When Things Go Wrong: The Real Benefit Of Empowered Teams

In product development, encountering unexpected results isn't just common – it's inevitable. The true measure of a team's effectiveness lies not in avoiding failures, but in how they respond when faced with disappointing data or failing features.

This is where empowered teams come to the fore. I've worked on so many project teams where people not only didn't care whether the product was effective, but didn't even know what effectiveness looked like. The sole focus was on building the output on time and on budget.

When you shift to empowered teams, outcomes matter more than outputs. After all, a Microsoft study found that up to 33% of features actually hurt the product. When faced with negative feedback on a feature, empowered teams immediately stop working on the feature until they can figure out what is happening. There is no point in throwing good money after bad.

That's really easy to write, but really hard to do in practice because we all fall in love with our ideas. I dive into this and more challenges in my article below.

This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

When Things Go Wrong: The Real Benefit Of Empowered Teams by Rory Madden
The real benefit of empowered teams lies in their capacity to respond quickly and effectively when things go wrong. This becomes a crucial competitive advantage, enabling organisations to learn and evolve rapidly.

Let's Stop Pretending That Managers And Executives Care About Productivity by Baldur Bjarnason
Tech debates often mask ideology as objectivity, eroding genuine dialogue. Recognising bias and encouraging honest discussion is key to building healthier teams, better decisions, and more transparent product cultures.

Product Direction

The Best Product Managers Optimize For Reversibility And Optionality by Maarten Dalmijn
High-performing product managers focus less on being right and more on learning fast. By treating each experiment as a chance to refine understanding, they build adaptability, reduce risk, and create compounding product insight.

How To Measure AI Adoption In A Product Team by Adam Faik
Measuring AI adoption goes beyond usage metrics. True success comes from tracking shifts in user behaviour, perceived value, and business impact by aligning adoption data with outcomes rather than feature counts.

Continuous Research

In User Research, Don’t Stop At “Yes” Or “No” by Pavel Samsonov
Not every project needs research, but skipping it blindly can be costly. The key is knowing when insights will change decisions; balancing risk, complexity, and confidence to decide if research is worth the investment.

The Impact Of Invisible Stigma On User Interviews: Lessons For UX Researchers by Laura Wissiak
Hidden stigmas such as disability, trauma, or social anxiety can quietly shape how participants share experiences. Recognising and accounting for these factors helps researchers create safer, more honest interview environments.

Continuous Design

Digital Twin Modeling: A Vision Of An AI Future With UX At The Helm by Kai Wong
Digital twins powered by AI are reshaping how designers model complex systems and user behaviours. By placing UX at the centre, teams can ensure these intelligent simulations remain transparent, ethical, and human-led.

How To Stand Out When Anyone Can Build Anything by Anton Sten
In a world where tools make creation easy, differentiation comes from taste, empathy, and intent. The future of design lies in curating meaning and human connection, not just producing more polished outputs.

Continuous Development

Claude Code: What It Is, How It's Different, And Why Non-technical People Should Use It by Teresa Torres
Claude Code blends natural language with programming logic, enabling developers to write, debug, and reason about code conversationally. Its design reflects a shift toward AI-assisted workflows that prioritise clarity and collaboration over syntax.

Why Your Legacy APIs Are A Roadblock For AI Agents by Saqib Jan
AI agents depend on structured, predictable interfaces, which legacy APIs often fail to provide. Modernising these foundations is essential for reliable automation, smoother orchestration, and effective AI-driven workflows.

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Get Ready For Some More Community Events!

Two More Events In Seattle And Washington, DC
This December

Two UXDX Community events are coming up in December in the US, and both are free to join.

Seattle – 4 December
We’re closing the year with an evening of insight and innovation in Seattle. Xuan Zheng from Instacart will unpack Practical Eye Tracking for Product Teams, showing how to translate gaze data into real design improvements. Then, Sayena Majlesein from Microsoft explores AI-Driven Process Change in UX, how automation and generative tools are transforming workflows and creativity at scale.

Washington, DC – 13 December
In DC, we’ll dive into agility, product evolution, and influence. Andrew Park from Edensoft Labs shares how AI is enabling cross-functional individuals to move faster and smarter, while Vlad Korobov from Antithesis reveals what happens when an internal tool becomes a customer-facing product. Finally, Amberly Miller from Prudential closes with The Art of Influence, offering strategies to persuade stakeholders and drive action from research insights.

Both events are free to attend, offering practical lessons, real-world examples, and the chance to connect with your local product, UX, and engineering community. Secure your spot now here.

Partner highlight: Congrats to Great Question on securing $13M in Series A funding to Accelerate Research Democratization for Enterprises. This is a strong signal of continued growth and innovation in the research ops space.

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Video Of The Week
From IT-Driven to Product-Led:
Bridging Design, Product, and IT at Scale

What happens when 60,000 people try to build as one organisation? At ING, the answer wasn’t more governance. It was empathy, product thinking, and radical clarity. In this session from UXDX EMEA 2025, Steven Roest (Lead Platform Experience, ING) shares how treating internal platforms like products unlocked alignment between design, product, and IT. See how Steven’s team defined a shared language for “product” with 33 measurable criteria across six convictions, stood up a product operating model with a four-person “Leadership Trinity,” and turned Obeya rooms into a fast lane from strategy to execution.

Learn the practical OKR tactics that avoid cascade theatre, how to craft audience-ready roadmaps at enterprise scale, and why designers are the bridge, not the afterthought, in complex systems:

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question: How does your organisation value cross-functional skills in promotions?

Last week’s poll asked how organisations value cross-functional skills when it comes to promotions, and the results show a striking split. While 21% say cross-functional ability is a key promotion criterion, only 13% see it as a meaningful consideration. The majority, however, report that promotions favour functional expertise alone (33%) or that it’s entirely unclear how these skills are valued (33%).

This uncertainty says a lot about where teams are today. We keep talking about collaboration, autonomy, and alignment, yet many promotion frameworks still reward narrow, siloed expertise. If you want teams to think beyond their lane, your career paths need to reflect that. Otherwise, cross-functional work becomes “extra effort” rather than recognised impact.

The companies that make real progress are the ones that explicitly reward people who can think across design, engineering, product, and research. Those are the skills that remove blockers, improve flow, and ultimately deliver better outcomes. If organisations want cross-functional teams to work, they need cross-functional growth paths to match.