Recently I encountered a company fully invested in Empowered Product Teams (EPT’s). You know, the work that Marty Cagan and SVPG have been evangelizing, training, and consulting on. It’s essentially the culmination of the work that Marty shared in his Empowered book.
Full disclosure, I’ve not studied Marty’s work in excruciating detail. I’ve read it, and I largely agree with his perspectives on modern-day product development team dynamics that lead to success. However, I’m not SVPG trained nor an expert in the approaches.
But that being said, the company I ran into illustrated a problem with EPT’s that I want to share so that others might reconsider the model and effectively implement it in the real world.
So, what did the company do? They—
Dutifully brought in SVPG several times for training around Empowered Product Team dynamics.
Their leadership team became incredibly excited about (perky, enamored by, and bought into) EPT and used it as a model to augment/replace their existing agile transformation strategies.
They enthusiastically converted all of their development teams to EPT’s. No matter what their contexts or work scope. That included de-emphasizing Scrum.
Part of this evolution was to increase the role of the Product Managers to be more team leaders/managers and to implement the role of Delivery Manager across teams. Consider the DM to be the Product Manager or Project Manager.
They immediately began expecting higher-performance results from the teams (problem-solving, ideation, creativity, and of course, productivity – outcomes).
That all being said, the role of the functional managers didn’t change. They still held a large command-and-control posture with the teams. In other words, while every leader recited those magical words “Empowered Product Team,” their behaviors belied the empowerment piece.
As best I could tell, the role of managers and leaders in the organization hadn’t changed. There was no real retraining, coaching, or evolution at this level organizationally. It was management and leadership business as usual.
And finally, all the managers are complaining that, while they’ve empowered the teams, they’re not getting the results they were hoping for (promised) by the EPT model. And they’re doubling down on it a bit by placing more and more downward pressure on the teams.
The new Spotify model?
As an aside, I’m almost thinking that empowered product teams might be the new Spotify model. It’s a sexy concept that, if adopted, will move an organization from its current as-is state to a new nirvana-based agile delivery state. Simply by “installing” EPT’s.
But I digress.
The Problem
The point was that ALL of the efforts that the organization made to change the structure into EPT’s was not having any real positive impact.
Imagine that.
Just saying you’re empowering the teams or creating EPT’s structurally doesn’t mean a darn thing if you don’t change the organizational culture and the leadership mindsets.
Words are cheap and easy. While behavioral and cultural changes, true changes, are much harder.
And the SVPG folks seem to be selling a concept at the team level but not doing a good job explaining, training, or coaching the requisite cultural changes.
Wrapping Up
This example of EPT’s reminded me of how folks often implemented Spotify. Or how they often implement SAFe or any other agile framework or model.
They seem to implement it as a model, package, or framework that can be purchased and simply installed. And often, that installation is teams-ward rather than whole organizational or leadership-driven.
It’s sad because I believe Marty’s EPT’s have some incredibly valuable ideas and merit. Perhaps in future revisions, they’ll place more emphasis on creating the environment for successful EPT’s before they push or encourage, or install the EPT’s themselves. Or come up with some readiness criteria that clients must meet to eliminate silver bullet thinking?
Anyway, food for thought as I’m empowered to end this article.
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.