My tip, “developer empowered” means that the buck stops with Engineering leadership when it comes to dev work. They have to be able to greenlight work, and also red-light it.

That gives engineers the flexibility to build what they see is missing, while still having executive leadership (e.g. “Director of Engineering” etc) in the loop who can rein in rabbithole-development projects.

But the second you allow “Product” teams to dictate dev work, you will lose that developer empowerment, and they will always just be “the ones who build what Product tells them to”.