Empowered Teams Work. They Really Do.
<p>An empowered team owns a <em>well-defined</em> slice of product, whatever that may be in the context of their wider organization, and is ultimately responsible for its success or failure. They have the final say over what they create and how they create it.</p>
<p>Chaos! Mass Bedlam! How could this possibly work? What next, the guillotine?</p>
<p>Hold on, you counter-revolutionaries, hear me out.</p>
<p>Empowered teams aren’t little Ayn Randian islands, proudly isolated from the rest of humanity. There is a thing that an empowered team <em>doesn’t</em> have control over, and it makes all the difference.</p>
<p>And this is <em>their context</em>. A team must work within the confines of what success means within the context in which they work. Most software organizations (though not all) are motivated by the bottom line, so a team in this context has a very real constraint placed upon it: contribute to the money-making or fail.</p>
<h2>Scaling Decision-Making</h2>
<p>It is a basic truth that systems must change as they scale. What works for a small system doesn’t work the same when scaled up.</p>
<p>For organizations, the thing that must scale as it grows is:</p>
<p><strong>Decision-making.</strong></p>
<p>In a smaller organization, with a clear leader and a few trusted lieutenants, the scale is usually small enough that the core leadership team, if they’re good, can make most of the important decisions.</p>
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