Product Collective - 💪 Empowering product teams

Are organizations empowering their product teams?

For a while now, many in the product community proclaimed empowered product teams as the ideal structure to develop a product. The idea sounds great. Leaders ask teams to solve a problem and give the teams the latitude to apply their skills to come up with a valuable, viable, feasible, and usable solution. But is that happening to any great extent? Here are some perspectives on whether product teams are empowered and why or why not.

This week in product news, we look at a couple of new products that will help product teams, whether they’re empowered or not. And a couple of cautionary tales about companies that grew too fast, or didn’t improve their products.

Are you in an empowered product team? So you’ve read all the other fantastic product literature. You’ve learned what great product teams look like in theory and are ready to apply your newly gained knowledge. But then reality sinks in… you are not a part of an empowered product team. You get frustrated and start blaming the leadership. You may even consider leaving. Sound familiar? If so, Martin Spinnangr has some advice for you.

A new playbook? On a recent podcast Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, laid out his “new playbook” for product development at Airbnb. In which, he shares how he now believes the CEO of any tech company should be the chief product officer and how he reassigned product managers as program managers. The product teams now operate from a single roadmap across the entire company with Chesky staying very close to every design and every feature. Mike Fisher shares his thoughts on how tech CEOs may interpret Airbnb’s approach and what it may mean for those disempowered product teams.

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This week’s Video

The Coming 'Autonomous Teams' Backlash—and what we can do about it. Perhaps no concept has better defined the last half-decade of product management than that of autonomous and empowered teams. Sure enough, great things happen when the teams and individuals who are actually learning from and building for customers are empowered to make strategic decisions. And yet, a storm is brewing.

For every team that goes from building what executives want to building what customers want, there are five more that go from building what executives want to guessing what executives want. In this talk, product leader and Product Management in Practice author Matt LeMay addresses the common pitfalls that confront organizations seeking to build empowered and autonomous product teams, why those pitfalls often send executives careening back into command-and-control management, and what we can do about it.

Is it impossible to empower product people these days?

As product managers and leaders, we're often focused on the big picture: strategies for empowering our teams, driving innovation, and delivering exceptional products. But, let's face it, the current climate in the tech industry has added a layer of complexity to our roles. In the past few months, we've seen major players like Google, Snap, and Meta announce significant layoffs, impacting many talented product people. It's tough news to digest, and it naturally leads to a sense of uncertainty and concern.

In our upcoming episode of Rocketship.FM, we’ll be discussing some of the recent layoffs and their implications on the product management landscape. As product professionals, even when our own jobs aren’t affected, it's a punch in the gut to see our friends and colleagues face such these kinds of outcomes. It brings to the forefront a hard truth: feeling empowered in your role is a lot tougher when teams are being downsized and resources are shrinking.

However, we don’t really have any choice but to work with the resources we have. Now, more than ever, the ability to navigate these choppy waters with fewer resources becomes not just valuable, but essential. It's a testament to the core skills that make a great product manager: resourcefulness, strategic thinking, and the ability to pivot and adapt quickly.

The silver lining? Adversity often breeds innovation. Constraints can lead to creativity, and limitations can force us to think outside the box. This is a time to refocus, to reevaluate our priorities, and to find new ways to drive impact with what we have. It's a time to rally our teams, to inspire confidence, and to lead by example through these uncertain times.

Sometimes, it’s hard to stay in a positive mindset – but let’s not underestimate our ability to rise to the occasion. You can do it. 👊

Experiment like Spotify, with Confidence. Spotify created a set of experimentation tools that it uses to conduct multiple product experiments on a massive scale. It’s now offering those tools to external companies in a package called Confidence. This package replaces the build-vs-buy dichotomy with an API-driven approach to experimentation. Want to know how effective your text messages are? Customer engagement platform Twilio introduced Messaging Engagement Suite, a new product that helps you schedule messages around your customer’s preferred time periods, optimizes shortened hyperlinks for deliverability and clicks, and provides dashboards for experimentation and granular analysis. InVision design collaboration services shut down. Following Miro’s acquisition of Freehand, InVision decided to shut down at the end of 2024. The company did not give a specific reason for the shutdown. Posters on Reddit identifying themselves as customers or employees suggest “that instead of growing its products, the company allowed those products to get stagnant and failed to react to the market around it.” An example of why once you release a product you should continue to improve it. Amazon laying off 35% of staff at Twitch. The cuts, which impact about 500 employees, come amid concerns over losses at Twitch and after several top executives, including their chief product officer, left the company in the span of a few months. CEO Dan Clancy explained in a blog post that “the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we’re at today.” This is another example of a tech company that grew too quickly and is now looking to prioritize monetization.

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Building a culture of accountability for empowered product teams. Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion sat down to discuss what it looks like to be an empowered product team and especially for leaders, how to hold empowered product teams accountable to their outcomes. Their discussion provides an alternative to CEOs taking back all the decision-making responsibility.

Ego killed the empowered product team. By now you’ve most certainly read Marty Cagan’s article on Product teams vs Feature Teams. Feature teams are told what to do and measured on delivering output. Product teams are empowered to solve problems, achieve outcomes, and collaborate across disciplines effectively. After over two decades working in and with product teams Jeff Gothelf can confidently say that the empowered product team doesn’t stand a chance in the face of ego.

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