EMPOWERED. Marty Cagan
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Название: EMPOWERED
Автор: Marty Cagan
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Экономика
isbn: 9781119691327
isbn:
The Technology Leader
One very common manifestation of how a company views the role of technology is whether the engineers building the company's products report up to a CIO (chief information officer)/head of IT, or whether they report up to a CTO (chief technology officer)/head of engineering.
This may seem like a minor issue, but I've come to realize it's a much more significant impediment to transformation than most companies realize.
With the big caveat that each individual CIO is a unique person, I share this not as an absolute, but as something to seriously and honestly consider. Also, it is important to realize that the core CIO job (managing the IT function) is both important and difficult.
But here's the problem: the CIO truly is there to serve the business.
The very traits that make for a strong CIO can easily end up undermining the company's attempts to transform.
That's my theory for why I've found it very difficult to get CIOs—even strong CIOs—to appreciate, much less adopt, the mindset, methods, and practices of product engineering organizations.
What's especially problematic is that product engineers—the type the future of your company depends on—are rarely willing to work for a CIO because they know this difference in mindset is extremely important.
Engineers in a CIO's organization play a very different role than engineers in a CTO's organization. It's the difference between feature teams and empowered product teams.
In some cases, I've encouraged the CIO to retitle as CTO (because I believed the person was up to the challenges of this much larger role), and in other cases I've strongly encouraged the CEO to hire a true CTO to lead product engineering.
Notes
1 1 https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world/.
2 2 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers.
3 3 Bob Lutz, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013).
CHAPTER 3
Strong Product Leadership
The heart of this book is the importance of strong product leadership.
To be clear, by “product leadership” I mean the leaders and managers of product management, the leaders and managers of product design,1 and the leaders and managers of engineering.
For this discussion, I will distinguish between leaders and managers. Certainly, many leaders are also managers, and many managers are also leaders, but even if both roles are covered by the same person, there are different responsibilities.
Overall, we look to leadership for inspiration and we look to management for execution.
The Role of Leadership—Inspiration
The subject of strong leadership, is of course, a major topic, but it is a clear and visible difference between strong product companies and most companies.
The purpose of strong leadership is to inspire and motivate the organization.
If product teams are to be empowered to make good decisions, they need to have the strategic context necessary to make those decisions.
Part of the strategic context comes from the senior leaders of the company, such as the purpose of the business (the mission) and critical business objectives, but the product leadership has four major explicit responsibilities:
Product Vision and Principles
The product vision describes the future we are trying to create and, most important, how it improves the lives of our customers.
It is usually between 3 and 10 years out. The product vision serves as the shared goal for the product organization.
There may be any number of cross‐functional, empowered product teams—ranging from a few in a startup, to hundreds in a large enterprise—but they all need to head in the same direction and contribute in their own way to solving the larger problem.
Some companies refer to the product vision as their “North Star”—in the sense that no matter what product team you're on, and whatever specific problem you're trying to solve, you can all see and follow the North Star. You always know how your piece contributes to the more meaningful whole.
More generally, the product vision is what keeps us inspired and excited to come to work each day—month after month, year after year.
It is worth noting that the product vision is typically the single most powerful recruiting tool for strong product people.
Product principles complement the product vision by speaking to the nature of the products that your organization believes it needs to produce. The principles reflect the values of the organization, and also some strategic decisions that help the teams make the right decisions when faced with difficult trade‐offs.
Team Topology
The “team topology” refers to how we break up the work among different product teams to best enable them to do great work. This includes the structure and scope of teams, and their relationship to one another.
Product Strategy
The product strategy describes how we plan to accomplish the product vision, while meeting the needs of the business as we go. The strategy derives from focus, then leverages insights, converts these insights into action, and finally manages the work through to completion.
Product Evangelism
Another critical role of leaders is communicating the product vision, principles, and product strategy—both to the internal product organization, and also across the company more broadly.
John Doerr, the famous venture capitalist, likes to explain that “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.”
If we want teams of missionaries, it's essential that every person in the organization understands and is convinced—they need to be true believers.
This requires an ongoing crusade of evangelizing—in recruiting, onboarding, weekly 1:1 coaching, all‐hands meetings, team СКАЧАТЬ