Empowerment is about giving people and teams enough autonomy and accountability to take their own decisions in their jobs—e.g., having a PO really own the product. For that to work, there must be trust (e.g., from the manager to the employee), ability (e.g., the PO mastering Stakeholder Management), and the right opportunity (e.g., going agile).

Ideally, managers should not only empower their teams to make technical decisions, but also decisions that the managers could’ve taken themselves (e.g., removing systemic impediments, prioritizing all of the team’s work, organizing team constellations, etc.). The more appropriately empower the Scrum Team is, the higher chance of increased flow, value add and team member engagement.