PDF Summary:Empowered, by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones

Every modern business is in the technology game in some way. In Empowered, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones explain how technology and product development are the fundamental drivers of every successful business. Therefore, to thrive in the modern business world, companies must empower their product development teams to use technology to meet customer needs and drive business growth.

Cagan and Jones have a wealth of experience in product leadership, having worked at multiple high-profile technology businesses. In this guide, we’ll discuss the roles of product leaders and their technology teams, as well as how they measure their collective success. We’ll describe how to empower product teams to work with autonomy and enhance innovation. In addition, we’ll explain the authors’ key concepts, show how other writers expand on their ideas, and explore how some experts arrive at similar conclusions using slightly different approaches.

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Create Personalized Development Plans

Cagan and Jones’s first recommendation for effectively coaching individual team members is to create a tailored development plan for each person on your team by performing a skills assessment to determine their strengths and weaknesses. Don’t try to force team members to improve in too many areas at once—for each person, keep the focus on strengthening the three areas most in need of growth. Your aim should be to help everyone grow in their expertise while also encouraging them to understand how the whole business works. Everyone should be trained on skills and techniques related to their current tasks, but you should also impress upon them the value of learning new skills if needed.

(Shortform note: The authors’ advice to help your team develop is becoming more important as artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes the roles that many workers perform. Many team members may fear for their jobs, but as a coach, you can help persuade them that “soft” human skills, such as emotional intelligence, will be even more important in the shifting technological landscape. Product leaders should also urge workers to enhance their AI skills by embracing practical, hands-on experience, either through online courses or structured training.)

Request a Written Narrative

Another technique the authors recommend is to ask for written narratives in which team members describe the problems they're solving, along with why the issues they’re working on are important to the company’s customers and the business as a whole. Creating a written narrative gets workers to think through their ideas while explaining exactly how their solutions to problems meet the customers’ needs. In this way, written narratives help team members develop a customer-focused mindset while addressing any concerns they may have before problems become issues that affect other stakeholders.

(Shortform note: One company that’s used this technique with good results is the online retail giant Amazon. In Working Backwards, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr explain that when an Amazon employee wants to propose a course of action, they’re expected to write a detailed argument rather than present a slideshow, as in most businesses. Rather than only sharing these with managers, as in the process Cagan and Jones describe, Amazon employees share their arguments with all of their colleagues, who use the start of each meeting to silently read through new proposals. This lets team members explain complex concepts while affording their colleagues the chance to properly engage with their ideas.)

The Empowered Team

An effective product leader is nothing without a strong team to lead. In technology-driven companies, product teams should be empowered to figure out how to solve customers’ problems rather than merely tasked with creating new product features. Teams empowered in this way maximize the customers’ experience while also serving the business’s needs. To create an empowered team, leaders should hire for passion and diversity, give teams ownership of their respective duties, and create a dynamic business structure that keeps teams aligned with company objectives.

Recruiting Your Team

To build a strong team, you must recruit strong people. However, Cagan and Jones argue that you shouldn’t place too much emphasis on hiring enormously exceptional people. Instead, you should hire people with competence and character.

Competence: Look beyond traditional qualifications such as elite college educations, and instead look for people who combine technical skills with a passion for work, an eagerness to learn, and a desire for personal growth. You generally want people who already have the skills to handle the work, but sometimes it's worth taking a chance on someone with unproven potential—as long as you’re willing to help that person build the necessary skills on the job.

(Shortform note: If you’re in doubt about a candidate’s potential, one option is to let them show off their skills before permanently bringing them onto your team. In Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson suggest you contract your best candidates to do a “tryout” project so you can see the quality of their work. A test project can not only determine whether a candidate has potential, but by identifying strengths and weaknesses, it can give you a place to start building their personal development plan, as the authors discussed earlier in this guide.)

Character: Cagan and Jones caution that looking for people with good character doesn’t necessarily mean looking for people who have a good “cultural fit” with your company. Companies that hire for cultural fit often end up hiring the same type of person—typically, male graduates of top universities—which creates teams where everyone thinks alike. Instead, hire people who think differently from you and who come from various career and education paths, as diversity promotes innovation in tech fields. People with a variety of backgrounds bring an equivalent variety of ideas—a recipe for empowering out-of-the-box thinking.

Diversity Versus Cultural Fit

Business experts debate whether you should hire based on how an applicant fits your company’s culture. Contrary to Cagan and Jones’s thoughts on the matter, Tony Hsieh argues in Delivering Happiness that in addition to hiring team members who already fit the company’s values, you should also look for candidates who will actively improve the company’s culture. In Leading Change, John P. Kotter writes that changing a company’s culture is often necessary to keep it current with the times, but he still argues in favor of hiring based on how well candidates mesh with the current culture. He argues that cultural change must be approached slowly and only in conjunction with other incremental, organizational shifts.

However, hiring employees based on cultural fit is a slippery slope toward discrimination. If you can avoid it, the converse to Cagan and Jones's argument may also be true—that in addition to diversity benefiting business, tech companies can become a positive force for diversity. For example, businesses can form partnerships with historically Black colleges, both to provide students with technical skills and to give them access to networking opportunities. Plus, many tech roles don't require a college degree, so providing different entry points, such as code schools and tech bootcamps, can be a way to introduce underrepresented groups into the technology sector, enhancing inclusivity across race, gender, and class.

Developing Your Team

Post-recruitment, it's crucial to invest in your team's development. Cagan and Jones stress the importance of creating opportunities for training and professional growth while also nurturing an environment that encourages team members to brainstorm, ask questions, and take risks.

(Shortform note: In addition to strengthening your team’s performance, providing ongoing training serves other functions. As recounted by Tony Hsieh in Delivering Happiness, the shoe retailer Zappos found that continual learning was a great boost to morale. Also, from a practical, long-term perspective, Zappos recognized that continuing education is crucial to prepare employees to move up in the company as senior team members retire or move on, a topic that Cagan and Jones touch on next.)

If you’re going to help team members reach their full potential, it’s vital to understand your employees' career goals. Some might wish to remain individual contributors while advancing their professional skills. Others may aspire to take leadership roles, while some may be uncertain and wish to explore different options. By allowing for different developmental paths, you retain top talent and create an atmosphere where continual learning is the norm.

(Shortform note: Many employees may fall into Cagan and Jones’s latter category—those who aren’t sure what they want from their careers. They may be too swamped with work to think about it, or your company’s structure may not offer a clear path forward. In either case, you should avoid steering employees too forcefully toward specific career paths. Instead, help them determine what they enjoy most in their current role and let them explore new areas of interest. You can also expand their view of their careers by letting them attend industry conferences or serve on interdepartmental committees.)

Empowering Your Team

Once your product team is in place and you’ve set up the means to help them develop, it’s time to step out of their way and let them work. Cagan and Jones advise that product leaders should give teams ownership of their duties, promote a culture of collaboration, and understand that mistakes are essential to success.

To promote a sense of ownership in your team, say Cagan and Jones, product leaders should set clear, meaningful objectives rather than giving teams lists of jobs to do. By defining “what” needs to be achieved without dictating “how,” you make team members responsible for the results of their work, not just for following a specified method. Granting teams this type of ownership over their objectives encourages workers to feel responsible for achieving the company’s wider mission. This increases team members’ engagement, which then opens doors to innovation. After all, when workers start thinking like owners, they turn their focus to the outcome of their work instead of just making sure all their tasks are done.

(Shortform note: The idea of giving teams objectives to accomplish rather than instructions to follow didn’t originate with Cagan and Jones, and perhaps not even in the business world at all. In the late 1800s, a German general named Helmuth von Moltke implemented the military strategy called Auftragstaktik to deal with uncertainty on the battlefield. Instead of laying out steps that each soldier had to follow, Moltke set overall objectives and trusted soldiers to meet them in the most appropriate way. This allowed soldiers to adapt quickly to constantly shifting combat situations. This strategy continues to serve as a model for maximizing individual decision-making power and adapting to dynamic situations.)

Next, Cagan and Jones recommend that you encourage interactions between team members so individuals can collaborate and learn from each other. Collaboration in this case doesn't imply that your team should make decisions based on consensus or compromise—instead, team members should work together toward solutions that derive from each person’s unique knowledge and skills. This constructive sharing of ideas boosts growth and confidence within your team while working toward your company’s larger business goals.

Lastly, to truly empower a team, say Cagan and Jones, product leaders must understand that failures are often stepping stones toward success. Rather than punishing mistakes, leaders should nurture a work environment where exploration is encouraged. Experimentation often leads to new breakthroughs faster than conventional methods might allow. Keep in mind that innovative exploration only thrives when team members feel psychologically safe. As a leader, it’s your task to ensure your team feels respected and that their contributions are valued as crucial to the business’s innovative growth and progress, even when their contributions and ideas don’t work out as intended.

(Shortform note: Cagan and Jones’s words on reframing failure also imply that you should change your attitude toward success. Though it may seem counterintuitive, management expert Peter F. Drucker explains in Innovation and Entrepreneurship that success pulls resources away from innovation. A business’s focus on its successful activities can make it overlook new ideas or risky side projects as being less significant than the company’s established initiatives. It requires a conscious decision to redirect resources away from successful endeavors, and because of the risks involved with new ideas, Drucker writes that companies should pursue three times as many innovative projects as they think they’ll need for the future.)

Collaboration and Psychological Safety

Though Cagan and Jones only touch on it briefly, one prerequisite for the degree of collaboration they espouse is psychological safety. Research by Google underscores the value of creating a space where team members feel safe to take interpersonal risks. This kind of safety requires the acceptance of diversity, transparency in discussing problems, and an assurance that mistakes don't lead to repercussions. Once these conditions are in place, team members feel safe to seek help from others and still feel that their contributions are valued, which in turn means they're likely to be more innovative and productive.

Showing interest in your team members’ development, as Cagan and Jones previously advised, can also contribute to an atmosphere of psychological safety at work. In The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier writes that directly asking people what they want—as in, how they would like to grow their skills or progress in their careers—creates a sense of safety because many people aren’t used to expressing their needs directly out of fear of being rejected. Asking team members what they want for themselves sends the message that you’re on their side, you value their input, and it’s safe for them to relax and lower their defenses while at work, freeing their minds to be more productive.

Structuring Your Organization

Even the best product teams don’t exist in isolation. How teams are organized within a business structure plays as important a role as how well individual teams function. An effective structure clarifies how teams interact while keeping them aligned with company interests, granting them autonomy to meet their objectives without undermining other teams' roles, and remaining dynamic enough to adjust in response to evolving business realities.

Creating a product often involves multiple teams working toward a shared purpose, which raises the question of how to organize their work. Some teams design products directly for the customer, while others exist to support their fellow teams. Team relationships can get complicated quickly, so Cagan and Jones write that it’s vital to establish each team's area of responsibility and authority. The framework this creates, called a “team topology,” clarifies how teams relate to each other while defining their individual areas of expertise. Ideally, your company’s structure will be such that all teams remain aligned with your company’s vision by keeping them focused on how their work contributes to the end-user experience.

The “Cover and Move” Strategy in Product Leadership

After setting up the framework defining team relationships, as Cagan and Jones describe, product leaders must play an active role in ensuring teams function well together. A parallel idea outside the business world is the military concept of “Cover and Move,” as explained by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin in Extreme Ownership. In the “Cover and Move” strategy, one team of soldiers protects another as the second team moves into a new position, after which the teams switch roles. In product leadership, this could refer to one team double-checking another team’s work before switching places and receiving the same guidance.

Just as the commanders of combat units support each other in the field, product leaders should always keep the bigger picture in mind, promote a sense of mutual support, and encourage teams to understand how their actions impact the other teams they work with. This battlefield mindset steers teams away from internal competition to focus on their collective success.

Cagan and Jones say it's important to remember that team structures aren’t static—they evolve over time. For instance, a company’s IT department might need to take on additional work when other teams launch products. If left unmanaged, this evolution of duties may lead to a growing imbalance of work that leads to unexpected bottlenecks throughout the production process. Therefore, team structures need regular review and adjustment due to the shifting realities of your business. Signs that indicate a change is needed include frequently shifting employees between teams or receiving complaints about excessive slowdowns from different sectors of your business.

(Shortform note: If you don’t control your team structure’s evolution the way Cagan and Jones insist that you should, the results can be disastrous. In The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford demonstrate how the slow, unmanaged buildup of work in one part of an organization can create a bottleneck that slows down the whole product creation process. If the bottleneck causes a total stoppage of work, you may be forced to restructure all your teams at once—a process ripe with peril for any organization. To prevent such a crisis, The Phoenix Project’s authors recommend that you constantly monitor your company’s workflow with an eye to where it moves quickly and where it gets bogged down.)

Empowered Teams in Action

Not only are modern businesses and their structures always in flux, so are the industries in which they operate. In the fast-moving world of technology, product teams need to be empowered with contextual information and decision-making abilities to discover solutions that benefit both your customers and your business. To do this, your company's overall vision must become a concrete strategy for product teams to follow. This strategy must establish achievable objectives and define measurable results to gauge success.

(Shortform note: It’s not a new feature of the 21st century that businesses have to stay on their toes to keep up with ever-changing industries. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter F. Drucker argues that businesses must embrace change as a normal and necessary force in society. In addition to suggesting a variety of ways to steer a company toward the future, Drucker states that businesses, especially large ones, have a social obligation to be innovative that goes beyond the mindset of self-interest that Cagan and Jones write from. Should a major business falter, it can take many people’s livelihoods with it.)

Start With a Strategy

Just as a good coach begins with a game plan, the first step to setting a product team in motion is turning the company's overall vision into an actionable strategy that defines the path to the company's goals in terms of quantifiable objectives. Your strategy should focus on a handful of specific goals that you can reappraise as you gather information from all levels of your company.

The product vision and strategy are the bedrock of any successful organization, acting as a shared goal for all involved. Cagan and Jones write that while the company’s vision defines the impact you hope your products will deliver to your customers, your product strategy is the roadmap to how you’ll achieve your company’s vision. It sets out each specific team's objectives and outlines how you plan to reach your business goals. For instance, if your company’s vision is to provide frozen breakfasts that taste like they’re homemade, your strategy will outline the steps required to formulate your product, scale up to mass production, and deliver your breakfasts to grocery stores.

(Shortform note: While Cagan and Jones don’t set specific time constraints on a product strategy, Brian P. Moran, author of The 12 Week Year, advocates a tightly bound schedule—a 12-week plan for achieving specific, measurable goals. When you limit your plan to 12 weeks ahead, says Moran, you have a better chance of accurately predicting the obstacles you’ll face, saving time and energy. Additionally, breaking deadlines and objectives into 12-week periods focuses your team’s concentration and how they structure their work.)

Cagan and Jones argue that a well-crafted product strategy has a narrow focus. It should concentrate on no more than two or three business goals at a time—chasing too many high-priority objectives can hinder progress rather than aid it. To cultivate a strong but adaptable product strategy that stands out from those of your competitors, focus on your customers’ needs—such as what product features will have the most impact—so you can maximize the business value of your team’s efforts. In other words, a narrow strategic focus provides the most return on the work your teams do by targeting no more than a handful of user needs at once.

(Shortform note: Maintaining the narrow focus that Cagan and Jones advocate while long-term goals beckon on the horizon requires you to practice a measure of patience. Used strategically, patience shields your long-term plans from impulsive decisions and short-term setbacks. While keeping your focus on narrow, immediate targets, patience lets you maintain your broader vision without getting sidetracked. Therefore, patience coupled with a narrow product focus gives your business a safety net for sustained development and underscores the compounding power of small, consistent efforts that turn into significant growth and achievement over time.)

Since a good strategy is customer-focused, you have to gather details about your customers and then translate those details into actions. Cagan and Jones describe this as an ongoing process involving rigorous study, learning from customers, and being open to ideas that can come from anywhere. They recommend encouraging contributions from all rungs of the organizational ladder, including junior staff and anyone who interacts with the customers themselves. These details, which include who your customers really are and what value they actually derive from the products, will form the bedrock of all your strategic decisions, which you’ll put into motion via actionable objectives for each of your company’s product teams.

(Shortform note: Though the authors point out that valuable consumer information can come from anywhere in your business, it’s a common mistake to assume that information will be logically quantifiable. In Alchemy, Rory Sutherland argues that people's irrational motivations cloud how a business understands its customers. Traditional market research often misses the mark, he says, because its assumptions don't capture the unconscious motives that drive consumer behavior. Therefore, business leaders should go beyond the usual market questionnaires and speak directly to their customers and the team members who interact with them. It’s the only way to untangle the messiness of human behavior to accurately predict customers' needs.)

Set Team Objectives

Remember, overarching business goals and visions are essential for steering your company, but they’re not effective at letting individuals and teams know what to do. Defining realistic yet challenging objectives is crucial when implementing a successful product strategy, and Cagan and Jones strongly prefer the business tools known as Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). Objectives should be designed to encourage creative problem-solving while also making clear how progress will be measured—teams need to know exactly what success should look like.

Objectives and Key Results: An Overview

Andy Grove, then CEO of Intel, developed the concept of OKRs in the 1970s by building on the concept of Management by Objectives (MBO) introduced by Peter F. Drucker in 1954. Grove saw several of MBO's weaknesses, such as how it motivated employees to take shortcuts and how it failed to align the business’s goals with those of workers. The OKR framework aimed to solve these problems, but it wasn't until John Doerr introduced OKRs at Google in 1999 that they became widely adopted in the business world.

Cagan and Jones don’t go into detail about the OKR concept. In Measure What Matters, John Doerr explains the OKR concept as a goal-setting system in which individual objectives are achieved via measurable sub-goals (known as key results). The major benefits of implementing OKRs are that they clarify your focus by limiting how many objectives you pursue at once, they align all of your business’s efforts by being publicly visible at all times, they enable you to easily track your progress so you can make any changes as needed, and—by making objectives challenging—they stretch your teams’ abilities in a way that lets them aspire to ambitious achievements.

Cagan and Jones highly recommend using OKRs to define how you measure success. OKRs merge the qualitative nature of objectives with the more quantitative dimension of key results—all while ensuring that success is measured according to those results instead of merely the amount of work done. For example, your objective may be to develop and release a new product feature, while the key results you use to measure your progress might be benchmark dates, such as when the product goes into beta testing. OKRs shouldn’t be set in stone—a healthy back-and-forth between leaders and teams may change objectives or key results to reflect unexpected challenges or happy breakthroughs.

Complementary Tools for Feedback and Goal-Setting

In Measure What Matters, Doerr offers a complementary tool to the OKR system—namely Conversations, Feedback, and Recognition (CFRs). Whereas OKRs address a company’s progress, CFRs are a tool for performance management and promoting a positive company culture. CFRs formalize a system of continual conversations with employees through the year, the constructive use of positive and negative feedback and the frequent recognition of employee contributions. Cagan and Jones touch on all these factors in their discussion of how to coach employees, though not as part of a unified management toolset.

You can formalize the back-and-forth goal setting that Cagan and Jones recommend by applying the “one-minute goals” that Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson describe in The One-Minute Manager. In this system, you meet with each employee when they take on a new task or responsibility. Working together, you decide on the appropriate goals—the authors suggest no more than three to six—each of which should be defined in less than 250 words. This gives you and each team member concise rubrics to define success and drive accountability, while removing the need for you to monitor your employee’s work too closely—instead, they use the goals you mutually agreed upon to monitor and report on their progress.

When putting a product strategy into action, leaders should focus on team objectives rather than objectives for managers or employees. By setting objectives at the team level, you give the individual members of a team the freedom to experiment with different approaches. After all, say Cagan and Jones, the people best suited to discover solutions are those who are closest to the problem itself. Allowing teams space for creative problem-solving encourages them to push for the best outcomes, and if at first they don't meet with the best results, a team empowered by their leader’s respect and guidance will persist until they’re successful.

The Bottom-Up Approach to OKRs

If, as Cagan and Jones suggest, you only set your team’s objectives, then how do individual workers know what to do? In Measure What Matters, Doerr suggests that you let team members set their own objectives and key results. Since this approach saves management’s time, it improves efficiency while allowing employees to remain flexible, which in turn drives innovation. Plus, team members who select their own goals feel more engaged and motivated, which boosts morale overall.

Managing this process successfully means setting up a few guidelines. Doerr says team members should create about half of their own objectives and most of their key results. Managers should make sure that employees' objectives are clearly linked to company priorities. It's also important that you continually stress the significance of certain high-priority OKRs and promote cross-departmental OKRs to maintain alignment throughout the company.

Test, Fail, and Learn

While OKRs define the range of acceptable results and give teams targets to hit, it’s unrealistic for a leader to expect their team to achieve their goals every time. A fully empowered team that embraces experimentation doesn't fear making mistakes along the way. Cagan and Jones write that product leaders should encourage their teams to test new ideas—including risky ones—and then analyze their failures together to find out what can be learned. Rigorous testing and analyzing failures leads to ideas being further refined while also sparking new ones. In this setting, learning from failure isn’t just about finding out what doesn’t work—it's about understanding how every misstep lays the groundwork for improvement.

(Shortform note: Not every failure is equal—some cause risks to life and limb, as would be the case if a car’s design flaw isn’t found until it’s already in use. However, most mistakes are a normal part of life we can learn from. In Think Like a Rocket Scientist, Ozan Varol discusses how scientists, for example, approach their failures with disinterested curiosity. Allowing yourself emotional distance from failure provides the psychological safety that Cagan and Jones advocate. Varol also says that to reframe failure, you should shift your perspective away from short-term goals to the larger outcomes you’re working for. Therefore, when mistakes happen, your big-picture view lets you look beyond the “obvious” to see if there are deeper, underlying causes.)

Therefore, since failure is a tool, when teams fail to meet their objectives, don’t turn to blame as your initial reaction. Cagan and Jones point out that if your team’s expectations were already high, then failure to meet them is largely expected. However, if a team’s expectations were conservative and their efforts still led to disappointing results, then something may have gone wrong with their efforts or how they conceived of the problem to begin with. In either case, gather the product team and their colleagues, let them discuss the root causes of their setback, and ask them to explore what alternative steps they could have taken. With this approach, empowered teams are self-correcting and can produce better results in the long run.

(Shortform note: In The Unicorn Project, Gene Kim dubs the kind of meeting Cagan and Jones describe as a “blameless post-mortem” in which the person responsible for an error or a failure is free to admit their mistakes without fear. In Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull recounts holding similar diagnostic sessions at Pixar Animation Studios so that lessons can be learned after projects are complete, bringing about a beneficial cycle in which the mistakes of one project lead to success and improvements in the next. Ideally, admitting a mistake should be rewarded, since mistakes can make the whole company stronger when they’re treated as learning experiences.)