(2023-12-11) Gothelf Ego Killed The Empowered Product Team

Jeff Gothelf: (Management) Ego killed the empowered product team. By now you’ve most certainly read Martin Cagan’s article on Product teams vs Feature Teams. ((2019-08-29) Cagan Product Vs Feature Teams)

You’ll recognize empowered product teams as the preferred model we described in Lean UX, Sense & Respond and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking (and countless blog posts and speeches). ((2018-10-31) Cagan Empowered Product Teams)

After more than two decades working in and with product teams I can confidently say that the empowered product team doesn’t stand a chance in the face of ego.

Empowered product teams are the “perfect” we constantly chase in the hopes of one day becoming the ideal product development team. Inevitably teams and organizations struggle to put this model into place consistently causing frustration, blame and ultimately sub-optimal products and services.

The teams working to help their customers are frustrated along the way knowing their work could have been better if it wasn’t for “this mandate” or “that last minute leadership change.” Yet, the people who suffer the most from this failed pursuit are the end users and customers

Empowered product teams fail because of a lack of trust. Leaders, egos buoyed by titles and salaries, believe they know best. Their teams are there to execute their vision and to do it predictably

This isn’t limited to enterprise scale companies. Startup founders operate in a similar manner. After all, this is their baby. An empowered team threatens the viability of that initial idea (as it should).

Many years ago I joined a band called The Tony Roberts Band. If you’ve ever played music you know that a band can be the embodiment of an empowered team.... In this new band, we were not an empowered team. It was clear from the name. There was one decision-maker and his name was Tony Roberts. When you join a band with a person’s name in it you have a clear sense of your role in that group. You’re an employee, not a collaborator. This kind of transparency is rare in product development. Every company touts their collaborative culture, transparency and customer focus. If they advertised the opposite, who would apply to work there?

Let’s chase the perfect – the empowered product team model so many of us promote. Along the way, let’s focus on the wins we rack up. Every step forward is a step in the right direction. Maybe we never spoke to customers before. Today we speak to 2 every quarter. That’s a win. It’s not perfect. It’s not even close to “empowered” but our customers get slightly better products because of it. We used to ship once a year. That gave us a yearly opportunity to learn. Now we ship every quarter. We’ve now quadrupled our learning opportunities.

Step by step we improve our ways of working. Rather than getting wrapped up in other companies’ models we’re building our own

In the same way we use evidence learned from in-market experimentation, we can justify the organizational design and cultural changes we want to make. Your CEO doesn’t have to believe Marty Cagan (or me or anyone else). However, if you can repeatedly prove that small changes in your team’s ways of working yield stronger product results you can expand the autonomy and empowerment of your team.

This is rarely clear-cut. Agile Product Development increases the odds of better outcomes, but it's not guaranteed, and often not-fast. And managers rarely acknkowledge that past problems were the fault of their process.