EMPOWERED - Achieving Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People - Marty Cagan

all right thanks Andre appreciate it and thank you everybody for coming to this conference I appreciate you inviting me here and having this chance to talk to you I I'm I have a new talk that I'm been testing actually prototyping I'm a big believer in that and I have decided this year really to focus on some what it's an adjacent set of problems but bigger problems and I want to share that with you I will warn you and advanced it I'm going to throw a lot at you some of it will probably be uncomfortable one

of the things I've learned as I do this longer and longer is I'm I don't think it's helpful to sugarcoat things you know it's more useful I think to all of us to be honest so I'm gonna be frank on a lot of this stuff and maybe to Frank you will see but I want to I want to share with you some of the things that I think are important that not enough teams are really dealing with first of all I should say what powers me what keeps me doing this is I am introduced to

a lot of companies I've been in the industry a long time I'm based in San Francisco you get introduced to a lot and what is amazing to me is the difference between how great product companies work and how all the rest work and to me that difference is huge and unacceptable really embarrassing at this point in our industry that there's such a massive distractor discrepancy and yeah it's it's very frustrating now normally sometimes they have to wake this up here try it now no all right old school normally this is what I like to talk

about product discovery it's my favorite topic honestly I could talk all day if for those of you who are with me yesterday I did talk all day on this topic just this topic I love it it's to me what I totally find incredibly inspiring about building product is we are solving hard problems and that's what we're there to do between product design and engineering we're decided we're we're there to work together and solve hard problems now the way I like to frame the world is this is called discovery and there are four big risks in

product always will the product be valuable will people buy it or choose to use it is it usable can they figure out how to use it is it feasible do we know how to build it and finally is it viable for the business does it work for the different parts of our business that's what discovery is is finding solutions with those characteristics these are so this is what we mean by the right product so I love that but I will also tell you at this point I have worked with a lot of organizations where I

teach the teams how to work this way and I find out later that they're not allowed to work this way this is just of course this is like a dagger this just really bothers me and it especially bothers me because I know that unless they work this way they are almost certainly going to go out of business it's not usually tomorrow but if you follow the news in the u.s. almost every week a major company Falls to Amazon and the difference in my book is Amazon runs like I advocate and most of these other come

from well really all these other companies that have gone under not even close so to me it's a pretty serious topic that we need to talk about and first let me try to make this real to you when we talk about a truly empowered team versus the rest did I not use it I've tried it well thank you so in most organizations teams exist to serve the business literally I mean you often hear that phrase they are there to serve the business but even if it's not explicit its implicit the business gets together and gives

the team's roadmaps and says you know build these features that is how it is in most organizations but in great organizations they have a very different model teams are actually there for a different purpose they are there to come up with solutions that our customers love but that worked for the business now I hope you can see that's not a small difference that is a massive difference everything is different now we often III do this too we often refer to the second as the product mindset or a product culture and we refer to the first

by a various sort of derogatory terms IT mindset a project mindset feature factories you've heard all these different flavors of them now I would also point out we in the first model I mean this is not this going to be a little harsh first thing I would honestly say the first model is the vast majority of companies in the world and this is not just Silicon Valley versus rest of the world this is true in the San Francisco Bay Area we have both kinds of companies too many of the LAT of the the poor ones

but I will also tell you if your company's running in the first way they really don't need product managers in that model it's not product management it's literally a product owner of course just administering the role in a scrum team or it's a little bit of project management a little bit of business analysis business and that'll be a role I hate to tell you but if you're a product manager real product manager you're probably not very happy if your company runs in that way and I see I meet people like this all the time they

end up in a company like that and say you know can you introduce me to a company that's a real product company so that's kind of a harsh reality but the real question is why is this the case because that well let's talk about it I'm gonna talk about this idea of truly empowered teams and one of the reasons that's such a difficult topic is I have to talk about your entire organization you know when we talk about transformation in fact you've all heard the term digital transformation my guess is almost all of your companies

have a digital transformation initiative of some sort or another you may know that those almost never work right they almost always fail and it's because they are not willing to really make the transformation that I'm talking about here so that's why I say this is big and brought so the first thing I want to say about this idea of truly empowered teams is that I am not even close to the first person to say this is a great thing this is old news this is absolutely old news these are just my top ten favorite books

then make the argument for truly empowered teams and I know several others I just didn't want to put more than 10 on there at you I'm reading another one by simon Sinek right now it's another great one called leaders elast which is also making the same argument they all make this argument I encourage you to read these all of them really they're inspiring but for some reason they have failed to convince leaders of most companies that this is a good idea I mean that's the reality they haven't so to me that begs the question why

don't more companies actually really empower their teams and I often the way my world works is typically a venture capitalist will introduce me to a company and I'll spend a little time with them just so you know it is very easy to spot the clues of which kind of company we're talking about this sort of product culture thing or the old school it's easy to spot so it's simple I can tell it from meeting any engineer and the organization I can tell it from the weather they do old-style roadmaps and project planning and all the

sort of games people do so it's easy to see but then I'll go to the CEO and say look you know this is not the way good companies run right you know that so why are you running like this and honestly the answer comes down to one word trust and usually I can get them to admit that they don't trust the teams they'll they'll phrase it like they can't trust the team's look you know they'll point out look at these you know mostly they do truly focus on product managers and I hate to say this

but mostly they're right right mostly they're right the product managers in most of these companies are not worthy of being trusted they're not they haven't earned that right to be trusted now of course I immediately point out to them that while that may be true whose fault is that they're the ones that hire them right so it's their fault so that we need to get this out on the table so then the real discussion becomes all right if you believe that you need to run with truly empowered teams then and then you need people you

can trust clearly you need people you can trust in these roles so let's talk about how you really do that and that's really what I want I want to talk about here in an organization that works this way what the real differences are the important differences are so the first way I'd like to describe that is three companies that everybody knows they are three of the most valuable companies in the world we know that you probably all know that just recently app was across the trillion dollar mark t is and trillion right and as you

also probably know that's on the back of the iPhone but those three companies I would argue are you know three of the most valuable companies for good reason they have proven their ability to consistently innovate on behalf of their customers now here's the tricky thing and why I realized that the this just loose concept we talked about about we need product culture is not really sufficient because if any of you have been inside these three companies like I have you know that they all three actually have very different cultures so like how could that be

what does that even mean how and they're actually those are two extremes to apples kind of in the middle Amazon is well away on one side of the spectrum Google is more like a party in most places and so you know it's just all over yeah all three managed to have a pretty amazing environment for product teams and I think the results are the consequences of that environment so I've been one of the things I realized and it's funny it was just about a month ago over a very informal beer with a friend I realized

that one of the things we just having luckily lived in San Francisco something I was aware of and a lot of people they're aware too but most of the world is not aware of but nobody talks about and they should talk talk about which is these three companies actually have something hugely critical in common it's just not well known these three companies the founders of the three companies four people right Bezos Steve Jobs Larry and Sergey at Google whoops the four founders all were coached by the same person Bill Campbell known as actually the coach

of Silicon Valley sadly he passed away a couple years ago but and I will also say I was not lucky enough to be coached by him I truly wish I was but I was very fortunate in that two of the people that I worked for were directly coached by him and I will also tell you several the people that I have tremendous respect for like Ben Horowitz like Chris I gir these are leaders in our industry they were personally coached by him and they've really taught me a lot so I feel like I'm a beneficiary

of his teaching but this guy literally for a decade through the formative years of Google Apple Amazon showed them how to set up a product company he literally explained the process to these companies and I could really talk for hours just on him I actually ten years ago I wrote an article that some of you may know I published stuff for a while on product I wrote an article talking about the real learnings I've got from him and I asked him to review it and he told me that he'd rather I not published this for

the same reason he never agrees to press interviews he likes all the attention he liked all the attention on the people he coaches and that's why when he passed away there was a one of the biggest memorials in Silicon Valley but almost no press coverage there's the the press really didn't know about him but it turns out I would argue that's pretty important one of my favorite quotes from him is this in fact I'll tie my shoe while you read that so I love that quote by the way and he is any and you might

even read that and think oh that's sappy it's too sappy but honestly this was him his personality came through anybody that knew him will tell you this he was a genuine guy and what I think is amazing is that if you look at Google Amazon Apple they all three all and of course there are four very different founders but they all three managed to figure out how to do that in their own way all three companies created this kind of environment now contrast that of course with most companies environments so this is really what I

sort of decided I want to focus on for at least the next year I want to focus on how can we get this kind of environment in more companies because to me this is the root cause of why so many companies are just you know clueless on product okay so this leads to the topic of leadership so let's talk about leadership first many of you probably have heard of Etsy Etsy is another great product company they're based in Brooklyn big global marketplace Mike Fisher is actually their CTO he's one of my favorite CEOs in the

world his longtime friend Marty Abbott I didn't show his picture here but he is also a CTL I met both of them Marty Abbott was the CTO at eBay when I was running product at eBay and Mike Fisher was actually running PayPal's engineering when I met him so I've known them for about 20 years I what's really interesting about those two is that they both went to the US Military Academy at West Point and they both served in US Special Forces now I say that because to me that's the main reason why they take leadership

so seriously in that context it I mean it's literally a life or death thing so I have actually written about a lot of the things that they teach before I love this quote because it is true I'm gonna talk about leadership and management a lot of people make this mistake I think of mashing those together it is true of course that most leaders are also managers but the responsibilities are different and I don't want them to get lost so I'm going to talk about them separately at a high level of course yes leadership is about

inspiring the organization and management is about guiding us there I think that's spot-on so this the topic of leadership is honestly a massive topic m''d talk easily the whole books are on leadership I want to do here is make sure that everybody in this room we're all sort of on the same page about what it means to have good leadership now and the reason this is so important health I should I should state this explicitly you can't hope to have truly empowered teams unless you give the teams the business context of what we're all trying

to achieve that should be obvious but I want to be explicit and this is how we do that that is the primary role here of leadership so there are five big responsibilities of leaders and in particular I'm talking about the leaders of product the leaders of design user experience design and the leaders of engineering and of course the leader of the company that sort of that team there's more leaders in a company overall but we're talking about the product leadership product design and engineering so the first is product vision the vision of course is our

North Star it's typically for software three to five years out for hardware five to ten years out but it is a lot of people do call it the North Stars because if you have 50 product teams in your company this is the common objective so a lot of people make the mistake of doing product vision per product team that misses the point the product vision is the whole we're all contributing to the other thing I'll say is this is our best recruiting tool for the kind of people we need to staff empowered product teams there's

the division is really that's the purpose every good product design engineer I know wants to contribute to something meaningful and that's what the vision describes the product strategy is really how do we get from here wherever we are today to this great vision that we all are are anxious to make happen now there are many different valid ways to come up with strategy that is a massive topic on itself it usually turns out to be a sequence of product market fits but there are other ways to do it too what we're really trying to avoid

there is product strategy represents some important choices what we want to make sure doesn't happen is that the whole company tries to solve everybody's problems at once that is a clear recipe for failure so one of the clear purposes of strategy is to make some intelligent intentional choices about what problems we attack in what order okay that's the strategy one of my favorite parts of this the really vision strategy and principles go together product principles describe the nature of the kind of product we're trying to create what are the things we believe to be true

that we that these are not requirements they don't show up they don't tell us specifically what to do but they do inform the decisions we will make when conflicts come up now that's a big discussion if you're not clear on that I have lots of examples just google the term product principles and you'll find them so product priorities most there are many different ways to techniques out there for getting teams to focus on outcomes rather than output as you'll see that is a fundamental objective of hey no pun intended of a of a modern product

team but the most popular one today really is the okay our system which most of you know objectives and key results now the okay our system is if you've if you've tried it even though it's conceptually simple most companies completely bungle it up for the first couple times it's just normal and one of the first things they do is they get this wrong they just basically ask every team to propose their objectives and of course you have 25 teams doing going in 25 different directions this is nonsense so the the product leadership Staub is to

define the organization's objectives typically that's done on an annual basis and that of course represents some choices which is their job to make these choices because again otherwise every team is - has no context they don't know what the priority really is and finally and the bigger the company the more critical this is the organization the leaders need to evangelized they need to sell the organization on the vision now John Doerr one of the most famous venture capitalists in our industry likes to argue we need teams of missionaries not teams of mercenaries that's his way

of saying truly empowered product teams versus the old-style mercenary teams just build features on a road map but if we need missionaries the leaders need to preach they need to share that vision and convert the people to be true believers to be missionaries so evangelism is a huge responsibility in a large company I will also tell you it's a non-stock responsibility you let up on that at all and things start to go sideways all right I also want to make this real I'm gonna show you some people so that it's not just theoretical stacy is

actually a vet veterinarian she's a doctor to animals and she I met her because she was running as a practicing vet in a small town and she was very frustrated with the technology that they had and she kept thinking there must be some suppliers out there some vendors and and finally gave up and and said she wanted to create a startup to do it she felt like this is an important problem completely passionate about the purview was this is essential today to providing quality care for animals and she I watched her I watched her I

mean it's a start-up co-founder I watched her first learn product and she still does the product role then I watched her learn running managing engineers because effectively she was the engineering manager then I watched her learn marketing and I watched her learn sales I watched her learn bizdev fundraising she's now the CEO of a pretty amazing startup that is disrupting the space has thousands of passionate customers I was an advisor so I was able to watch her grow like this to me one of the big lessons about how is it this person who I mean

fundamentally smart person she was a that but no experience at all in the technology industry how is it that she was able to build this business so quickly so successfully I would argue it's because great product people at all levels they know what they don't know they know what they can't know they admit what they don't know it's just another way of saying they're humble they're not arrogant there is not an arrogant bone in her body she completely gets this so when you've got that mindset she just goes in she figures out what she needs

to know she learns it and she goes so that's what we're looking for in leaders and incredibly articulate advocate for the vision in an animal health care alright let's talk about the role of management I love this Steve Jobs quote because I think so many people missed the point of Steve Jobs they misunderstand his legacy they really especially product people they have this myth in their mind that he was like a product manager but he wasn't he was really good actually at looking at your prototypes and telling you all the reasons they were bad that's

great skill that's not I mean and yes he was also of amazing product visionary amazing and I think that's critical for that team of missionaries but I love this point and I think it gets right to the heart of what we need to talk about why do you hire these people you hire smart people not to tell them what to do by giving them a roadmap of features that mostly won't work what you do is you hire smart people and set them up so that they can show you what's possible that's really the key all

right so let's talk about the responsibilities of management there are three responsibilities of managers now I'm not talking about you know the CEO level I'm talking about the people managers especially and clearly not product managers I'm not talking about product marketing managers the managers of product managers of managers of designers and the managers of engineers because honestly the whole empowered thing team thing this is where it either happens or not right here these people managers and it's usually the not and you'll see why so there our three responsibilities of these managers the first one is

staffing it's kind of obvious their job is to put in place competent people that is their job now we'll talk about why they often fail at that but that is their job it is not hrs job HR is there to help which they sometimes do but it is not the job of the ha of HR it is the job of the hiring manager to source to go to things like this meet the right people to recruit to sell clothes and convince them of the vision and why they should come work here and then of course

once they get them they need to onboard them and they need to manage their performance way and that might include if they can't do the job ultimately moving them to somewhere they can succeed but staffing is critical the most critical responsibility is a second which is coaching and I I you know the more I progress in this business I realized I was so lucky in my career to have worked in some places it really is a form of a bubble but I the my first 10 years were at HP Labs HP had this amazing culture

back then of developing people it was just all about developing people and they would basically just Duke Eyre college hire so I was one of millions and they would develop them in I will tell you for my entire 10 years at HP and I was an engineer through engineering management there every single day I had at least one people manager that was dedicated to coaching me to get to the next level and I thought that's what everybody had and it wasn't until I you know left HP I wanted to do a start-up and of course

I didn't expect any anything like that and I started but then I went and met lots of other companies and I will tell you today it's the exception when I meet somebody that actually tells me they have somebody helping them get good at their job I will very often and I hate this you know there's such a problem in product managers in our industry whether they have the title product manager product owner they are not competent that's the problem and I asked them look okay I can see you'd have no idea how to do your

job so the question is who is helping you learn that and when the answer it which is all too often no nobody that's like okay now whose fault is that it's not the person's fault that's their managers fault the biggest if I had to point the finger anywhere it is the managers of product managers you know I only recently realize this but a decade ago Ben Horowitz wrote a piece for those that don't know you should read anything he writes Ben wrote a piece where he argued that the director of product management which is the

typical title for the person managing product managers he argues this is the single most non-executive position in an in a tech product company this is why he's like saying because look product teams are only as good as their product manager who's responsible for competent product managers the director of product so if they're not able to do this job if or they're not willing to do this job everything falls apart and the notion of empowered teams no chance so this is huge everybody needs that I I spend a lot of my time coaching but as an

advisor that's kind of what you're supposed to do but this is it just kills me I meet so many people that I think have the raw talent for success and they are given no guidance in how to do product right and the truth is they never seem good this is this is sad all right finally if you're using a system like ok are as I mentioned that there's objectives at the organizational level but there is also objectives at the team level this has to this is the part where managers really earn their money here they

have to go if we have you know a big marketplace with buyers and seller teams and search teams and Trust and safety teams things like that then the managers need to make sure each team has a set of relevant object tips the way it's supposed to work in the model is they're given the managers get together and decide which objectives will deliver on the organization's objectives and they'll go to a team like the search team and say hey we need you to you know improve the experience in this dimension or these are the three KPIs

but what can you do for this area maybe fix the onboarding experience reduce our churn rate whatever it is and the team then looks at that and proposes back key results and it's normal for there to be to some some give-and-take that managers might come and say well nobody's working on churn rate we need that which team can do something for churn rate but without that active management you can hopefully it's obvious there's no chance that your teams are going to produce the results that the organization was hoping for so I can tell you what

will happen next Baxter roadmaps alright so those are the three responsibilities of management here's another example of a great people manager Christian I met Christian because he was at a company I was advising in Richmond Virginia I've actually known him now for a decade and I have seen him absolutely do fantastic things at three different companies he is he is one of the best people managers I know and of course it's the way you tell that is the people they're just they're just fantastic in an area that in the u.s. is definitely not known as

the tech hub he can crank out absolutely you know Amazon caliber people and that is I was actually curious about how he got so good at developing people and I should also say he has turned into not he he will always be a great people developer leader but he has turned into a great head of product as well but I asked him like where did this come from and and Christian explained to me he wasn't actually from the US he came from Nigeria and in Nigeria he went to school with African kids from all over

Africa 80 different languages across the entire socio-economic spectrum and he said the main thing he learned in school was you got to work with people everything is all about that and you got to learn what they care about and you got to help and and it just made him fantastic at that so let's get back to this concept of trust because I was saying before for truly empowered teams you have to provide that context but then we need to provide we need to get the teams to the point where the leaders trust them that's really

the two big elements so let's get back to this idea of trust many of you probably know Stephen Covey he's a pretty famous thought leader on he wrote the seven Habits of Highly successful people but I believe he nails this it's my favorite most concise summary of what we're looking for which is trust really depends on two things competence and character now I'll talk about character next that's also a very important discussion but let's talk about competence because this is an area where I said you know I do think one of the big issues in

our industry is product managers that have not been trained to competence and mostly because their manager doesn't know their manager really isn't they've never done it before this is why my single main piece of advice to a new product manager is don't worry about the company find a high manager that you will work for that is been there done that at a good product company and it's committed to coaching you for the next year or two that's the best way to learn product the vast majority people that have never seen it so how do we

expect a director of product management that's never actually done product at a good place or seen it to be able to hire competent product managers and if you've ever heard the old adage A's hire A's and B's hire sees this is really playing out every day in our industry so you see the good ones just hire and develop great people and the other ones just they what do they do I'll tell you unfortunately what they do so they think they they all think they need a Google product manager and then they come back to me

and say well we can't afford them we can't attract them we can't can't even find them yeah because there's not enough right so and then what does he do they they kind of say well I found somebody who's really skilled but yeah we're we're gonna kind of overlook the fact that they're a bit of a jerk yeah see that all the time they lower their bar in other areas another problem is they think they need these ten Xers you might have heard that phrase and all right so let me just say we need to hire

competence now that's why the head of product management hires product managers the head of design hires designers and the head of engineering hires engineers they are supposed to know competence now I also want to be clear once in a while you you can hire not for confidence but for potential I'm actually a huge advocate of that I like some of the proudest aspects of my career are the people I have helped that gone on to do awesome things and that's hiring on potential but here's the thing you only hire on potential if an only if

the hiring manager is willing and able to coach them from potential to confidence unless they're willing and able to do that you're just hiring people that are not going to be able to do what you need to do and you'll just propagate this problem so competence is critical and yes there are lots of different views of what a product manager is even supposed to do you hear it heard several all I can tell you is they can't all be right of what you heard there were lots of them that were in conflict and that is

you need to you need to know what good is on product if you're trying to hire more people like that okay so let's now talk about character the New Zealand All Blacks some of you may know they're actually the most successful sports franchise across all countries all sports over a hundred years they're more successful than anybody else something like literally a hundred year win percentage of 77% phenomenal and the All Blacks have figured this out they have figured out the Empowered team thing and one of the critical things they figured out is it doesn't matter

how how talented skilled a player is if they're an that's what they figured out and they literally have a rule which is the no rule which is applied to both players and coaches because they're right it's toxic now this to me is a hugely important point because this this of course is in no I've never seen in company's HR guidelines have right no no I have but they should have that they should have that but you know what's worse this is by the way this is a deadly serious problem they have something in their guidelines

which says in our interview process we have to ensure cultural fits so I have come I hate those two words because you know what that really means when you talk to the interview team because they don't what the hell does that really mean cultural fit it is the most vague term but you know what it means in practice it's like okay we're on the interview team we work for this company so if we're sufficient we are cultural fit right so what it right that's what it means I'm my mom here so I'm part of it

so what does that mean well we need to find people that are like us seriously this is what happens they hire people like us for most of the companies I advise that's like white guys that went to a top university with an engineering degree and you know it's even worse by the way in the interview process they will have questions that are meant to determine how the candidate thinks about a problem and I'm like look you are institutionalizing hiring people just like you we don't want that we want people to think differently so I try

to get these organizations that tell me they can't find competent you know people or they can't tell they tell me they can't find these rock stars is what they complain oh you can you can instead of just this big can't you know pool of candidates and at first you shrink it way down to these perceived rock stars and then filter it even more to people that look like you instead of that you've got this big pool of people out there that are candidates filter it down to just the competent ones that's a lot bigger set

than the rock star ones the confident ones and then just figure filter out the just that which is not a big group and the rest are great candidates I see this everywhere the talent is there it's usually hiding in plain sight but you know we see organizations hire for they're looking like them acting like them talking like them went to the same schools it's it's deep problem but this is a much more effective policy all right so I just want to make sure and make this real I'm gonna highlight a few people from these are

people that are ordinary people all of the people I'm talking about are ordinary people that did amazing things because they were in an environment that let them do amazing things so a product manager a designer and an engineer Adi is actually a product manager and a team called a company called augury which is in tel-aviv and by the way a lot of the best teams I've ever met her in Israel I'm still trying to figure it out out my theory is because in Israel unlike most of the world at age 18 every man and woman

has to go serve in the military and Adi they the military actually looks at your high school grades and decides where they're gonna place you and they decided she was a fighter pilot so they sent her to flight training she did that for about a year and then they said okay your job now with their technology aptitudes here is to build flight simulation software so that the pilots can know what to do in emergency maneuver situations and the commanding officer explained to her and by the way you need to get these pilots that come in

twice a year you need to get these pilots to listen to you because it could literally save their life and he said look they're not gonna listen to you unless they trust you so in order to trust you you have to know your stuff and they have to like you and it's funny because she shared this with me and I was like that's really good training for a product manager that is like because we do that and that's what this is based on this trust they trust us because they trust us because we're competent and

we're not all right and Audrey is a designer and I you know real product designers I'm not talking somebody who's just graphic design a product designer is worth their weight in gold a competent product designer many of you I'm hoping work with them all the time they should sit right next to the product manager i-i've known Audrey for 20 years she worked for me a Netscape I just was blown away by her mind and then she was lucky cuz at Netscape we had a head of design which came from Apple he was original luminary there

and he just he just made her an awesome designer and and I have seen her over and over I don't know how many teams now just solve incredibly hard problems this is what designers really do they solve for constraints in fact the harder the problem the more they like it it's just yeah that's that I don't have time to really go into what great design is about but that's one of them right there and then Lindsay is an engineer the reason I like to highlight her is in an empowered team we do not want engineers

that just roll over and build whatever you tell them to build good Engineers on empowered team are like they like show me why we should build this they challenge the product manager you need engineers that will go toe-to-toe with the product manager and the CEO and Lindsay is fearless she guy I think that key mystery by the way she's now a top-rated answer on Stack Overflow she's an iOS app native developer she's done many good apps but you know she she had a rough childhood she was bullied a lot discriminated against the law fortunately for

her she um she liked the code she went and studied computer science and interestingly drama and went on to become a very competent developer for sure and she still pursues her acting and she's had a really pretty amazing career than that as well but this is what we're looking for out of our engineers and again these are just ordinary people that when you put them in the right environment they do amazing things I have seen this so many places Google for those that don't know they did research on this probably longer than any other company

I know and they they published fairly recently some of their most interesting findings you can google the topic project Aristotle and they shared that you know they thought if you've got a really important thing you take these rock stars from different parts of the company you put them together and a team it's gonna be amazing no not amazing at all it turns out the teams that consistently produce are the ones with the ordinary people that trust each other that have this relationship where they don't have an on the team poisoning the environment and making people

not feel safe or not feeling comfortable to do what they need to do so okay just to close because I am out of time I want to leave you with a test because I hope well I would love it if most of you were to tell me you are working in a truly empowered product team but I would not believe it either because I have talked to a lot of you including yesterday and it's just not that common and so if you're not sure there are a clear litmus test that is listed for quite a

while on this the first question is is the team staffed with competent people covering the range of skills we need for most product teams that's product design and engineering with access to data science or data analysts and user research but that is a typical team if you don't have that team you're basically being set up to fail if you're gonna be truly empowered so this is table stakes you have to have a competent team they usually the issue there with competence is our designer and our product manager usually because the managers of those areas have

not either hired to the competence or coached them to the competence the second test and this is clear this is the most well-defined litmus test for it but is the team actually assigned problems to solve versus just given features to build and that's often referred to as the difference between you know this is this is well that's actually the next point the difference they're held accountable to solving problems outcome rather than output we of course have to do output to get to those outcomes but what matters is the outcome the business results this is actually

you can see okay ours were intended for this to stop people chasing features and output and to start them focusing on problems to solve that's what the objectives are supposed to be and key results are supposed to be business results okay clear easy test you can decide if you're in that or not now if you are congratulations but if you're not I would argue it's a only a matter of time it's a race you either get to here or you will fall prey to somebody that knows what they're doing in the tech space so on

that cheery note I hope this was useful my email right there thank you very much [Applause]