Focus on the Right Stuff: Conditions for Empowerment, Part II
Autonomy without the right work is just chaos. Here’s how to get the balance right.
“... no matter what the client says the problem is, it is always a people problem.”
- Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
If you want to empower your teams and make it stick, there’s first some groundwork to lay. You need to create conditions that will support the people you are empowering. Last post I proposed a key element is having shared practices and enabling constraints. Another critical piece of building empowered teams is ensuring they are applying their talent to the most important work. Creating an environment where teams can thrive is also about where they focus.
This is the argument for making sure teams commit to work they should do, not simply what they can.
Always doing different types of work helps manage the mess
On any given product team, work falls into different categories. John Cutler has written about balancing rigor and flexibility from a different perspective that I think applies here too. I like his buckets, but I’m adapting them slightly:
Corporate Initiatives (“large, complex projects”): Top-down projects that align with company-wide goals. These provide direction, but an overload of them can stifle team autonomy, making teams executors instead of decision-makers.
Zero-to-One Product Work: Work focused on creating new products or features from scratch. This drives innovation but can become disconnected from overall strategy if done in silos.
Maintenance and Improvements (”independent product work”): Refining and sustaining existing products based on user feedback or making technical improvements. This is critical for long-term success but often gets deprioritized in favor of net-new work.
If you want to create autonomy, find the middle
Different types of work are best suited for different levels of autonomy. Startups, small companies, or teams with immature products have lots of freedom to carve their own path. More established organizations with mature products often have teams with less autonomy because it’s important to make sure the work supports broader goals (but at the same time, it’s more difficult and complex to do so).
If you’re starting from a place of high autonomy (left side), like at an early-stage startup, as you build 0-1 products you need to balance time spent on shipping new work with maintaining and iterating on what you’ve already built. As you scale to multiple teams, you also have to introduce corporate-level initiatives that drive broader impact.
If you’re starting with more rigidity and less flexibility (right side), like an enterprise or mature product ecosystem, you’re at a place where big, complex corporate priorities take up a bulk of teams’ focus already. You already have the rigor and need to increase team-level flexibility.
Empowered teams naturally thrive in the middle scenario, where these different types of work are in balance. The problem is, being in the middle is a lot messier than being at either end of the spectrum. There’s more visibility, less defined boundaries, and more responsibility. I’d argue that a key component of having autonomous, empowered teams is being prepared to navigate that 'messy middle.’ If either your leders or your teams aren’t committed, this autonomy won’t last. Everyone together needs to pay attention to the balance of work happening at any given time, not only how and when it’s being done. When empowered teams operate out of balance they’re more likely to turn into reactive order-takers, build things disconnected from strategy, or get overloaded with top-down priorities. Inevitably, products and outcomes suffer.
Empowerment requires rethinking how your org works too
When companies say they want to empower teams, its common to only look at how the teams need to change. Yet for empowered teams to succeed it’s not simply about “giving teams ownership” but making sure they have the guidance and air cover to support a healthy mix of work. The right balance between rigor and flexibility is one the organization itself needs to consent to.
A healthy team doesn’t just do one type of work, it balances all three. Too many corporate initiatives? The team is not empowered, it’s a feature factory. Too much zero-to-one work? The team is detached from any coherent business goal. Too much maintenance? The team stagnates, stunting progress and impact.
If teams have real decision-making power and autonomy to achieve outcomes, they need dedicated space to work on product-driven and maintenance efforts with clarity into they can impact broader goals, a say in how priorities are shaped, and a system for balancing work types.
True empowerment and autonomy are not about letting people do whatever they want, it’s about treating them like adults by creating the conditions for success, enabling focus on meaningful work, and providing the freedom to operate within that space.
Coming Up in Part III
In the next part of this series, we’ll explore signals you might not be as empowering your teams as well as you think plus practical ways to help teams practice cohesively and prioritize effectively, including:
Establish decision rights
When to set priorities without micromanaging
Balancing company goals with team-driven initiatives
Avoiding overload while keeping teams accountable