Empowered teams are essential for complex work

If you are doing complex work and believe an Agile way of working helps best to deal with that, then you should move towards:

1. Empowered / Self-managing / Self-organizing teams

2. Rooting yourself in customer problems

3. Checking whether you help the customer to meet their goals and capture the business value (outcomes).

What does not help achieve these things

• More layers (unable to make swift decisions)

• More coordination and planning

• More up-front technical design

• More middle (wo)men (Proxy PO or PO/PM combo)

• More controls and checklists (e.g. Definition of Ready)

Empowered teams working towards better outcomes require short feedback loops. Simplicity is the way.

When feedback loops are long teams are not empowered as they are waiting on others.

Beware when you adopt a scaling framework as often they break these rules. There are exceptions.