Marty Cagan

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.

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

EMPOWERED

Fabian Beiner

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

In Strong product companies, the purpose of the product team is 

creating products customers love, yet work for the business

While moving to truly empowered teams does require moving away from the old command-and-control model of management, it does 

 mean you need fewer leaders and managers. It means, you need 

In strong product companies, teams are given 

, rather than features to build, and most important, they are 

empowered to solve those problems in the best way they see fit.

 And they are then held accountable to the results. 

 are cross-functions (a product manager doing mainly project management, a product designer, plus some engineers) and assigned features and projects to build rather than problems to solve, and as such they are all about output and not business results.

 are also cross-functional (a product manager, a product designer, and engineers), but in contrast to feature teams, they are assigned 

, and are then empowered to come up with solutions that work—measured by outcome—and held accountable to results.

We look to leadership for inspiration and we look to management for execution.

If you think that by moving to Agile you've already done some form of digital transformation, I am sorry to tell you, but you haven't even gotten started.

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