Your company says it has empowered product teams. The org chart has squads. There are product managers, designers, and engineers sitting together. But when it comes time to decide what to build, the roadmap arrives from the executive team fully formed. Engineers get tickets. Designers get specs. The PM's job is to manage the queue and keep stakeholders updated. That is not an empowered team. That is a feature factory with a modern org chart.
Marty Cagan, who has spent decades coaching product organisations at companies like Google and Amazon, draws a sharp line between empowered teams and what he calls 'feature teams.' The difference is not structure. It is authority. Empowered teams have the authority to discover the right solutions to customer problems. Feature teams are handed solutions and asked to deliver them.
The Core Idea
An empowered team has three capabilities that work together. First, discovery authority: the team decides which problems to solve, informed by strategy but not dictated by stakeholders. Second, delivery authority: the team decides how to build the solution, not just executes tickets handed to them. Third, learning capability: the team can get prototypes and experiments in front of real users to validate assumptions before committing to full builds.