EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 54Assignment

Keeping in mind the principles of empowerment that team objectives are designed to encourage, we are ready to have the product teams get to work. So, let's consider the mechanics of assigning objectives to product teams.

Assigning Objectives to Product Teams

To be very clear, and to address head‐on another one of the very common misconceptions about team objectives, it is the responsibility of the leaders to decide which problems should be worked on by which product teams.

Many companies think that the idea is to let the product teams come up with their own objectives, yet are somehow surprised when the organization complains of lack of direction and little is accomplished. And it's important to point out that this is not the fault of the teams—it's the clear fault of leadership.

More explicitly, the whole point of assigning objectives to product teams is to execute on a product strategy. The product strategy is all about deciding which problems to work on.

Assigning objectives to product teams is both a top‐down and bottom‐up process, and it often requires iteration.

These assignments are a function of the product strategy and the team topology (aka team scoping). In other words, the strategy tells us which problems we need to solve, and the topology will imply which teams are best positioned to tackle each problem.

Now, we love it when teams volunteer to pursue an objective, and we try hard to accommodate that desire, but we also are clear with the ...