan's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

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