Empowered on Feature Teams

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.⊕ (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 1)

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.⊕ (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 1)