EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

Written by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones

Narrated by Marty Cagan

What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation?

Most people think it's because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products.

As legendary Silicon Valley coach-and coach to the founders of several of today's leading tech companies-Bill Campbell said, "Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge." The goal of EMPOWERED is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you'll need to create just such an environment.

A natural companion to the bestseller INSPIRED, EMPOWERED tackles head-on the reason why most companies fail to truly leverage the potential of their people to innovate: product leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Dec 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781663709776

Reviews for EMPOWERED

[Nikole Hooper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Written with a humility and a clarity that made it easy to follow and easy to embrace. It’s clear that Marty and Chris’ goal is to make me and you better product executives. A must read for anyone in a technology product organization!

[tomer oster · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Every leader has to read this! Speaks clearly with vast amount of examples and inspire for action

[Marius Leatu · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Too many ordinary platitudes in the book. There were less than 10 ideas worth taking away from reading the whole book. It was meant to be comprehensive, but to me it ended up covering the very basics of too many already digested topics.

[Olya · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Awesome book for product managers and company's leaders. Mind changer from old-fashioned features delivery companies to technology driven market leaders.

[sperzdechly-619992 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the most useless, yet a good book, I've read. Let me explain.The author presents here a pefect organization working in a perfect way. It all makes sense and can be something to aspire to. However, one can hardly find any tips on how to get there. What's even worse the most repeated advice here is "if your company does not work this way - change the company". There are no grays or in-betweens, you either do it like the author says or you're doing it wrong. The companies presented here were seemingly constructed this way, they got it right from the get-go, and I miss here transformation stories of companies that changed into this model. I'd love to know what problems needed to be solved first and how they were solved, but in this perfect setup there are no problems.I was wondering who is this book written for and concluded it is for executives who know there's something wrong with their product organisation but don't know how to run it in a different, hopefully better, way. They can find here a compeling description of a good way and the contact details of the author's consulting company ;)The thing that rubed me the wrong way the most was the only justification for the entire Empowered model that author provides - "this is how the biggest and most successful companies work, so it has to be good". This completely fails to acknowledge the possibility that these companies were successful not because this model but despite of it. In 2023 we can see that many of Sillicon Valley companies praised in this book failed in a major way, either on the product strategy front (Meta), execution efficiency side (Google), or both (Twitter). Massive layoffs done by every company mentioned in this book (except Apple) might also be a sign that they didn't figure it all out as well.I missed here a better reason to believe that Empowered model is THE way. Intuitively, it's reasonable and I could agree with a lot of described practices but having some strong principles, convincing data, experiments results, or anything else that "this is how Sillicon Valley rolls" mantra would be a great addition.I think this book presents a valuable benchmark for how to run a product organisation. There are many bases covered (80+ chapters!), so it gives a quite comprehensive perspective on what is needed to succeed. However, quality doesn't go with the quantity in this case - everything is described on the surface level, not going very deep to understand underlying priciples, problems solved to get there, and challenges of maintaining such model. There is a lot of good things here, so I guess this is a good book, but nothing really actionable, so I find it pretty useless.