The 4 Risks of Empowering Teams

90% of product features fail to deliver the expected business value according to research by Ron Kohavi.

The challenge is that the software we build is used by humans - and human behaviour is difficult to predict. We lock in so many assumptions in our business cases months before we build our products so it is no surprise that we’re often wrong.

With effectiveness rates so low, many companies are looking to shift from traditional top-down planning in favour of the Product Operating Model: empowering teams to build solutions based on direct customer conversations. But empowering teams introduces a new set of risks.

The Process Risk: Do teams have the skills to work autonomously?

The first, and perhaps most fundamental risk, lies in the assumption that teams naturally know how to work autonomously. Most product teams have spent years, if not decades, operating within structured frameworks where requirements flow down from business cases, specifications are detailed, and success metrics are predefined. Suddenly asking these teams to identify problems, conduct customer research, generate solutions, and make strategic decisions represents a complete paradigm shift.

This transition reveals a critical skills gap. Teams accustomed to executing against clear specifications often struggle with the ambiguity inherent in autonomous work. And what’s more, some teams do not want the additional accountability that comes with the new autonomy. It is much easier to highlight how well you did your job when you have a detailed specification to refer to. If you get to decide what to build it is much harder to hide when business outcomes are not being achieved.

Organisations often underestimate the time and investment required to help people make the transition and develop these new capabilities. They expect immediate results from newly empowered teams without recognising that autonomous work requires fundamentally different skills, mindsets, and support structures than traditional execution-focused roles.

The Alignment Risk: Will teams work on the highest priority items?

Perhaps the most dangerous risk of team empowerment, from a management perspective, is the potential for misalignment with broader organisational strategy and values. When teams are given the freedom to identify problems and create solutions based on customer feedback, there's no guarantee that their efforts will align with what makes the most strategic sense for the organisation.

Imagine a team working for an airline was tasked with increasing ancillary revenue. Ancillaries are all the extras that airlines charge you for like bags, seats and insurance. The team discover through customer research that passengers hate feeling cramped and uncomfortable during flights. There are two completely opposing, but equally successful, solutions that emerge from this insight. The first option is to default passengers into middle seats and then charge them to upgrade to an aisle or window seat. The second solution is to create a premium service tier that guarantees the middle seat remains empty for a more comfortable experience.

Both solutions address the customer problem of feeling cramped during flights, and both could potentially increase ancillary revenue. However, they represent vastly different approaches to customer relationships and brand positioning. Your brand is the sum of all of the customer interactions and what can take years to build can be destroyed overnight.

An empowered team focused solely on customer feedback and revenue metrics might choose either path, depending on how they interpret and prioritise the data. Without clear strategic guardrails and brand value alignment, teams may inadvertently pursue solutions that optimise local metrics while undermining broader organisational objectives or brand integrity. The challenge lies in maintaining strategic coherence while preserving the customer-centricity that empowerment enables.

The Governance Risk: Will teams work efficiently without time and cost metrics?

Traditional governance models track progress through fixed timelines, budgets, and feature checklists. While these constraints often lead to suboptimal solutions, they do provide a level of predictability and confidnece, albeit a false confidence, that enables organisational planning and resource allocation.

As stated above, 90% of features fail to deliver the expected business value. We are paying a heavy cost for a perception of predictability. Empowered teams are supposed to improve efficiency and effectiveness by delivering iteratively, pivoting as they learn, and sometimes “failing” quickly to succeed later.

But we can’t just trust that teams will work more efficiently. There needs to be a viable governance approach. We can’t rely on the old time and cost metrics because how do you budget for exploration when you don't know what you'll discover? How do you set timelines for problem-solving when the scope of the problem isn't fully understood?

Deadlines have been proven to be effective at motivating teams. We need to avoid teams falling into analysis paralysis; endlessly researching and experimenting without delivering tangible value. And without clear constraints, teams may over-engineer solutions or become attached to elaborate approaches that, while technically superior, don't justify their cost in time and resources.

Even though the team is empowered it is ultimately the leaders who are held accountable for progress. Organisations need to define the product and process metrics that balance empowerment with accountability.

The Structure Risk: Coordination in a decentralised environment

Many agile frameworks focus on how to empower a single team. But the complexity arises when those teams interact with other teams and the rest of the business. When teams have the freedom to identify problems and create solutions, how do you ensure they don't duplicate effort or work at cross-purposes? How do you define boundaries and responsibilities when the scope of work is emergent rather than predetermined?

This challenge becomes much more complex as the organisation scales because it increases the risk of multiple teams independently identifying similar customer problems or where solutions developed by one team might conflict with or undermine work being done elsewhere. Traditional organisational structures rely on clear functional boundaries and hierarchical coordination to prevent such conflicts but this creates bureaucracy that slows down development speeds.

When teams can self-direct their efforts based on customer insights, how does the organisation ensure that the most critical problems receive appropriate attention? How do you prevent teams from gravitating toward interesting but low-impact problems while more pressing issues remain unaddressed?

If teams are expected to understand what every other team is working on it will slow them down. If a manager is responsible for coordinating work across teams it removes their autonomy which kills accountability.

The key insight is that teams need to be designed. Organisations need to proactively identify distinct areas of scope for teams so they can own both the customer problem space and the solution (code) space.

The Path Forward: Structured Empowerment

These risks are real and significant; it doesn’t make sense to ask each company to try to figure out the solutions for themselves. Luckily they have been solved by the companies that are pioneering empowered teams. When we started to identify the patterns at UXDX we started pulling out the “best” practices that the leading companies are using to solve these problems and codified them in the ZeroBlockers framework.

The framework defines a scalable structure for products with a separation between Stream Teams (the teams building the products) and Product Teams (the teams providing direction and tracking outcomes). Product Teams are responsible for defining the Product Vision and Strategy to ensure alignment across the Stream Teams.

Regarding process, the framework defines the ways of working for both the Stream Teams and the Product Teams. The Stream Teams process includes continuous research, continuous design and continuous delivery with teams operating as true cross-functional teams instead of teams of functions. The Product Teams process includes designing team boundaries, setting metrics and the necessary governance practices to track performance.

Change is never easy but the organisations that successfully navigate this transition don't abandon empowerment in the face of these challenges, rather, they build the capabilities and systems necessary to make empowerment effective. The result is teams that combine the customer focus and innovation potential of autonomous work with the strategic alignment and operational discipline that large organisations require.

The future belongs to organisations that can harness the creative potential of empowered teams while maintaining coherent strategy and efficient execution. ZeroBlockers provides the framework to make this vision a reality.