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Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary ProductsBook

by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones

Who uses, recommends or left Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Ken Norton
Executive coach for product leaders; previously a product partner at GV and a product manager at Google.
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The sequel to Inspired, this book explores what the best product companies have in common. “Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products.”

From “Best Books for Product Managers [2026]”, his standing list, introduced as “the 44 books I’d consider essential to any PM’s bookshelf”. Marked TOP PICK on the page. Every book links through amzn.to and a Bookshop.org affiliate id (/a/83161/).

2026-01-07·bringthedonuts.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.