Empowered Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

Become the leader your product teams, and your company, need you to be.

"Every product leader—no—every CEO and senior management team should read this. Now."
—PHIL TERRY, Founder, Collaborative Gain; co-author, Customers Included

"There are only a few people in the world with the experience to outline the secrets of world-class product organizations. That's what Marty and Chris do in this book. This is essential reading for every product leader."
—WYATT JENKINS, SVP Product, Procore

"Marty Cagan's INSPIRED motivated a generation of product managers to build products customers love, and EMPOWERED is the blueprint leaders need to transform their organizations and empower their teams to deliver on that inspiration."
—MARTIN ERIKSSON, Co-Founder, Mind the Product

"Marty and Chris have written the definitive book on product leadership. Their emphasis on coaching as a key leadership skill and the detail on how to do it well, makes EMPOWERED a must-read for new, aspiring, and experienced product leaders."
—TERESA TORRES, Product Discovery Coach, Product Talk

"EMPOWERED is a must-read for product leaders in the same way INSPIRED is unquestionably the most influential book in tech product management."
—FELIPE CASTRO, Founder, OutcomeEdge

"This is the missing guide to product leadership. It gave me the tools, mindset, and practical insights to excel in my role. I fully expect to come back to this book on a recurring basis—as I do with INSPIRED. EMPOWERED needs to be on the shelf of all product leaders and aspiring product leaders."
—GABRIELLE BUFREM, Manager of Product Management, VMware

"EMPOWERED is full of straight talk for anyone looking to understand how the best product teams operate. The book demonstrates that great product companies aren't made by magic—the structure and leadership of the product development organization creates the environment for success."
—HOLLY HESTER-REILLY, Founder, H2R Product Science

What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation?

Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products.

As legendary Silicon Valley coach--and coach to the founders of several of today’s leading tech companies--Bill Campbell said, “Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.”

The goal of EMPOWERED is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create just such an environment.

As partners at The Silicon Valley Product Group, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones have long worked to reveal the best practices of the most consistently innovative companies in the world. A natural companion to the bestseller INSPIRED, EMPOWERED tackles head-on the reason why most companies fail to truly leverage the potential of their people to innovate: product leadership.

The book covers:

• what it means to be an empowered product team, and how this is different from the “feature teams” used by most companies to build technology products
• recruiting and coaching the members of product teams, first to competence, and then to reach their potential
• creating an inspiring product vision along with an insights-driven product strategy
• translating that strategy into action by empowering teams with specific objectives—problems to solve—rather than features to build
• redefining the relationship of the product teams to the rest of the company
• detailing the changes necessary to effectively and successfully transform your organization to truly empowered product teams

EMPOWERED puts decades of lessons learned from the best leaders of the top technology companies in your hand as a guide. It shows you how to become the leader your team and company needs to not only survive but thrive.