Marty Cagan has some really insightful thoughts (as usual) on autonomous teams in Autonomy vs. Mission:

In healthy teams and organizations, the way we normally reconcile these views [where the team might have one perspective and the leadership might very well have another] is that the leadership has control of two major inputs to the decision process. The first is the overall product vision, and the second are the specific business objectives assigned to each team.

Problems arise if the leadership does not provide clarity on these two critical pieces of context. If they don’t, there’s a vacuum and that leads to real ambiguity over what a team can decide and what they can’t.

The section on how to ensure consistency in design across different teams is also really good:

In the name of empowerment and also speed, my personal preference is to invest in the necessary automation (with pattern libraries and style guides) so that the team can get the design (interaction and visual) mostly right pretty easily, and acknowledge that on occasion, you will incur some “design debt” where we realize that the design needs to be corrected, and that’s fixed as soon as the problem is spotted. I like this approach because the manager of design is still responsible for developing a strong set of designers, but doesn’t have to be in the review cycle for everything (which tends to slow things way down, as well as undermine autonomy).