The Risk Of NOT Empowering Teams

When products fail to deliver expected business value, most organisations respond by tightening control through more detailed business cases, approval layers, and coordinators.

This approach ignores two fundamental market realities:

1. We don't fully understand what customers want, and

2. We cannot effectively manage dependencies at scale.

We are experts, so we think customers will love our ideas - but the data says otherwise. And as the company grows larger, and development speeds slow down, we introduce new coordination roles - project managers, program managers, scrum masters.

But our fixes only make the problems worse. We cannot manage our way out of exponentially increasing dependencies. Organizations caught in this cycle face declining product performance as features fall short with customers. Market share erodes as more agile competitors respond faster to customer needs, while development costs spiral upward.

Empowered teams offer a better approach because they acknowledge the reality of modern software development. They solve the uncertainty problem through outcome focus, short cycles, and iteration. And they solve the dependency problem through intentional dependency removal instead of management.

This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

The Risk Of NOT Empowering Teams by Rory Madden
Empowering teams is risky, but that doesn't mean that you should abandon the effort because the risk of not empowering teams is worse!

Why Labeling Relationships Is So Important by John Cutler
Labeling the relationships between goals, initiatives, teams, and data turns messy org charts into real operating maps, surfacing hidden assumptions so leaders can design strategy, portfolios, and learning loops that match how work actually happens.

Product Direction