Not all product teams are created equal. To build powerful products you first need to build empowered teams. Don’t put the cart before the horse.
Earlier this summer I read Marty Cagan’s newest book “Empowered,” the companion piece to “Inspired.” Marty Cagan is a partner at the Silicon Valley Product Group and a former product leader at eBay, Netscape and HP (truly gold standard product credentials). Fun fact: I linked to one of Cagan’s articles “Behind Every Great Product” in my March 2021 blog post “What Did I Read This Week? Chipotle Makeup, Billionaires, Tik Tok & Killing Brands.” Since then, I’ve read dozens of posts on the SVPG (Silicon Valley Product Group) blog - stay tuned for a potential blog post about the SVPG blog!
“Empowered,” is a crash course for product leaders in how to staff, organize, coach and empower product teams to do their best work. It is also singlehandedly the best product management resource I’ve ever encountered. It probably goes without saying, but I’ve already bought “Inspired” (sitting next to me on my desk as I write this).
Side note: It was particularly interesting to read this book as a relatively junior product person at a startup that is actively building from scratch its product function. This book has taught me what to look for in a product leader for the rest of my career and how to identify if I’m part of an empowered team.
I can confidently say I haven’t annotated a book as much as this one since I read “East of Eden” in grade 9 (lots of symbolism in the Salinas Valley, if you know … you know). This book was read in Ubers, in a pool, before going to bed and during lunch break. It was marked up with napkins, highlighters, sticky notes found in the bottom of an old backpack and about 25 different crappy pens. I fully intend to keep this book permanently at-hand and within reach on my desk. While this post is by no means a substitute for reading the book yourself, I did want to share my key takeaways. Without further ado …
1. To Build Powerful Products, Build Empowered Teams
What is an empowered product team?
So ‘Empowered’ sounds like a great buzzword, but what does it really mean in practice? Cagan explains the difference between empowered product teams and feature teams in Part 1 of “Empowered.” While at first glance they may superficially similar, the work they do is radically different.
A feature team …. is output-driven, told what deliverables are expected and generally do minimum product discovery work. These teams have a low sense of ownership and can’t be adequately held responsible for the results. Are you primarily in charge of managing a backlog of requests (ex. new landing page, translate app into Spanish, set up two-factor authentification)? If so, you may be on a feature team.
Meanwhile, an empowered product team …. is given problems to solve and the freedom to discover, iterate, build, and launch the solution. Product leaders provide the team with strategic context but not exact deliverables. These teams can and should be held accountable to the results.
With that in mind, evaluate if you’re really on an empowered team or doing project management with the title of Product Manager. In the words of Lizzo, sometimes “Truth Hurts.”
And why does it matter if the team is empowered?
Cagan makes the case for empowered product teams at the very outset of the book, I’ll list just a few of the crucial reasons here:
- Risk of Stagnation - There’s very little chance of innovation if your product teams are hacking away at a backlog of unproven suggestions instead of doing valuable product discovery work and prototyping
- Talent Retention - High talent product people are eventually going to leave and go elsewhere to companies where they feel more ownership and passion about their work
- Ignored Customers - Without a product team serving as the voice of the customer, your users are going to flock to your competitors who understand and practice customer-centricity
In other words, your company is ‘ripe’ for disruption and high talent turnover. Convinced? Let’s proceed.
2. A Few Thoughts on Thoughtful Staffing
Okay, so you’ve decided to empower your teams - where do you begin? Hiring.
Hiring lesson #1: Don’t outsource your product teams. The very nature of the product manager role requires intimate knowledge of the product, the user, the stakeholders, business constraints, competitive landscape, etc. Take shortcuts here and you’ll pay for it later.
On a similar note, product leaders should be deeply involved in hiring. A tech lead should hire an engineer, a design lead should hire a designer and a product manager should be hired by a product leader. You wouldn’t ask the cruise ship captain to hire the entertainment acts or sous chef.
Hiring lesson #2: A compelling product vision is a great recruiting tool for strong product people. Don’t underestimate the power of an inspiring product vision, it’s probably more persuasive than the fancy sit-stand workstations (not to discredit ergonomic design).
Strong product people want to work on something meaningful. They want to work on something larger than themselves. They want to be missionaries and not mercenaries. So, while you can talk about nice employees benefits and show the candidate the foosball tables, the best product people care more about your product vision than anything else (197).
Hiring lesson #3: Avoid hiring primarily for domain knowledge. If you hire a competent, bright product person they can get up to speed on domain knowledge quickly. It’s easier to catch up on industry knowledge than product skills.
A note on team topologies
How you organize product teams internally can make all the difference in the level of innovation that results. High talent product people incorrectly allocated will not save the day. Cagan dedicates the entirety of Part V of this book to team topologies and how to optimize for empowerment.
3. Behind Every Great Player is a Great Coach
So you’ve recruited high talent product people and organized teams, what now?
Don’t for a second fool yourself into thinking that it’s less work to manage an empowered product team - that you can set it up with talented people and step away. Ongoing management and support is still very much needed for empowered teams. (P.S. weekly 1:1s are only the tip of the iceberg).
I like to tell product leaders that they are only as strong as their weakest product manager (359).
In Chapter 8, Cagan explains how to assess a product manager’s current skill level and create a coaching plan for professional growth. There should be weekly progress check-ins on this coaching plan. Potential areas of development could include: user & customer knowledge, data knowledge, industry & domain knowledge, product operational knowledge, product discovery techniques, team collaboration skills, etc. A strong product leader cultivates a culture of #continuousimprovement (the theme of this blog!) in their empowered product teams.
If you’re a product leader, coaching is not a ‘part’ of your job - it’s at the very heart of it.
A note on feedback
A major focus of this book is the importance of consistent, timely and actionable feedback:
Just to be perfectly clear here, at the performance review, nothing should be a surprise - everything should have already been discussed in depth, likely for months (71).
If you’re properly coaching your product people and providing actionable feedback, no direct report should be blindsided during a performance review. If they are, it’s a direct reflection of your coaching (or lack thereof). Looking to learn more about feedback? I highly recommend “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott.
4. Assign Problems to Solve, Rather Than Features To Build*
*This is the exact wording of a sub-section in Chapter 53; it’s so perfectly worded it required repeating here.
How work is assigned matters. A lot. Like a LOT.
While every great product person needs a great coach, it’s important to avoid the command-and-control style of leadership - that’s a surefire way to kill innovation and ownership (and motivation as well).
As mentioned above, one of the major differences between a feature and empowered product team is whether they are tasked with deliverables to output or problems to solved. For example, a product leader at a job market company (ex. LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.) may task one of their empowered product teams with decreasing the amount of time it takes a job seeker to find a new job. Notice that the task is not to improve the UI or launch an app - how does the product leader know that would solve the problem? They don’t.
The best people to determine the appropriate solution are those closest to the problem, with the necessary skills - the product team. We want the team to take responsibility for achieving the desired outcome. If we tell the team the feature we want them to build, then if that feature doesn’t provide the necessary results, we can’t hold the team accountable (275).
Okay I’m convinced … so how do you lead?
It’s your job as a product leader to evangelize the product vision, set expectations, remove barriers to progress, coach your teams and share strategic context. Objectives and direction will be top-down although the solutions and implementation will be bottom-up.
A few final notes and suggested further reading
It’s worth mentioning that Cagan includes interviews with product leaders at the end of every part. Featured leaders include April Underwood, Debby Meredith, Christine Wodtke, etc. These excerpts are goldmines of wisdom based on extensive industry experience.
+ Look out for “Transformed” and “Loved” - two books by other SVPG partners hitting shelves later this year.
**Note: Article originally posted on August 16th, 2021 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022