This is the most useless book I've read, yet a good one. Let me explain.

The author presents here a pefect organization working in a perfect way. It all makes sense and can be something to aspire to. However, one can hardly find any tips on how to get there. What's even worse the most repeated advice here is "if your company does not work this way - change the company". There are no grays or in-betweens, you either do it like the author says or you're doing it wrong. The companies presented here were seemingly constructed this way, they got it right from the get-go. I miss transformation stories of companies that changed into this model. I'd love to know what problems needed to be solved first and how they were solved, but here everyone has the perfect setup so there are no problems.

I was wondering who is this book written for and concluded it is for executives who know there's something wrong with their product organisation but don't know how to run it in a different, hopefully better, way. They can find here a compeling description of a good way and the contact details of the author's consulting company ;)

The thing that rubbed me the wrong way the most was the only justification author provides for the entire Empowered model - "this is how the biggest and most successful companies work, so it has to be good". This completely fails to acknowledge the possibility that these companies were successful not because this model but despite of it. In 2023 we can see that many of Sillicon Valley companies praised in this book failed in a major way, either on the product strategy front (Meta), execution efficiency side (Google), or both (Twitter). Massive layoffs done by every company mentioned in this book (except Apple) might also be a sign that they didn't figure it all out as well.

I missed here a better reason to believe that Empowered model is THE way. Intuitively, it's reasonable and I could agree with a lot of described practices but having some strong principles, convincing data, experiments results, or anything else that "this is how Sillicon Valley rolls" mantra would be a great addition.

I think this book presents a valuable benchmark for how to run a product organisation. There are many bases covered (80+ chapters!), so it gives a quite comprehensive perspective on what is needed to succeed. However, quality doesn't go with the quantity in this case - everything is described on the surface level, not going very deep to understand underlying principles, problems solved to get there, and challenges of maintaining such model. There is a lot of good things here, so I guess this is a good book, but nothing really actionable, so I find it pretty useless. ( )

It was very eye opening and has given me a lot to think through and apply to my professional role. I will likely revisit this book in the future as there are a lot of nuggets that need practical application in order to truly grok. ( )