Empowered

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

By: Marty Cagan, Chris Jones

Narrated by: Marty Cagan

Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation?

Most people think it's because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products.

As legendary Silicon Valley coach - and coach to the founders of several of today's leading tech companies - Bill Campbell said, "Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge". The goal of Empowered is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you'll need to create just such an environment.

A natural companion to the best seller Inspired, Empowered tackles head-on the reason why most companies fail to truly leverage the potential of their people to innovate: product leadership.

©2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (P)2020 Gildan Media

A must read to any leader

Lots of insights and inspiration. A must read fir any leader. Great to have Marty Cagan reading it

Every CEO, product and engineering leaders should read this book.

I learned greatly from Empowered, it gives you another perspective on how to build the right team topology to build the right product, and trust your team by empowering them to leverage what you hired them to do, put their brain into doing great things. Easy to listen to the audio book and retain.
However, there is quite a bit of repetition that makes it a bit heavy and longer than it should be.

Great book after inspired

Another great book of Marty Cagan, i strongly recommend to read Inspired at first, both book are great

Very good content, sometimes it feels it could have been less words

Some topics/chapters feel like fillers, I understand that the summary is not enough to truly have everyone understand the concepts.

A good listen if you want to learn about Product Management. Just a few caveat.

The most important thing I feel I need to say about this book is that, the author and narrator Mr. M. Cagan is fixed to refer to all people in his narrative as "her" or "she". It is not a good look.

Great book for both Product and Engineering leaders, full of useful advices.

A great collection of guidelines on how to run a successful tech business based on a good amount of experience.

Great read, even as a PMM

Good case studies. Wish there were more examples of what bad looks like though (and how to fix it)

Great but too long to make the point

I really enjoyed the content although I believe the book could’ve been 40% shorter - there are quite many repetitive thoughts / going into too basic things

A must read for Product People. Specially software oriented.

After years, I finally find a single source that unites what I would call: Product organization best practices.
In my 10 years in product, I have worked in 2 companies that were close to having Empowered teams but sadly went back to command and control.
I can vouch for this book.
The audiobook will be handy for Product Managers, Product Owners, Product Designers, Tech leads and Managers of Product roles.
The author provides both "hands on" tips on how to manage product teams and some specific product roles and also a very business organization broad perspective.
Very valuable for the content.
It's read by the author, which helps a lot because of the emotional emphasis on his tone.
I really liked how chapters were organized and the length of each, this makes it very useful for future occasions you want to re-read.
The only negative thing of the book is how mucho some phrases get repeted too many times. eg. 'Create products that Users love, yet work for the company."

Great follow-up to Inspired!

Marty does a great job narrating and both he and and Chris knock it out of the park with this book! I can’t wait to apply all of the leadership lessons. For anyone who has read or listened to Inspired, this is a MUST for ongoing product management career development.