The science is clear that empowered teams are more innovative and cost less than non-empowered teams when it comes to developing products. So naturally, all product companies want to have empowered teams for their development.

But the vast majority fail. Why?

I claim that this is because empowered teams are completely counterintuitive in a corporate context. To make things even worse, the move to empowered teams typically takes a leap of faith, where you need to decide on a completely new way of working and then just hope that it will work out automatically. See my article on the Circle of Safety for a description of a transitional organisation that makes this leap a lot shorter and less risky.

You already know how a high-impact developer organisation looks like. The hard part is getting there, especially in a large traditional organisation.

Back when I tried to make this shift and needed help, all I could find were descriptions of how organisations should work, but hardly any steps for getting there when the ideal was too far from the current reality.

This is the path I had some success with. A way to carve out space for your team to embrace parts of the empowered way of working, even when the larger organisation is not yet ready to change.

It is said that “For many reasons, Agile seems to work best when a [line manager] does not assume either the Product Owner or Scrum Master role.” But if so, then who should be that line manager?

The above quote comes from SAFe, and although the latest version of the official Scrum Guide has nothing to say about the topic, it is an often-repeated truth when talking about Scrum. But that obvious follow-up question is not discussed nearly as often.