(2020-04-20) Cagan The Most Important Thing

Martin Cagan: The Most Important Thing. One of the listeners asked me, “OK, I know we’re clearly a feature team, but if you could pick just one thing to change about how we work, what would it be?”

if I had to pick just one thing, it would be the concept of an empowered engineer. See 2017-09-25-CaganCustomerInspiredTechnologyEnabled.

the best single source for innovation is your engineers (because they’re working with the enabling technology every day, so they’re in the best position to see what’s just now possible

Empowerment of an engineer means that you provide the engineers with the problem to solve, and the strategic context, and they are able to leverage technology to figure out the best solution to the problem.

An easy way to tell whether you have empowered engineers or not, is if the first time your engineers see a product idea is at sprint planning, you are clearly a feature team, and your engineers are not empowered in any meaningful sense.

Often when I’m asked to talk to a company, the head of product will warn me – “we’re a sales-driven company” or “we’re a marketing-driven company” – but occasionally I’ll be warned “we’re an engineering-driven company.” When a company is so-called “engineering-driven” it is usually very straightforward to transform the company into a world-class product company. That’s because they have already addressed the most important part.

I'm not sure I agree with this. If you don't have cross-functional empowered teams, then 90% of the time engineers will push technology approaches that aren't ready for use, or in a way that won't actually get adopted (esp if you don't have the time/budget for big pushes).

Update: Empowered Engineers FAQ

I believe that some of these opinions are at the core of why product management has such a poor reputation in so many companies.

"If I give my engineers this kind of power, all they will want to do is over-engineer and play with new technologies." If this is true (and not just another reason to keep the engineers focused on coding), then this is describing an empowered engineer but without motivation or focus.

"Our best engineers only want to work on what they consider hard technical problems." This might be the same issue as above, or it may be these strong engineers are doing exactly the right thing because they are empowered engineers and they do understand the business.