How do organizations truly foster a culture that drives innovation and delivers outstanding digital products? And what distinguishes truly empowered teams from those simply going through the motions?

Organizational culture isn’t merely what you say or think; it’s what you do. It’s defined by a group’s collective habits and patterns. As a company grows, maintaining an aspirational culture becomes exponentially challenging, requiring continuous effort with each new employee cohort.

Companies that successfully build and deliver exceptional digital products exhibit several key traits in their product culture:

  • Technology as an Asset Strong product cultures are founded on the belief that technology is a force multiplier and a core asset, regardless of the industry. In contrast, organizations with weak product cultures often view technology as an expense or outsource it, which ironically can lead to higher spending. A strong culture actively leverages technology to drive innovation that might have been impossible just a few years prior.

  • Strong Product Leadership Product leadership isn’t confined to product management teams; it encompasses all leaders entrusted with building and delivering products, including product managers, designers, and technical leaders. In strong product organizations, leaders lead the way in problem definition and explore how previously impossible technology can be utilized. They are not merely “delivery wings” or order-takers for “business” demands; instead, they focus on shaping the product by aligning technical and product roadmaps. These leaders build trust with peers and teams through their actions, recognizing that trust is built on competence, honesty/integrity, and benevolence. They are responsible for staffing, coaching, nurturing talent, and addressing underperformance.

  • Empowered Product Teams A hallmark of strong product culture is truly empowered product teams, which stand in stark contrast to what are often termed “Feature Teams”.

    • Feature Teams are cross-functional but primarily own delivery rather than problem definition. They operate from a backlog, breaking down tasks and releasing features, often becoming “feature factories” focused on churning out products and satisfying senior leaders based on metrics like “story points delivered” instead of actual customer traction.
    • Empowered Teams are genuinely given the autonomy to explore both the problem and the solution. They diligently validate whether a problem is real and impactful for customer needs, by placing the customer at the center of their universe. They are skilled at extracting the nuanced, unmet needs of customers. This involves actively engaging in product discovery, with engineers also encouraged to participate in the customer needs discovery process.
    • These teams effectively manage stakeholders, viewing them as partners while dispassionately evaluating requests. For initiatives they pursue, empowered teams clearly identify target customers, conduct interviews, establish success measures, and explicitly state and quickly validate their assumptions. This proactive validation helps avoid costly mistakes, as the most expensive way to validate an intuition or assumption is by building the product first.
    • Ultimately, empowered teams are accountable for customer value and business outcomes, not simply the number of features released or story points delivered. They understand that technology is a means to an end: solving customer problems and benefiting the business.

Adopting a strategic mindset is crucial for leaders, especially engineering leaders, to influence their environment from the bottom-up. This involves focusing on the “why” behind building new capabilities, understanding customer details, and identifying the metrics that will be impacted. The goal is to build the “right products” that solve customer needs and help the business, rather than just building products “right”. This shift also means prioritizing “outcomes over features” and defining desired outcomes and how to measure them before building.

Decentralizing the decision-making process is a key aspect of true team empowerment. Product Managers and leaders with intimate knowledge of a problem space should be empowered to make reversible (“Type 2”) decisions quickly, while more consequential (“Type 1”) decisions require methodical deliberation, often by senior leaders with strict turnaround times. This decentralization fosters agility and innovation, preventing bureaucracy that stifles creativity.

In summary, cultivating a strong product culture and empowering teams is an ongoing journey that requires moving away from traditional command-and-control structures. It involves a fundamental shift in how organizations view technology, how leaders operate, and how teams approach problem-solving and delivery, always with a keen focus on validated customer and business value.