Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

Cagan's sequel to Inspired — where Inspired describes what strong product teams do, Empowered describes what product leadership does to produce them. The book is organised around coaching, recruiting, product vision, and team topology, with specific attention to the leader's failure modes. For product direction this is the more useful of the two Cagan books if you are already directing teams: Inspired is for PMs, Empowered is for heads of product. Read alongside Skelton and Pais's Team Topologies for a complementary structural argument. Cagan's prose is not elegant but it is clear; this book is argument rather than memoir.