Читать книгу EMPOWERED - Marty Cagan - Страница 14

In most companies, the technology teams are not empowered product teams, they are what I call here feature teams.

Feature teams look superficially like a product team. They are cross‐functional, with a product manager, a product designer, and some number of engineers. The difference is that they are all about implementing features and projects (output), and as such are not empowered or held accountable to results.

The feature teams get to work first designing the features on the roadmap, maybe doing a little usability testing, and then proceeding to building, QA testing, and deploying the features (known as delivery).

These feature teams sometimes claim they're doing some product discovery, but they rarely are. They've already been told what the solution should be; they're not empowered to go figure out the solution themselves. They're just there to design and then code.

In these feature teams, there is usually a person with the product manager title, but they are mainly doing project management. They are there to ensure the features get designed and delivered. Necessary perhaps, but this is not product management.

Because the teams are provided, or are pressed to provide, roadmaps of features and projects, the focus of the team is delivery—delivery of these features. And features are output. Even if someone were to complain of lack of business results, who would you hold accountable?

In contrast, in strong product companies, teams are instead given problems to solve, rather than features to build, and most important, they are empowered to solve those problems in the best way they see fit. And they are then held accountable to the results.

In the empowered product team model, the product manager has a clear responsibility, which is to ensure that the solutions are valuable (our customers will buy the product and/or choose to use it), and viable (it will meet the needs of the business). Together with a product designer who is responsible for ensuring the solution is usable, and a tech lead who is responsible for ensuring the solution is feasible, the team is able to collaborate to address this full range of risks (value, viability, usability, and feasibility). Together, they own the problem and are responsible and accountable for the results.²

So, to summarize feature teams vs. empowered product teams:

Feature teams are cross‐functional (a product manager doing mainly project management, a product designer, plus some engineers), and assigned features and projects to build rather than problems to solve, and as such they are all about output and not business results.

Empowered product teams are also cross‐functional (a product manager, a product designer, and engineers), but in contrast to feature teams, they are assigned problems to solve, and are then empowered to come up with solutions that work—measured by outcome—and held accountable to results.³