How I Empower Product Teams to Take Ownership by Breaking Down Walls

Because I want problem solvers, not order takers.

Imagine being set up to fail, year after year, despite your best efforts.

You know the yearly drill (charade).

1. Senior managers huddle during the budget cycle.
2. They draft a roadmap filled with features and hard deadlines.
3. Teams receive these lofty commitments with little to say in their creation.
4. Despite valiant efforts, delivery falls short.
5. And inevitably, the blame lands squarely on the teams.

You’d think, after countless failures, we’d learn this approach doesn’t work. Yet, we keep coming back to this pattern. We’re stuck on this hamster wheel, expecting different results even though we find ourselves going nowhere.

We have a fallacy of precision aiming and factory thinking in software product development.

The drill we run every year is a play we’ve seen a thousand times.

Many of us, including me, have played starring roles in this theater production. In a past life, I had award-worthy, pristine roadmaps that looked great on the surface. But my yearly roadmaps were full of unvalidated features and bloated commitments.

Your product teams don’t see these yearly theatrics as a Tony-winning performance. They see it for what it is…a comedy show. And they fear the horror act it portends for them to play out for the next year.

Yet, the show must go on. To make things worse, in this parody, we weaponize empowerment.

We say to teams, “We empower you to hit these commitments.” Then, when nothing goes as planned, we hold the teams accountable. It is a time of much blame and gnashing of teeth. We point at them and say, “How could smart folks like you not be able to figure this out?”

It seems absurd to hold teams accountable for something they had no part in crafting. Yet, we consistently do it.

I have good news. There is a saner path, less taken. One that empowers teams and leads to real results.

How I’ve Made Empowerment and Product Teams Actually Work

For real empowerment, a team must have ownership.

This means more than some platitude displayed on a poster hung in corporate halls.

• Ownership means a team feels accountable.
• Ownership means a team can innovate on how to achieve goals.
• Ownership means a team has the capability and agency to pursue goals.

Simple? Yes. Easy? Far from it.

Why is this so hard? It comes down to a stubborn belief we can’t seem to break in the corporate world. In error, we believe we need to tell those doing the work exactly what to do and how to do it. And then, we only allow leadership or resident experts to decide the what and the how.

Bottom line, we don’t trust or have faith in the smart people we hired to do the work. Instead, we give them a recipe to follow. We hire them and then tell them what to do.

No empowerment can result from this. But with desire and focused effort, we can break this broken pattern.

And this is what I want to walk you through. I’m going to give you 3 steps to take today to start unwinding this tangled web of backward behavior. These will head you down a path toward team empowerment.

Why would you want this? I’ve got four reasons:

1. You want those closest to the work innovating to solve tough problems.
2. You want those closest to the work to assess the feasibility of solutions.
3. You want those closest to the work to have agency and urgency.
4. You want those closest to the work to be adaptive to issues.

Now, that’s what I’m talking about. It gives me chills to write down those compelling statements and consider the powerful impact of them. Ready to figure out how to do this?

Let’s dive in. Here’s my step-by-step guide to make this happen.

Step 1: Involve the team end-to-end, not at the end.

You know what sucks? Trying to protect the team from ideation so they can crank out more features.

It sucks for stakeholders because they miss insights from the bright minds of the team on the ground. It sucks for the users because hand-offs delay putting solutions into their hands. It sucks for the business because we tend to bet too big up front and lose big on unvalidated ideas. And it sucks for the teams because they have no connection to why they are building the items on their list.

Teams who take orders aren’t inspired. Inspiration requires ownership.

But ownership isn’t given. It’s taken. And how does a team take ownership? By involving them end-to-end, not at the end. Instead of leaders and experts doing the ideation and planning, involve your teams. We want those closest to the work crafting solutions and owning the outcomes of them.

And we want leaders defining the problems that need solving, not the solutions to build. This leads us to step 2.

Step 2: Give problems to solve, not solutions to build.

Leaders and experts today focus on creating a roadmap of features for teams to build. But they should focus on strategy—the missing link in most product efforts.

Strategy connects business objectives to customer problems to solve. Then, customer problems go to the teams to solve. Strategy is the job we need leaders to tackle. We want leaders focused much more on strategy than solutions.

Let’s take a story of mine to illustrate.

A client of mine had a clear business goal to increase the annual revenue by $750,000. This gap resulted because customers were not filing a report on time. The procedure normally used to solve this problem was typical. Gather senior leaders, generate a feature list, form a business case, and assign it to teams to build. But we did something different this time with leaders and teams together.

• We analyzed data.
• We talked to customers.
• We worked to understand the problem.

We figured out two key issues. 80% of customers didn’t have automated mechanisms set up to help them do the reporting. And 20% of customers didn’t know they had to file a report.

Perfect. We now had a strategy on which problems we needed to solve and which one was the most urgent. We knew what was in the way of meeting our business goal.

The team went off to solve the lack of automation in 80% of the customers. We didn’t tell them how. We put it in their hands to innovate a solution. And we asked them to measure whether their fixes resulted in timely report filings.

Since the team was generating solutions, they felt ownership.

• They asked for help when they needed it. 
• They measured and iterated on their own.
• They tried things that didn’t work, pivoted, and tried new things.

This is what we mean when we say empowerment.

But empowerment does not mean the absence of leadership, as described by Step 3.

Step 3: Be a present leader and coach, not an absent manager.

Empowerment does not mean the team is solving problems without leadership.

We don’t need less leadership. We need involved leadership who supports and helps the team solve problems.

You know all that time you normally spend spelling out exactly what the team should build? All that time and effort you put into giving instructions on exactly how to build it? You aren’t doing that anymore.

You should now spend your time coaching your team and clearing their path. Be present as the team does its work.

• When the team hits a roadblock, help them clear it.
• When the team is ideating on solutions, help them see blind spots.
• When the team does not know what to do, nudge them back on track.

Better leaders are present leaders.

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That’s it.

We need a shift from leadership feeding teams a roadmap and unvalidated features to build. This is a broken set of behaviors.

Instead, we need empowered teams who own solutions end-to-end.

To achieve this, we need:

1. End-to-end team involvement to understand problems and solve them.
2. Teams squashing problems with solutions they generate and own.
3. Engaged leaders who coach and serve the team as they work.

Empowered product teams require a shift from conventional methods. We desperately need leaders to own this shift. Otherwise, empowerment will continue as a myth on corporate posters no team has felt in the wild.

Let’s start taking the necessary steps today. We can do it. One team at a time.

We want empowered teams to solve hard problems for customers in a way that works for our business. This must be a problem teams care for as their own to solve. Now, that’s a problem worth solving.

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