This document discusses empowerment through collaboration in Agile teams. It describes how empowerment was lacking in traditional practices like stand-ups, retrospectives, and sprint reviews due to silos, lack of respect, and a blame culture. The author's team became more empowered by removing silos, valuing opinions, collaborating with customers, and trusting self-organizing teams. Practices like story mapping, 3 Amigos meetings, developer pairing, and collaborative retrospectives helped build relationships and a common understanding within the smaller team.