Empowered

A book review.

Empowered

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

by Marty Cagan, Chris Jones

published: 2020.12.03

ISBN: 9781119691297

genre: Computer Technology

reviewed:2022.07.22

👍🏼 recommended

This is a book explaining how to make the most of an "empowered" software delivery team; hence the name. It assumes a corporate environment in which a team of employees delivers a software product, and that there is a "product owner" who decides the long term trajectory for that business application. It also requires that the product owner is organizationally in the same structure as the software delivery team. In fact, in a footnote in the introduction it explains that if the product owner is outside the structure where the software delivery team exists, then what the software team is doing is taking owners from a client and therefore not "empowered" and therefor why is the reader reading any further.

This was, of course, as with every environment I've ever seen or discussed with my peers in the industry, how we are organized. I took the warning to heart and read through the first half of the book, which as the first half of books everywhere does, did an excellent job of describing common pitfalls (into which we had fallen). In the second half, which followed the assumed model I mentioned above, it described things that were were simply unable to execute. So I set it aside. Good luck to whoever has product owners inside the IT organization, I'd love to hear how that divorce from business decision makers is going.

P.S. Happy Pi Approximation Day, all of my zero readers!

Bonus in 2025: We remain unable to do this because our organization hasn't changed (and likely won't).