Empowerment of an engineer means that you provide the engineers with the problem to solve and the strategic context, and they are able to leverage technology to figure out the best solution to the problem. An easy way to tell whether or not you have empowered engineers is if the first time your engineers see a product idea is at sprint planning, you are clearly a feature team and your engineers are not empowered in any meaningful sense. If you’re just using your engineers to code, you’re only getting about half their value.
Marty Cagan and Chris Jones in Empowered