There's a critical misconception I'm seeing in a lot of product circles around empowerment. Many leaders and teams struggle to empower their teams and end up experiencing chaos as a byproduct. Here's the thing: empowerment without structure, enablement, guidance, and support can lead to disorganization, misalignment, and frustration. On the other hand, strong enablement, coaching, and support can create extremely high-performing teams.
Empowerment is often viewed as simply "letting people do what they think is best," but this interpretation is incomplete and dangerous for an organization. True empowerment comes when individuals or teams have the tools, knowledge, support, and direction to make effective decisions and take meaningful action. Without these foundations, empowerment risks devolving into chaos, inefficiency, team doubt, or burnout.
Empowerment is meaningless if teams lack access to what they need to succeed. Enablement involves providing:
ℹ️ Important note: Clarity and alignment come about best through collaboration. If you can build alignment and clarity with your team instead of trying to communicate it to them, you will be much more successful.
Example: A Product Manager can only feel empowered to prioritize effectively if they have access to user research, analytics, and frameworks for decision-making.
Empowerment is not about leaving teams to figure it out alone. It thrives in an environment where leaders:
Example: A PX Designer empowered to lead discovery efforts will still need a leader to review their process, validate findings, and refine approaches over time.
Empowerment without clarity can lead to scattered priorities, wasted effort, and misalignment. In other words, chaos!
Teams need:
Example: Teams told to "innovate" without clear direction may chase ideas that don't align with company goals, wasting resources. I'd be surprised if you haven't seen this happen in your career. Meanwhile, a goal like "reduce onboarding friction for employers by 20%" focuses their efforts meaningfully.
Empowerment works best when paired with accountability. Teams need:
This implies robust data tools, access to key data, and data-driven maturity within the organization.
Example: A team empowered to "increase customer engagement" must also track engagement metrics, report findings, and adjust their approach as they learn.
Define the "what" (desired outcomes) and the "why" (strategic goals), but leave space for teams to figure out the "how."
Build confidence by ensuring teams have the necessary skills to succeed.
This can be general and broad sweeping: I recommend every PM, PMM, PX, or Eng lead receives facilitation training, for example, because it helps all of them.
For leaders themselves: I also recommend every people leader undergo Situational Leadership training so they better understand when to use what kind of leadership style to help their people best.
Or function-specific: I recommend once a year intensive training to help each function upskill, as well as ongoing casual training throughout the year for continued support and habitualization of skills.
It can be internal or external: Spend time with your teams and teach them. It's fun and rewarding to see them grow. Also, send or enroll them in courses, workshops, and conferences.
Example: Provide workshops on prioritization frameworks, usability testing, or customer journey mapping to budding teams to help cover various use cases and get a quick ROI.
Create toolkits, templates, and processes to reduce ambiguity in daily work. Repeatable tasks and processes are opportunities to create resources or automate to help your teams.
Example: Creating base usability test scripts or reach-out emails for teams that do a lot of usability testing can help streamline the work, get to value faster, maintain a cohesive voice, reduce the risk of unintentional variance, and help teams focus on the permutative parts that matter.
Smash silos between teams and increase communication and collateral availability. Regularly share market insights, user research, and competitive analysis to help teams make informed decisions.
Example: Building a strong feedback loop between a customer care team and a product team can help feed the product team opportunities for further product discovery and improvement while also helping reduce customer care volume.
Empower teams to own their decisions while holding them accountable for their impact.
Example: A team tackling onboarding friction should have clear KPIs, autonomy in their approach, and regular checkpoints to align with leadership.
Offer guidance and mentorship rather than prescriptive solutions.
Example: Help a team refine their proposed solution by asking questions rather than dictating changes. Celebrate them when they reach an impact, and support them when they fail.
One of the most significant pieces of product operations advice I can give is that many enablement, support, and empowerment efforts will fail if you don't find a way to operationalize them effectively. One of the most effective ways we operationalize is through rituals.
ℹ️ Rituals are events with a narrow focus, with generally the same people each time, that happen regularly. Rituals should also attempt to be self-referential and introspective, iterating on themselves to improve continually.
This is not about creating more meetings. In fact, in many cases, the proper rituals can replace or evolve from existing meetings. For example, I have helped teams that started with two-hour-long grooming sessions mature and only need half an hour. This isn't because they're no longer grooming– in fact, they're still getting together almost the same amount of time–instead, they're displacing more of that time each week to run workshops, ideate, and do discovery together. They effectively increase so much of their shared context that grooming is now a breeze. Plus, the benefits of those other rituals transfer into a wider variety of impacts.
Empowerment is not about removing all guardrails; it’s about giving teams the confidence and clarity to thrive within meaningful boundaries. Empowerment creates a high-performing, innovative team when paired with enablement, coaching, and clear objectives. Without these elements, it risks becoming unproductive or even counterproductive.
By focusing on the ecosystem around empowerment, leaders can create a culture where teams are not just empowered but are also enabled and equipped to succeed.