Empower

To empower is to let someone do something you don't agree with.

I've seen this on numerous occasions and been at fault myself to consider it to be empowering when letting teams or individuals make their own decisions, as long as you agree with those decisions. Even though making your own decisions is motivating in itself as long as you are doing the things that everybody agrees on there is no trade-off or compromise involved. It boils down to when there is lack of agreement and who is best suited at making the decision and who has to live with the consequences of the decision. Creating the culture of empowering many persons who work hands-on with the product every day will always beat a top down decision culture.

For empowerment to work there needs to a built in feedback mechanism, the team that decides how to build the product should also be responsible for fixing it if it is broken or deal with the consequences if the product isn't providing customer value. You should enable feedback first, to let everybody be on the same page of what you are doing and how it works, then you can empower the team that is now informed and well equipped to make decisions. If there is a lack of feedback and information about the product available then empowering is merely an unfair shift of responsibility.

Internal motivation is a huge factor in this, maybe the most important one, since all the fantastic products we see are made by people. From a customer perspective what you get in the end is a level of creativity and quality that can not attained by letting external persons direct the design decisions.