Marty Cagan and Chris Jones

Your products are the lifeblood of your company, and these skills must be core competencies. Your customers depend on these products and services. Outsourcing these things will almost certainly kill any chance you have of teams of missionaries. Just the opposite, you literally have created teams of mercenaries.

Marty Cagan and Chris Jones in Empowered

Stephen Covey explained that: Trust is a function of two things: competence and character. Competence includes your capabilities, your skills, and your track record. Character includes your integrity, your motive, and your intent with people. Both are vital.

Marty Cagan and Chris Jones in Empowered

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

There is actually a third type of technology team, which is referred to as a delivery team (or “Scrum team” or “dev team”). A delivery team doesn’t even pretend to be a true product team. They are not cross‐functional, and they are not empowered. There is a product owner (responsible for administering the product backlog) and some number of engineers. They are purely about output (code and ship). If you’re running a process like SAFe, then this is unfortunately you, and truthfully, I have no idea why you would want to read this book, since what I describe here is the polar opposite both philosophically and practically.

Marty Cagan and Chris Jones in Empowered

Feature teams look superficially like a product team. They are cross‐functional, with a product manager, a product designer, and some number of engineers. The difference is that they are all about implementing features and projects (output), and as such are not empowered or held accountable to results. The feature teams get to work first designing the features on the roadmap, maybe doing a little usability testing, and then proceeding to building, QA testing, and deploying the features (known as delivery).

Marty Cagan and Chris Jones in Empowered

in strong product companies, the purpose of the product team is to serve customers by creating products customers love, yet work for the business.

Marty Cagan and Chris Jones in Empowered