My Blueprint for Building Empowered Teams - 10 Core Principles.

Or, in simple words, My Journey to Un-Suck Product Leadership

Chapter 1: Before we start.

Almost every leader I speak with (or a job post I go over) mentions ‘Empowered Teams.’ Yet, only a handful can truly articulate what that really means. And, more importantly, how to build and nurture an empowered culture. Maybe Marty Cagan (the one and only) did too good of a job popularizing the term empowered. 🤣

From my experience, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to building empowered teams. It’s about finding what works for you and your team. But what really matters are a few core principles that I observed over and over again, which are the DNA 🧬 building blocks of any empowered team.

I am aware that there’s so much AMAZING literature on how to lead down and drive empowerment. Hence, in this write-up, I will do my best to share my personal take on those principles based on my own experience. So no, this write-up is definitely not the Empowered book or other literature recap❗

I will share my story and focus on the approach I developed after years of trial and error and (embarrassing) mistakes. I am not a leadership guru, and I am still only a few-plus years into my leadership journey. Nevertheless, I hope this article helps you ‘un-suck’ at leading down, even if just a little. 😉

Chapter 2: My leadership journey.

The early days

I started leading product teams in 2017 when I did the unthinkable and relocated to Vietnam 🇻🇳 to join Sentifi, a Swiss fintech startup. I led a team of two PMs, and oh boy, did I suck.

In hindsight, it makes sense. The only thing I really knew how to do well was being an individual contributor. Plus, I had no mentors to guide me. And back then, the product community was almost nonexistent (Lenny’s newsletter wasn’t even a thing yet). 😓 To top it off, I didn’t have the self-awareness to know what I needed to improve.

To be honest, my first taste of ‘Leadership’ wasn’t great. Vickie King (my Sentifi manager), I’ll be forever grateful for the Sentifi opportunity, but seriously, what were you thinking? 🤣

Watching and learning.

Everything changed when I joined Ansarada, an Australian startup (now publicly listed). Ansarada embraced the Atlassian way, and I had a front-row seat to observe and learn firsthand. For some of you, working in an empowered culture might seem obvious, but for me, it was a revelation and a breath of fresh air. It made me feel safe, motivated, inspired, and genuinely happy. ❤️

Looking back, here are a few Ansarada culture takeaways I want to celebrate:

1. Leadership Development.
   Managers mentored their IC reports (Individual contributors) using ‘The 5 Levels of Leadership’ (by John C. Maxwell) frameworks, helping non-managers groom their leadership skills.

2. Radical Candor.
   Managers helped nurture feedback culture through ‘Radical Candor’ (by Kim Scott) principles, helping everyone in the company on all levels to give and receive feedback effectively.

3. Career Growth.
   Managers actively invested in the career development of their ICs, guiding them to uncover what they genuinely care about and integrate that passion into their day-to-day work.

4. Personal Growth.
   Managers promoted personal development through cross-company challenges, such as reading ten books in ten months and fostering continuous learning.

5. Collaboration & Values.
   Managers built cross-functional teams across Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD), facilitated hackathons and design sprints, and ensured Ansarada’s values - Care, Curiosity, Courage, and Change - were genuinely embodied, not just slogans on the wall.

Making an impact.

Fueled by the Ansarada way, I joined Miro’s Growth Product (PLG) team. At Miro, I led a team of four senior and lead PMs. This time, I had the battle scars and an internal compass guiding me on my mission: building empowered teams that could consistently and sustainably deliver outsized impact. And it worked. 😎

Before we dive into my ten principles for building empowered teams, here is a moment of vulnerability.

Even (and especially) at Miro, I made mistakes. However, thanks to Miro’s fast feedback loop culture, I was able to turn those mistakes into valuable lessons. ☝️

Here are a few leadership mistakes I made along the way: 🙃

1. I tried to be too nice and avoided giving timely, tough feedback.

2. I set non-ambitious goals because I was worried about being disliked by the team.

3. I didn’t take full responsibility for the team’s negative outcomes.

4. I struggled to find the right balance between letting go and taking control.

5. I didn’t lead by example on the back-to-office policy I was enforcing.

Chapter 3: The Blueprint

After leaving Miro, I took time to reflect on my journey and the lessons I had learned. As part of this self-awareness exercise, I crafted a list of principles that helped me build a winning team throughout my journey. I believe these principles form the DNA building blocks of any empowered team.

1. End-to-end ownership. ➡️
   I trust and expect the team to do whatever it takes to get the job done. This trust means the team will make decisions, raise flags, and ask for feedback when needed. As a manager, your role is to support them but not to become a bottleneck!

2. Clarity on what impact is (and isn’t). 💪
   If the team doesn’t understand what impact truly means, how can they succeed? Not everything qualifies as impact. For example, delivery isn’t impact, and effort alone isn’t impact. But moving a key metric or simplifying and improving a process - now that is impact.

3. Speed is everything. 🏃
   Speed in decision-making, execution, and learning is the most powerful enabler for reducing ambiguity, cutting losses early, and doubling down on winners. It’s how you outpace the competition and win the market. As a manager, it’s your responsibility to ensure that speed isn’t just acknowledged by your team but fully embraced and embedded in their day-to-day work. Remember, the biggest enemy of speed is perfection. If you chase perfection, you’ll lose. Speed and perfection simply don’t coexist. My own unhealthy perfectionism has been one of my biggest struggles throughout my entire career.

4. Tailor your communication to the audience. 📢
   I tailor communication expectations to each team member because everyone is different, and so are their communication preferences: F2F vs. online, sync vs. async, weekly vs. daily, or pull (asking) vs. push (sending summaries). For communication to be effective, it must be adapted to fit the audience.

5. Feedback is your API to communicate with empowered teams. 🗣️
   This one is crucial, and there are a few prerequisites to ensuring the feedback loop works:

   1. You won’t achieve frequent and meaningful feedback if you haven’t built trust - no trust, no feedback.

   2. Trust won’t happen if you haven’t built a relationship with your team members - no relationship, no trust.

   Think about it, feedback is a two-way street. As a manager, you must encourage your direct reports to provide feedback to you. But they won’t share their honest feedback unless you trust each other.

6. Humility and vulnerability will take you far. ❤️
   When you’re winning, give credit to your team. If you don’t know something, admit it. And if you’re wrong (which happens often), just own it. Empowered teams don’t follow psychopathic leaders. Simply put, don’t be an asshole - whether in the good times or the bad.

7. Define the managers’ accountability. 🧐
   Any team outcome, for better or worse, is the manager’s accountability. Understanding this helps the team recognize why it’s crucial to never let the manager be surprised and align on the problems the team is solving. The manager’s role is to provide feedback, stress-test hypotheses, and risks, and ask the right questions. Additionally, it’s the manager’s accountability to nurture a safe environment where learnings are celebrated, and teams aren’t afraid of failure.

8. Invest in your team’s career development. 💼
   Without actively investing in career development, retaining top performers and helping them do their best work is impossible. As a manager, it’s crucial to understand what motivates your direct reports, their interests, and career aspirations, then tailor their career paths within the company accordingly. This often requires thinking outside the box, as many organizations lack flexibility and resist change. Simply put, you want your team to work on what they’re truly passionate about; it’s one of the prerequisites to achieving a 10X impact.

9. Mentoring is an ongoing engagement. 🌱
   Mentoring focuses on turning your direct report’s strengths into superpowers, improving their weaknesses, and equipping them with the tools to observe and adjust their behaviors. It’s not a task reserved for quarterly performance reviews but an ongoing engagement. Additionally, you may not always be the best fit to mentor your direct report on specific hard or soft skills; in such cases, you can still support them by connecting them with another mentor, either within the company or externally.

10. Keep the motivation high. 🔥
    Dopamine-fueled teams, driven by the pursuit of ambitious achievements, are the ones that deliver 10X results. As a manager, your mission is to cultivate this dopamine-driven motivation (something that can’t be faked). You do this by setting bold, moonshot goals and pushing the team beyond comfortable, optimizations thinking. However, these ambitious goals won’t be achieved unless you first reduce execution friction (by applying principles 1 to 6) and create a safe environment (by implementing principles 7 to 9).

Chapter 4: The Afterthought

As I mentioned earlier, the manager’s job is to ensure teams can consistently and sustainably achieve outsized impact, and everything we’ve discussed so far leads to this goal. 🚀

1. If you find the principles I’ve outlined valuable, use them to build empowering relationships with your team. The first step? Share these principles with your team and ask for their feedback.

2. Additionally, you can apply these principles to improve your leading-up game; by simply reversing them. Leading up and leading down are mirror practices. 🪞

3. And one last thing. While this post is based on my experience leading product teams, I’m confident that many of these insights can also be applied to leading non-product teams, such as engineering and design.