Agile Atelier listeners! Welcome to a very special episode today, where I talk to Marty Cagan about Empowered Engineers on Product Teams. Widely recognized as the primary thought leader for technology product management, Marty is the founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG). He served as an executive responsible for defining and building products for some of the most successful companies in the world, including Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, and eBay. He is also the best-selling author of the books Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love and Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products.
Marty and I kick off this episode by talking about the difference between product teams and feature teams to set the context. We then talk about the roles of engineers and Product Managers/Owners in those different teams, what empowered engineers do differently and some underlying principles of modern tech products. Marty then touches on some techniques that he has used as well as whose role it is to empower teams. Towards the end of the episode, we discuss the 3 step process to move from feature teams to product teams, whether true product teams can exist within scaling frameworks, and how team members can engage in product strategy.
If you’re working in a tech product company, you don’t want to miss this one, folks. You can connect with Marty on LinkedIn, Twitter and his SVPG blog. If you’d like to read more on this topic, you can pre-order Marty’s new book, Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products, on Amazon.
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The little secret in tech product is the single best source of innovation is not your customers, it’s not your CEOs, it’s not your executives, and it’s also not your product manager or designers. It’s typically the [software] engineers; this is true only when you share with your [software] engineers what your pain is, rather than just say ‘here’s what you need to build’.
MARTY CAGAN ON THE AGILE ATELIER PODCAST
Rahul Bhattacharya 
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