How we can create extraordinary products with ordinary people. Empowered Teams
My last reading was a book called “Empowered Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products” by Marty Cagan & Chris Jones. The book was really useful and gave me different perspectives about product management.
The book starts with the lessons from top tech companies and the importance of empowered product teams. The authors persuade the reader to create empowered teams instead of feature teams. I would like to mention the difference between empowered teams and feature teams and how we can create a team like that. I prepared this article by collecting these sentences, quotes and sayings from the book and the authors videos.
Product management is really important because if you create a good product team you can reach your target and be successful. Sometimes you can be the first runner in a game but a competitor who knows to create a better team can pass you in time. Therefore it is very crucial to have a good product team, but there is no simple way to create a good product team. This question should be really old in History but still there is a question about how you should create a great product team.
All C-levels and the leaders of the product and technology team decided to read this book to bring us to the same level hence I feel really lucky to be a member of our technology and product team in our company(TurkNet). The reason why we all read this book was to figure out the best approach to create a great product team. The authors of this book are really experienced at their work. They have a vast knowledge on the great technology companies and they had a chance to see many cases to create a great product team.
Today at TurkNet it is like a north star when we have any disagreements or discussions we are usually checking this north star.
What is an empowered product team? How is it different to those feature teams?
According to Marty, they really look very similar. They’re both squads, in Spotify language. They both have somebody with a title like product manager. They have somebody that’s doing some kind of design and they have some set of between like two and ten engineers.
So from the outside, they kind of look alike. But from the inside, they’re very different, it’s easy to see the differences. Feature teams are basically given set of features to build. They’ve already been given a solution, what somebody thinks is a solution, they’re not even told, a lot of times, what the underlying problem is.
Somebody says we need this feature. It’s either like a salesperson thinks it or marketing or a stakeholder of some sort, but whatever. So for them, build a feature means do a little bit of design to work it out and then put it on the backlog, do some sprint planning, go ahead and build the thing, QA test the thing, deploy the thing. It’s all about output. So, they can’t be held accountable to the results and they’re basically building what other people think are the right solution.
On the contrast, on an empowered product team, instead of being given a list of the features to build, the team is actually given the problem to solve. It might be a customer problem. It might be a business problem. Sometimes it’s both. Being empowered is, they are given the ability to figure out the best solution to that problem.
They will build features, too. But if that feature doesn’t work, they don’t like talk about, “well, we ship the feature. It’s not our fault.” They try other approaches, other features or redesigning those or they try eliminating features to find whatever works.
The difference is they can be held accountable to the results. So fundamentally it’s a different purpose. Their job is coming up with a solution that’s valuable, usable, feasible, viable.
The product manager is a very different job. Because on a feature team, literally, it’s project management. In an empowered product team, the product manager is the one responsible for whether it’s valuable and viable. The designer is responsible for usable and the engineers are responsible for feasible.
Real product managers are in such demand. Because that’s hard. It’s also why it’s a proving ground for future startup CEOs, because it’s not an accident. If you start your company, as the founder that is the head of product, you are responsible for value and viability and so it really is practice for starting a company, you’re going to focus on getting those two things.
We can see the same approach at Steve Jobs’ quote. Hire smart people and set them up so that they can show you what’s possible. That’s literally the key.
Many companies try to create feature team not empowered team but the top successful ones create empowered team. The success behind creating empowered team. Let’s go in depth about the empowered.
The Role Of Leadership
Leadership serves to inspire people to greater accomplishments, and management exists to motivate them to the objective.
Mike Fisher and Marty Abbott
Shortly, leadership is about inspiring the organization, on the contrast management is about guiding them.
Leadership is a massive topic and the book includes many important information about it but in his one talk, he shared five big responsibilities of leaders and in particular the leaders of product, the leaders of design, user experience design and the leaders of engineering and the leader of the company. Therefore, I am going to go through them.
1. Product Vision
As soon as a company has grown to the point where there are multiple product teams-supporting customers with their constant needs- it is very easy for each product team to get caught up in their own problems and their own work, losing sight of the overarching goal.
Vision is our North Star. If you have 20 product teams in your company this is the common objective. A lot of people make the mistake of doing product vision per product team that misses the point: The product vision is the whole we’re all contributing to.
2. Product Strategy
Strategy is how do we get from here wherever we are today to the vision that we all are anxious to make happen now. There are many different valid ways to come up with strategy. It usually turns out to be a sequence of product market fits.
3. Product Principles
Product principles describe the nature of the kind of product we’re trying to create what are the things we believe to be true. These aren’t requirements, they don’t show up, they don’t tell us specifically what to do but they do inform the decisions we will make when conflicts come up.
4. Product Priorities
Getting teams to focus on outcomes rather than output as you’ll see that is a fundamental objective. The most popular techniques today is OKR. OKR system which most of you know objectives and key results.
Basically if you ask every team to propose their objectives, of course you have 20 teams going in 20 different directions. This is nonsense so the product leadership should define the organization’s objectives typically that’s done on an annual basis.
5. Product Evangelism
Bigger the company the more critical this is. The leaders need to evangelize they need to sell the organization on the vision. We need teams of missionaries not teams of mercenaries. That’s empowered product teams versus the old-style mercenary teams. If we need missionaries, the leaders need to preach, they need to share that vision and convert the people to be true believers to be missionaries so evangelism is a huge responsibility in a large company.
The Role Of Management
Another massive topic is management. To get more detail, you should read his book. However I am going to get on with his talk. He shared these three responsibilities of managers in his talk.
1. Staffing
Meet the right people to recruit, convince them of the vision and why they should come work here. Once getting them managers need to onboard them, need to manage their performance and that might include if they can’t do the job ultimately, moving them to somewhere they can succeed.
2. Coaching
Your company depends on successful products. And successful products come from strong product teams. Coaching is what turns ordinary people into extraordinary product teams.
If the product team is not effective, we need to look hard at the people on that team and see where we can help them improve as individuals, and especially as a team.
3. Objectives
There are objectives at the organizational level but there are also objectives at the team level. The managers need to make sure each team has a set of relevant objectives. Once product teams have their team objectives for quarter and are pursuing them, active management will still be needed.
Marty shares that we are looking for out of our engineers, just ordinary people that when you put them in the right environment, they do amazing things. Google did research on this. Probably longer than any other company and they published fairly recently some of their most interesting findings. You can google the topic project Aristotle and they shared that: They thought if you’ve got a really important thing, you take these rock stars from different parts of the company, you put them together and a team it’s gonna be amazing. No, not amazing at all. It turns out the teams that consistently produce are the ones with the ordinary people that trust each other that have this relationship where they don’t have someone on the team, poisoning the environment and making people not feel safe or not feeling comfortable to do. This team is performing better.
In a nutshell, creating a great product team doesn’t have any numerical formula rather it is an approach. However, there are signs to create efficient product teams. Even if you try to follow all the training in this book having an efficient product team is a long and complicated process. It does not mean to empower your team and leave them alone, managers still have the responsibility to coach and follow the team members to be empowered therefore it does not necessarily mean less management rather it means better management. Managers still have responsibility for coaching, staffing, following the performance of the team and being a part of the product vision.
Thank you for taking the time to read my article.
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