What’s Empowered by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones about? How can you thrive in the modern business world?
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.
Read below for a brief overview of Empowered.
Overview of Empowered by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones
When you think of “technology companies,” the first names that might spring to mind are Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. But what about a hair salon that lets you book appointments online? Or the car repair shop that needs to keep up with advances in the automotive industry? Do these companies need the same mindset toward technology as the industry giants? Product management experts Marty Cagan and Chris Jones say that the answer is “yes.”
In Empowered, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones argue that technology and product development are fundamental drivers of today’s business success. The authors stress that in a modern business, technology is no longer just a supporting function—instead, it underpins every aspect of a company’s operations, from product development to the customer experience. As such, to thrive in today’s business world, companies must empower product leaders and their teams—those tasked with developing a company’s products—so they can use technology to meet customer needs and drive business growth.
Cagan and Jones are members of the Silicon Valley Product Group, where they share their expertise on product management with others in the technology industry. Cagan has a wealth of experience in tech company leadership, having worked at high-profile businesses such as eBay, Netscape, and HP. In his previous book, Inspired, Cagan introduced his two-step plan for creating successful products. Jones complements Cagan’s experience with his 30-year background as a product leader at technology companies such as Symantec and Vontu.
What Is Product Leadership?
Cagan and Jones argue that all modern companies are in the technology business, no matter what kind of product they sell. (For the purposes of this discussion, a “product” can be a good or a service.) No matter the company’s overall focus—whether it provides lawn care, smartphones, or investment advice—technology underpins all business operations and is what allows companies to provide solutions to their customers’ needs.
Cagan and Jones’s main recommendation is that companies should think of technology as the central aspect of their business and let it drive their vision and operations. However, the authors argue, most companies don’t even realize how important technology is. They don’t give their technology departments enough attention, and they don’t empower them to direct company strategy. Instead, they consider their technology teams subservient to other departments, such as marketing or customer service, which decide what features or functions products should have without a unified vision. In some cases, these companies even outsource their technological expertise, ceding all direct involvement and control.
Who Are Product Leaders?
To prioritize technology the way a company should, Cagan and Jones say that product leaders—the people who head technology teams—should direct strategy as a vital part of a business’s overall leadership. This will ensure that technology teams are aligned with the company’s high-level goals. To this end, product leaders should be more than managers—they should do more than just assign tasks and tell their teams to create certain features. They should, instead, build empowered teams that can approach a problem and, even if they have no specific direction, figure out the best way to resolve it to improve the end-user experience.
When properly empowered, product leaders ensure that technology remains a company’s focus and is used to its best effect. Cagan and Jones describe how these leaders, who span departments such as IT operations, design, and engineering, can transform strategic goals into practical actions. Their duties may entail analyzing the market, defining a roadmap for a new product, and working with marketing and sales to ensure that product’s timely delivery. It’s essential that product leaders not only oversee their respective teams but also that they foster interdepartmental collaboration so that customers’ needs receive the highest priority.
Set Your Vision
The first thing a product leader must do is define and articulate an overarching vision to guide their team. Cagan and Jones write that a product vision is the company’s mission, as reflected through its products and services. A shared vision keeps everyone in a business focused on what they’re collectively trying to accomplish and why it matters. For example, a company that makes outdoor apparel might state their vision as “bringing more people back into the great outdoors.” In this case, the mission isn’t just to make a profit from hiking gear—it’s to get people excited about hiking.
Cagan and Jones insist that as a leader, you should clearly articulate your company’s objectives, ensuring your team understands the significance of these objectives to the organization. If crafted well, a strong vision has a powerful impact on team performance: It motivates your team, aligns their efforts with those of the business, and provides them with the framework to decide how to achieve their goals, creating an environment ripe for innovation.
Cultivate Trust
To effectively advance your business vision as a product leader, you need to actively build and nurture trust. Leaders must trust their teams to do their jobs, while teams must trust their leaders to support them. Investors want to trust the company to look after their interests, just as you want your customers to trust that you’ll provide the best products you can. Cagan and Jones write that all these stakeholders play crucial roles in your business and should be treated as partners in shaping its future. Developing that level of trust pays dividends by building employee and customer loyalty while cementing your company’s good reputation, both internally and with the public.
Demonstrate Integrity and Transparency
When it comes to building trust, integrity is essential for any product leader because, at its core, integrity means keeping your promises. Integrity also rests on accountability—being willing to take responsibility for mistakes while continually looking for ways to mitigate risks and achieve better outcomes. By shouldering responsibility, you let others know that you’re someone to rely on whose judgment can be respected.
Lastly, people trust what they see for themselves, so earning trust relies on being transparent about your actions as a leader. Cagan and Jones recommend that you regularly report on your team’s goals and progress, which includes sharing bad news when it comes along. Give feedback—and not just negative feedback. Acknowledge whenever you or others deliver on promises and show results. This isn’t just to celebrate when teams accomplish tasks—it brings everyone in the company together as all of you make progress toward achieving your vision.
Lead Like a Coach
The leadership model that exemplifies traits of trust and integrity isn’t that of the high-powered corporate exec—it’s that of the coach who’s focused on team success. According to Cagan and Jones, coaching is the most important leadership skill. To coach your team toward success, you can’t just focus on making sure they finish tasks—you have to inspire them as a team and as individuals, create development plans for each member, and maintain a constant dialogue as everyone you coach moves forward in their careers.
What Is a Coach?
Cagan and Jones are careful to distinguish between leadership and management. Leaders, like coaches, drive the team toward a goal, while managers merely oversee task performance. As coaches, leaders set their team’s overall direction by articulating a vision and providing guidance. As such, leading is more than supervising—it calls for inspiring your team. Whereas traditional managers stifle creativity and individual growth through management-by-directive, a true product leader motivates team members by posing challenges rather than assigning tasks. This encourages team members to think creatively and stretch their abilities as they achieve their goals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Empowering Your Team
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.
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.
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.
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.
Start With a Strategy
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.
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.
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.
Set Team Objectives
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.
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.
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.
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.
