The Shift from "Old Ways" to Empowered Product Teams

Do your teams consistently ship features that fail to deliver the expected business results? Do your product requirements come from a roadmap handed down by stakeholders, rather than being discovered by an empowered team? Do your best people feel like "mercenaries" just executing tasks, rather than "missionaries" with true ownership over outcomes? If you find yourself nodding in agreement, you're likely operating in what's known as the "old ways" of product development, where innovation is rare and talent is often wasted.

However, there is a better way – a transformation to the product operating model. This fundamental shift enables continuous innovation and the consistent delivery of products that customers love and that work for the business.

The Shift from "Old Ways" to Empowered Product Teams

In many traditional organizations, technology teams function as "feature teams". These teams are given lists of features and projects to build (output) and are primarily focused on delivery. In this model, the "product definition"—what gets built—is often decided upstream by executives and stakeholders, then handed off to the teams. Product managers in this context may act more like project or delivery managers, passing along requirements. The problem with this approach is a "fundamental confusion about what to look for when hiring strong product people" and a severe waste of talent and capabilities, often leading to a lack of meaningful business results and innovation.

The transformation involves three key dimensions of change: how you build, how you solve problems, and how you decide which problems to solve. At the heart of this transformation are empowered product teams. Unlike feature teams, empowered product teams are assigned problems to solve (objectives) and are then empowered to come up with solutions that work. They are held accountable for the outcomes or business results, not just the output. This fosters a "sense of ownership" over the problems they are solving.

Understanding the Pillars of the Product Operating Model

Within this transformed model, the leading and ownership of product work are clearly defined and interconnected:

1. Product Discovery

Product Discovery is the crucial process where product teams actively figure out the best solution to the problems they have been assigned. Its purpose is to discover solutions that customers love, yet work for the business. This process is about addressing four key product risks before significant time and money are invested in building a production-quality solution:

• Value Risk

  Will customers buy or choose to use it?

• Usability Risk

  Can users figure out how to use it?

• Feasibility Risk

  Can it be built with available staff, time, technology, and data?

• Viability Risk

  Will the solution work for the business and can stakeholders support it (e.g., sales, marketing, finance, legal, ethics)?.

Who leads this?

• The Empowered Product Team

  Product discovery is primarily the responsibility of the cross-functional product team itself, which typically includes a product manager, a product designer, and engineers (especially a tech lead).

• Product Manager

  The product manager is specifically responsible and accountable for the value and viability risks during discovery. They must deeply understand customers, the market, and the business.

• Product Designer

  The product designer is responsible and accountable for the usability risk and the overall product experience. They are critical in discovery through activities like prototyping and user research to gain quick feedback on potential solutions.

• Tech Lead (Senior Engineer)

  The tech lead is responsible and accountable for the feasibility risk. They are involved from the very beginning of discovery, as engineers often have deep insights into enabling technology that can lead to better solutions. Strong engineers care not just about how they build, but also about what gets built.

Collaboration: Product discovery explicitly depends on close collaboration, especially among the product manager, product designer, and tech lead—sometimes called the "product triad". This collaboration is often centered around prototypes, which serve as the main artifact for discussion and testing. The process involves rapidly testing ideas and experimenting to learn what works quickly and inexpensively. Failures in discovery are seen as valuable learning opportunities, not actual failures.

2. Product Delivery

Product Delivery is the process of building, testing, and delivering the solutions that have been successfully discovered and validated to customers.

• The Empowered Product Team

  The same empowered product team that performs discovery is also responsible for delivery. Separating these responsibilities into different teams (e.g., an innovation lab for discovery and separate teams for delivery) is detrimental, as it loses the passion and excitement felt by the team that discovered the solution.

• Focus

  Strong product companies aim for frequent, small, consistent, and uncoupled releases. Reliability and continuously improving the product are key features of this ongoing effort. The tech lead is generally accountable for the product's delivery.

3. Product Definition (in the Product Operating Model)

In the context of the product operating model, "product definition" is not a separate, upfront phase where requirements are collected and then handed off. Instead, it is an iterative and collaborative process integrated within product discovery.

The product manager is responsible for assessing product opportunities and defining the product to be built, but this "definition" is continuously refined through the discovery process by the cross-functional team.

Product principles and the product vision serve as crucial strategic context to inform the product definition by the teams, guiding their decisions and trade-offs.

The Importance of Team Topology

Team topology refers to how an organization structures and scopes its product teams, and how they relate to one another. It is a critical responsibility of product leadership.

• Optimizing for Empowerment:

  The overarching goal of defining a team topology is to maximize empowerment by fostering clear ownership, autonomy, and alignment among teams. This means minimizing unnecessary dependencies between teams.

• Team Types

  • Platform Teams: These teams provide leverage by managing shared services (e.g., authentication, reusable components, payment processing) that can be easily used by other teams. They encapsulate complexity, reducing the cognitive load for other teams and enabling them to focus more on customer problems. While their contribution is indirect, their work is crucial for the overall product success.
  • Experience Teams: These teams are responsible for how the product is directly experienced by users, such as through apps, UIs, or end-to-end solutions. They leverage the services provided by platform teams.

• Proximity and Collaboration

  While co-location offers a significant advantage for the intense collaboration required in product discovery, remote or distributed teams can still succeed by being aware of the challenges (e.g., avoiding artifact-driven handoffs) and through intentional coaching.

• Evolution

  A team topology is not static; it needs to evolve as the company's product vision, strategy, and market conditions change. Product and engineering leaders must collaborate closely to design and evolve the topology, balancing architectural needs with customer and business objectives. Moving from many small teams to a smaller number of larger-scope teams can increase empowerment and reduce dependencies.

The Crucial Role of Product Leadership

None of this transformation is possible without strong product leaders. Their role is to:

• Staff and Coach Teams

  Recruit, hire, onboard, and coach the members of product teams (product managers, designers, and engineers) to ensure they have the necessary competencies and can perform effectively. Coaching is their "most important responsibility".

• Provide Strategic Context

  Define and communicate the product vision (the inspiring long-term goal), product principles (values and beliefs for decision-making), and the product strategy (how the vision will be achieved by focusing on the most important problems). This context is essential for teams to make good decisions.

• Assign Problems (Team Objectives)

  Product leaders are responsible for deciding which problems should be worked on by which product teams, derived directly from the product strategy. The team, in turn, is responsible for determining how to solve the problem and defining the "key results" to measure success.

• Lead with Context, Not Control

  They foster a culture of trust over control and practice "servant leadership," removing obstacles and providing assistance rather than dictating solutions. They encourage teams to be ambitious and to make high-integrity commitments when appropriate, but these should be the exception, not the rule.

To truly innovate and unleash the full potential of your teams, you must move beyond simply delivering features and embrace this holistic product operating model. It's about empowering your people, giving them meaningful problems to solve, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and trust to deliver products that genuinely delight customers and drive business results.