Book review: Empowered by Marty Cagan

In Empowered, Marty Cagan shares a wealth of knowledge on how to create an effective design process in your product team. He explains the benefits of creating this type of culture, and throughout the book, he gives examples of how some companies have grown their products by following his steps.

Want to hear why Safia recommends this book? Let’s get straight into it.

Q: What attracted you to this book?

A: I wanted to understand what it means to be a great product leader and how to grow into a product leader's role.

Q: What is the basic storyline?

A: The book, Empowered is a guide on how to become an exceptional product leader and how to transform a product team into an empowered product team.

Q: What were some highlights?

A: These snippets were my highlights:

According to Bill Campbell, “leadership is about recognising that there's greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.” Product leaders must trust their teams for empowerment to happen.

In the book, Marty explains how empowered product teams are given problems to solve and create solutions that are valuable and usable for the user but are viable and feasible to the business. Together, the team owns the problem and is accountable for the results. Empowered teams are measured by outcome, whereas “featured” teams are given a feature to build and are measured by output.

Q: What insights have you gained?

• Collaboration between team members is extremely important because when a product team works together to solve a problem, extraordinary products are created.
• Coaching is an essential part of being a product leader. Coaching is what transforms ordinary people into extraordinary product teams.
• Written product narrative is the act of writing down your ideas which, in turn, provides clarity on what you are trying to achieve.

Q: Who do you think should read this book?

A: Empowered is written for leaders within the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) but I think anyone that inspires to be a leader should read this book.

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