With Marty Cagan’s book Transformed from earlier this year up next in my reading queue, I decided to revisit his previous work, Empowered (co-written with Chris Jones). Both books are from the Silicon Valley Product Group, focusing on how to create products that customers love that deliver value for the business.
Although there are countless books and frameworks on product leadership, SVPG’s approach is the one I find most closely aligns with my own – particularly in terms of the product leadership trifecta of Product Management, Design, and Engineering working together closely to solve hard problems. This includes being clear on the key responsibilities for the leaders of those functions.
As a side note, I first read this book as part of a book club 📚 that I organized with some colleagues at a former company.
It turned out to be an invaluable exercise. Having both Engineering and Product leaders participate was beneficial not only for establishing a shared vocabulary, but also as a chance to discuss what we were doing well — and even what we weren’t doing at all!
As a leadership team, we all came from different backgrounds, practiced various ways of working, and held differing expectations of one another as discipline leaders. For example, some team members had experience at FAANG companies, while others had primarily worked at startups.
Establishing common ground regarding where we were proved vital in helping us determine where we wanted to go. I only wish we had done it sooner!
Although Empowered offers a great deal of insights on how to create extraordinary products, here are six of the most salient points that still resonate upon my recent reread of the material. Each also point includes a little color commentary 🤔:
In strong product companies, teams are given problems to solve, rather than features to build, and most important, they are empowered to solve those problems in the best way they see fit. And they are then held accountable to the results.
This is essentially the core thesis of the book. I’ve seen this approach work extremely well with teams that had strong functional leadership and were staffed to deliver solutions end-to-end. Conversely, I’ve also been in companies where fellow senior leaders questioned the teams’ maturity, resulting in a lack of empowerment – as well as a lack of investment in coaching (see the next point!)
Even worse was when numerous product managers were hired long before the other functions needed to form a proper product team. The intention was for them to get ‘ahead of the problem space,’ but this reflected a waterfall mindset. In reality, the product managers ended up feeling powerless, bored, and ineffective as they struggled to gather the necessary resources from other parts of the org.
Empowered product teams depend on skilled product managers, product designers, and engineers, and it is the leaders and managers who are responsible for recruiting, hiring, and coaching these people. Further, a focused and compelling product strategy – based on quantitative and qualitative insights – is among the most important contributions of product leadership.
Not much to add here. This is the cornerstone of modern product development.
For product leaders, the product team is our product, and this is how we develop a great product. Coaching is what turns normal people into extraordinary product teams. Developing people and coaching is job number 1.
I’ve been in organizations where leaders rarely discussed talent development – unless it was already too late and the situation had turned into a dumpster fire – let alone coaching. Nor did we regularly address whether we had the right people in the right places.
In sharp contrast, the best organizations and teams I’ve worked with routinely dedicated significant time to these topics. We began leadership meetings by focusing on people, development, performance, and even recruiting updates and flight-risks. Only after that did we move on to product strategy and execution. (I’ve also written about this as it pertains to people management.)
The first and most important principle of product discovery: our customers, and our stakeholders, aren't able to tell us what to build. Most companies don't have a product strategy; they are just trying to please as many stakeholders as they can with the resources that they have.
While I certainly believe that product sense, vision, and taste add a tremendous amount of value, relying on instincts alone can be risky. Especially as a product matures. Instead, I favor an approach that begins with a hypothesis rooted in both product sense and generative research – then validates it using customer insights. Deciding what to build is the toughest part of building, so gaining a deep understanding of the specific problem to be solved early-on ultimately saves time and money.
Give teams a small number of significant problems to solve (like one or two things in a quarter) and the objectives. The teams consider the problem and come back with some key results – and we iterate based on broader company objectives.
Giving teams the “significant problems to solve” is very much leadership’s responsibility. Make no mistake about it; that’s hard because it means ruthless prioritization and constant trade-off calls. It also quickly exposes how good those decisions are.
In addition, I would rather build one awesome thing end-to-end in a quarter than try to cram in a bunch of half-baked features. I’ve been a part of teams that celebrate shipping something without fully understanding its impact and/or the measurable results after launching. They just moved on to the next shiny thing. It’s almost as if shipping more stuff was somehow a weird way of hedging bets — “but, that last release had so much stuff in it” — when it was more likely a lack of direction.
The larger the organization, the more essential it is to be very good at communicating the product vision and evangelizing it. Communicating the vision is an ongoing exercise — in recruiting, onboarding, coaching, all-hands, and everything in between. It is never done.
As a company grows, communication and alignment become that much more challenging. Changing how you do things is hard, so I guess it’s not terribly surprising that some people go back to what they’re most comfortable doing. That might mean relying on their original playbook or just doing things like they used to — vs. doing things that scale more effectively, like communicating and coaching.
Let’s say you launched a product and it was successful. Does doing the same thing over and over guarantee future success? Of course not. What got you here won’t necessarily get you to the next phase of growth. Maybe your product has hit a wall in terms of acquisition. What do you know about your prospects, existing customers, the market, or even the competition? Those factors have probably changed. (In fact, you have most likely changed!)
In the end, recognizing that you are not the user is the first step toward becoming genuinely curious, empathetic, and open-minded as to what is truly going on.
Well, I’m certainly looking forward to reading Transformed over the holiday break ⛷️…
Cheers to a wonderful 2025! 🥂
Marc
P.S. – There has been a lot of chatter around Paul Graham’s recent Founder Mode essay, which touches on a few of the topics discussed here. Funny enough, one of the better responses that I’ve seen was also from Marty Cagan: Founder-Style Leadership.