Real Talk about Empowered vs. Feature Product Teams | Chris Jones (SVPG)

What empowered really means, how to escape the feature factory trap, and how to take back control of your career

Dear subscribers,

Today, I want to share a new episode with Chris Jones, partner at SVPG.

Chris and Marty Cagan wrote the best-selling book Empowered based on their 30+ years of experience working with 200+ companies. Their definition of “empowered vs. feature product teams” has created controversy, so I knew I had to chat with them.

Chris and I had a heart-to-heart about empowered vs. feature teams, avoiding the feature factory trap, and taking back control of your career.

Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

Chris and I talked about:

• (00:00) What empowered really means

• (01:13) The difference between empowered and feature teams

• (04:58) Why companies stop being customer-focused

• (06:12) OKRs, processes, and bureaucracy

• (13:47) Be the go-to person to build trust with leaders

• (18:13) Quarterly metric targets and bad trade-offs

• (23:00) Does empowerment matter in wartime (Airbnb)?

• (27:24) 3 types of product operating principles

• (30:23) Is Google still empowered?

• (33:40) How to avoid product review hell

• (41:08) Take back control of your career

Keep reading for the interview takeaways.

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Demystifying empowered vs. feature teams

Chris, Marty, and the rest of the team at Silicon Valley Product Group

Welcome Chris! So, what’s the difference between empowered and feature teams?

Fundamentally, it comes down to how work is allocated. Are leaders giving teams solutions to build or problems to solve? That’s the key difference.

Empowered means giving teams problems and the latitude to find the best solution.

It comes from our belief that the team closest to the customer is best positioned to solve the problem.

20 product principles from Marty’s new book Transformed

So, “empowered” refers to teams getting problems to solve instead of building whatever they want.

Yeah, empowered is a cool word, but people might hear that and think, “I'm empowered, so I’m going to work on what I want to work on.”

That's not what we mean by empowered. What we mean is that: