Great teams need both autonomy and clear expectations

Empowerment does not mean you set up this product team and they go decide what to work on. No, that would just be anarchy, right? You'd have 50 teams doing 50 things. Instead, empowerment means the leaders do their job, come up with the bets, and then the teams are able to figure out the best way to solve those problems.

Your only goal as a manager, if you do nothing else, is clear roles and clear expectations. That's it.

I actually pulled them aside and I said, 'Hey, we need to move a lot faster. This is where we need to get to by X. We're a growth team. We need to prove wins out early.' And they don't have to be right, but just getting something out there, starting to line the whole team on what those are and then defining how we're going to measure success.

You are not meeting expectations. You will not be successful here if you continue on this path. I believe you can get here, but it is your responsibility.

Your ideal goal is to lead in a scalable way, which means you feel really confident about the direction of your team and your team has the autonomy to move in that direction. There's another really effective way of leading, which is selective micromanagement.

If you don't feel confident in the direction that your team is moving, the right answer is not to be hands-off and to let them go in that wrong direction. The right answer is to micromanagement, but do it in a very tactical and a very temporary way.