The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay | Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

More product managers and teams are getting laid off.

The problem is the message that Daniel Ek from Spotify sent out with their layoffs in 2024. still have too many teams doing work around the work.

Even if you are told to build a thing that the execs are really excited about, you're still going to get fired eventually.

If you were the CEO. Would you fully fund your own team?

Frankly, most of the people I ask that question to don't know the answer right away. which is something you call the low impact PM death spiral.

It's the dynamic in which every medium to large company I've ever worked with finds itself in one way or another.

It starts with adding little features here and there, making little cosmetic improvements until the next round of layoffs.

You have three steps to become more of an impact-first product team.

So the first is in setting team goals, no more than one step away from company goals.

Don't let it get cascaded into oblivion.

You're an ICPM. It's up to you. No excuses.

You can follow all the best practices, but if your company goes out of business, they're not going to keep writing your paycheck for two years because all of your OKRs were a 0.6 or a 0.5.

Seven. Today, my guest is Matt LeMay. Matt is a longtime product leader, author of one of the most popular and practical books in the field of product management called Product Management in Practice.

And over the course of his consulting practice, he's worked with hundreds of product teams, helping them improve how they operate and drive more impact more consistently.

From that experience, he wrote and recently published a new book called Impact-First Product Teams that I could not agree more with.

In our conversation, Matt shares why it is so essential to align all of your work with business critical outcomes, especially if you fear layoffs at your company.

We talk about the low impact death spiral that many product teams fall into, what steps an individual product team can take to align their work to business critical outcomes regardless of how their organization approaches product development tips for how to push back on stupid ideas that execs ask you to build And so much more, the message in this episode is one that I believe every product manager needs to hear, especially if you don't work at a high-flying Silicon Valley tech company.

A huge thank you to Martin Erickson, Adrienne Joselo, and Dan Corbin for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation.

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That's pragmaticinstitute.com. Matt thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast thank you so much for having me I'm really really excited to be here I'm even more excited.

You have a really interesting background.

I usually don't spend time on background, but I thought this would be fun.

At the beginning of your career, you spent 13 years at Pitchfork reviewing music, reviewing artists.

Yes. Pitchfork was like a massive deal.

I don't know where it is today, but it was like the most influential music review site.

Is it still a big deal or is it less? It is still a big deal.

It was okay. Much less of a big deal when I started working for them and I was a 16-year-old music nerd writing record reviews in my bedroom at my parents' apartment.

Okay, so what I'm hearing is you helped make them a big deal.

Excellent. That's impact. We're going to talk all about impact.

If I were better at telling my own story, that's exactly what I'd be saying.

Before I start it. I was product manager number one at Pitchfork.

Funny enough, you look at your resume, you went into product management from Pitchfork.

Very typical career path. By the way, if you're on YouTube watching, there's a lot of musical paraphernalia behind you and awesome guitar.

So clearly there's a thread of music throughout your background.

Let me ask you this question. What is most similar about making music critique and even critiquing music and building great product?

The magic lies in the way people work together.

That's really what I think has been the consistent thread between all the work that I've done.

I spent years as a touring musician. I still occasionally tour in my friend Will Chef's band.

And it's that magic of people with different perspectives, different ideas, building into something that is somehow greater than the sum of its individual parts and perspectives.

That's what makes this interesting. That's what makes music magical.

That's what makes product development interesting, especially in the age of AI, when people have the opportunity to, I think, close themselves off from the messier parts of human interaction, from those moments where you realize that your perspective might be limited, that somebody else might be able to expose you to something, show you a way of working, show you a way of seeing that you haven't seen before.

I think that those interactions, that ability to learn from and build with each other is only going to become more valuable and more precious, frankly, as technology continues to do what technology does.

Wow. What a beautiful answer. I love that.

Okay, so let's get to the task at hand. So you're known for writing one of the most popular books in the field of product management called Product Management in Practice.

I suppose I am. Yes. Basically describes the job of a product manager basically very practically, very specifically, better than any other book out there.

You have a new book out called Impact vs. Product Teams.

I asked you what the goal of this book was, and you said the goal was, what are the steps that individual product teams can take to align their work to business critical outcomes regardless of how their organizations approach product development.

And I thought this was a really nice way of framing this conversation.

There's two important parts to the sentence that you gave me.

One is aligning your work to business-critical outcomes, and the other is steps an individual product team can take regardless of how their business functions.

So let me start with this first part. This is kind of the, you named your book after this concept of impact first.

Why is aligning work to impact and to business critical outcomes so important?

It's important because at the end of the day, it is those business critical outcomes against which you and your team will be evaluated.

That's the reality of working for a business, right?

If you are contributing to the business in a way that the business at large can understand, that the CEO can understand, that the CFO can understand.

If your team is a good investment for the business, then the business will continue making that investment.

If your team is not a good investment for the business, or you don't really know if your team is a good investment for the business, but you figure you're showing up so probably it's fine, you guess, then that puts you in a really tenuous position and a position that I think we've all seen not work out terribly well for everybody in recent history.

And so what is this a reaction to? Because I imagine many people hearing this are like, of course, PMs, product teams, we're driving business impact, that's why we're here.

That's not actually the case in most cases.

So first of all, just like, what is this reaction to?

Is this the reaction to people being like, oh, we're just going to build great products.

We're going to listen to customers, talk about the flip side of this.

I mean, there's a couple things. I think the main one is just more product managers and teams are getting laid off.

That's a really scary reality right now.

And if you look at the messages that are being conveyed by CEOs when they lay off these teams, Some of them are pretty clear.

The message that Daniel Ek from Spotify sent out with their layoffs in 2024, said, we still have too many teams doing work around the work and supporting work rather than focusing on opportunities with real impact.

And that really struck a nerve because I've been on those supporting teams before.

I've done the work around the work. And I've assumed that if I was given work around the work to do, that surely it must be critical to the business.

Otherwise, they wouldn't have hired me to do it.

I don't think that is a safe assumption to make.

I think especially given that we are no longer in a zero interest rate environment, given that hiring and retaining employees is expensive, given that companies are looking at cost savings I think we are in a moment where it is really incumbent upon each product team and each member of each product team to be able to understand, articulate, and work towards the top line business impact of their own work.

Awesome, okay, so where this comes from is one, if you're not driving something that is directly driving business growth, You're not as valuable to the company.

You're the kind of person that they'd lay off.

There's also a flip side of finding a job.

It feels like if you have shown impact in your resume, here's all the impact I've driven.

This also helps you get hired, true? Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, it's the most common resume advice I see, right, is like show the number, show the impact. say what you did.

I have a friend who does resume coaching and I showed her my resume a couple years ago.

And she said, I love your resume except for one thing.

Why do you write like a little girl? Say what you did.

Say what your contributions were. Don't say, I helped.

I may have maybe helped people do this. Save the impact.

Put the number on it. And I think I needed to hear that from her.

Because I think there is a tendency, especially for those of us who do really thrive in that collaborative environment, who our nature is to not want to take credit for work that could only exist via the contributions of many people. with diverse experiences and perspectives.

It's really hard to say like, well, I did this and I contributed to that, but that's part of why I wrote this book at the team level.

Because I think for folks like myself who really enjoy and thrive in and enjoy that team environment, If you can look at the product team as the foundational unit of impact and say, we delivered this, we were able to work together to have this impact for the business.

That feels really good and also speaks directly to the work that that team did together.

That's really interesting insight. I think a lot of this comes from just PMs naturally are trained to deflect credit and to include say we and everything and just this person did that.

So I get where that comes from. Okay, so most listeners will probably still be thinking, yes, I'm driving impact.

I'm great. I don't have a problem here. I don't need to change anything.

What are some ways to stress test your thinking?

Maybe some questions to ask yourself or maybe your team of just like, okay, maybe I'm not.

So the first question I ask most of the teams I work with is, If you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund your own team?

And that is a small question that can provoke some big reactions.

Because for me, when I was working as a product manager, I truly believed that my job was to find the next most defensible thing to build build it, celebrate it, find the next most defensible thing to build, and so on and so forth, rinse and repeat forever and ever.

I kind of assumed that the existence of my team was this righteous fact of the universe, right?

My team would always be there for all time.

And it was just a matter of us finding the next thing to work on, which meant you know, doing discovery and making concessions to what leadership wanted and doing all that stakeholder management.

But the idea that my team came at a cost to the business, that at some point somebody might look at my team on a spreadsheet and say, who are these very expensive people?

Why do we need them? Do we actually need them?

It just wasn't something that crossed my mind because I wasn't in the room for those conversations.

That wasn't how I was thinking about my team's work.

So I like asking this question because it's a perspective shift.

It gets you thinking, if you were personally accountable for the existential market level success of this business, would you invest in your team?

And frankly, most of the people I ask that question to don't know the answer right away.

They're not sure. They say, I think so. Or yeah, yeah, yeah, because, and then you can see the gears turning.

And again, to me, that is a risky situation to be in because if you can't answer that question as a member of the team, nobody else in the organization is going to be as well equipped to answer that question as you are.

So bringing that question to the team, asking it and answering it proactively and collaboratively and being ready to say, okay, if we can't answer this confidently, What are the changes we need to make?

Do we need to change our purview? Do we need to change our goals?

Who do we need to talk to? What do we need to do in order to make this happen, in order to answer that question confidently?

We are much better off having that conversation at the team level and waiting for someone else to have it for us or at us.

So kind of the signal here is if you can't confidently say yes, asking yourself this question, your team talking through this and having a clear answer, there's maybe a potential problem that you need to work on.

Absolutely. I think that's exactly it. Yeah.

OK. And we'll talk about what to actually do and the steps you recommend to fix this problem.

But I want to keep talking about impact Sometimes it takes a while for people to be convinced, okay, I need to really do this versus here's the ways to do this.

It has taken me until now, until writing this book. to be convinced.

I still feel like I need to be convinced a little bit sometimes.

I think the layoffs are a really good convincing function for people where they're seeing all these PMs being laid off and just like, how do I avoid that?

This is basically the answer to that is here's how you avoid getting laid off.

There's an interesting implication in what you described here where you encourage the the PM and the product team to think like the CEO.

This touches on something I've been meaning to write about, but I haven't, which is a lot of people There's this argument, are PMs the mini-CEO?

In my mind, the PM is... 100% the mini-CEO in terms of they think like the CEO or they should within the team.

Like they're the same... They think about the business.

Their job is to think about the business like a CEO within the team.

Obviously, they're not in charge of everyone.

They can't let it get any worse. Reporting lines are not the same, but I feel like that's a really good lens for the job of a PM.

It's just you're like the mini-CEO on the team making sure You're building the right things, thinking about the business, solving real problems that matter.

I think the way I've come to think about it is that the product manager is responsible for the whole team thinking like a CEO, if that makes sense.

I love that. So if the product manager takes that on as their sole responsibility and says, I'm the mini CEO, I think about the business, that's a missed opportunity.

In my consulting work, it's more often than not been an engineer who's actually able to get to that specific impact level goal for the team. sometimes before the product manager does, because the engineer is thinking in systems, is thinking about, okay, I know this system, I know this other system, I've had this conversation with this person.

I think I see how this can all fit together.

Sometimes it's a designer or UX researcher who understands what customers need. and who has that direct firsthand knowledge.

So I think the way that I certainly initially misinterpreted the mini CEO thing was you are solely in charge of this. as opposed to you are the person who brings that kind of CEO level commercial thinking to the team.

And I've been much more inclined of late to see the product manager's job as to bring in and facilitate that conversation rather than to be the sole owner of that conversation.

That is a really good nuance to what I said.

And it makes all the sense in the world.

Following these lines of what is the job for a product manager, you have a really nice way of just thinking about it.

What does a business expect from a product manager?

Yeah, you know, my favorite definition of product management comes from Melissa Perry's book, escaping the build trap. where she describes product management as facilitating a value exchange, right?

You're facilitating a value exchange between a business and its customers. the actual shape and nature of that value exchange depends on so many things, right?

It depends on your funding model. It depends on your business model.

It depends on whether you're B2B or B2C.

It depends on whether you're publicly traded or privately held.

There are so many different variables that go into what a business expects from product teams.

And one thing I've come to is that I'm probably too hesitant to generalize in general, aside from that generalization I just made.

But I think that the best product managers and teams I've worked with are really curious to understand what success means to their particular business.

So if that's a startup, How much runway do we have?

What do we need to raise that next round?

Are our investors looking for growth? Are they looking for profitability?

What are they looking for in order for us to reach that next existential milestone?

If we're a publicly traded company, What are investors looking for?

What have we told shareholders? What's in our next prospectus?

What are we saying we're going to deliver to the market at large?

This information usually exists somewhere, but it's really easy to get disconnected from it as we go about the day to day work of doing product management.

I've been in a lot of rooms having workshops and sessions with teams I work with where they're pulling up the last town hall meeting to look for slides from their CEO.

Because they're so busy, they have so many day-to-day things to deal with that for them, that town hall day is like, okay, finally, I can just...

Not have to deal with people emailing me every 10 seconds It's a chance to like take a deep breath and then get back to the stuff that really matters but Those top level things, those promises that have been made to the market at large, to the board, to the shareholders,

Those are often a great place to start for understanding what exactly your business is looking for.

So you can figure out how your team's work helps contribute to success in the terms that matter most to the business.

That's an amazing segue to exactly where I wanted to go, which is this quote that is exactly what you just said.

The question you should be asking is kind of a different version of the one you shared earlier, which is, What are we doing to contribute to the success of the business?

Yeah. So what is it that you think people are thinking instead most often?

It's interesting. We live in a world where for the last 20 years of product development, we've been all about best practices.

We love best practices. And I love best practices too.

I think best practices can be really valuable, can be really useful.

I love how much knowledge sharing there is out there.

When I started 15 years ago, It was so much harder to get any sense of how anybody was doing anything.

But I think the, downside of this is that there are a lot of folks who are really, really fixated on doing things the right way.

And a lot of the writing and thinking about doing things the right way exists in kind of this middle layer between impact and day-to-day work.

So if you have impact, the overall success of the business, revenue, growth, profits, Then from there, you set objectives and you do initiatives and then you do bets and then you make a strategy and then you do your day-to-day work.

I think the tendency among a lot of product teams is to key to those middle pieces. to say, okay, what we're doing is on strategy.

What we're doing is part of objective. We did OKRs, right?

We spent three weeks coming up with our OKRs for three months.

It's OKR season, everybody. We have to pretend to care about our goals.

And I read a book that says we have to have five to seven objectives with five to seven key results.

And we want the score of each one to be a 0.6 or a 0.7.

And at the end of the day, you've actually spent so much time and energy being really clever and cascading these things into these intermediate steps that Each step has incurred more and more risk that we might not achieve that impact we seek to drive.

Each time we abstract things out, each time we cascade things from impact to something else until we wind up with a checklist of features to build, We're assuming that if we then build that checklist of features, dot, dot, dot, we will have a successful business.

Honestly, most of the companies and teams I work with, if I ask them how their lowest level goals add up to their highest level goals, They look at me like I just asked them the most impossible question in the world, because by the time you get things down to that level,

Maybe it's going to work. Maybe it's not going to work.

There are assumptions baked into each of those levels.

You might go through the motions of doing OKRs the right way or doing strategy the right way.

But that doesn't guarantee that your strategy is going to work.

It doesn't mean that your OKRs are going to add up to what your investors or your shareholders need to see.

So I think there's a tendency among product teams to really sweat the middle and to get really stressed out if the middle is not in perfect theoretical harmony with itself if the objectives are a little out of line with the initiatives, are a little out of line with the bets, are a little out of line with the domains.

But at the end of the day, I don't think I've ever worked for a company where these things add up to a perfect breadcrumb trail.

You can trace back. from we prioritized these bits of work in this sprint because it adds up to this objective, which is part of this strategy. which adds up to this initiative, which is part of this bet, which will deliver this much impact.

It's just not how things work in the real world.

I feel like a lot of listeners are like, that sounds very familiar, exactly what you just described.

Again, we're going to talk about what to change and how to make this work. to actually align your teams with impact.

But I want to first talk about something that kind of follows this thread you're on, which is something you call the low impact PM death spiral.

Yes, death spiral. I love the hands. The low impact death spiral is the dynamic in which every medium to large company I've ever worked with finds itself in one way or another.

And honestly, a lot of small product companies do as well.

And it goes something like this. It starts with teams taking on low impact work, adding little features here and there, making little cosmetic improvements because it's easier, it invites less scrutiny and you're less likely to mess up something important, right?

The analogy I use sometimes is if you're working on a car, If you put your hands in the engine, you might make the car run really well or you might make it so that the car doesn't run at all.

If you have the option of doing that or like decking out the car with a paint job and rhinestones and making it look really, really cool, What are you going to choose to do?

I know for me, I would choose the rhinestones every time, right?

Because then the car runs however it runs.

Whoever else is the expert in engines can fix the engine, but I'm gonna do this thing, which everyone can see.

All the executives can look at it and say, wow, look at how cool this car looks.

And it's not going to do any harm, right?

What's the worst that could happen? We can always take the paint off.

The problem is If you have 10 teams adding rhinestones to a car, eventually the hood of the car is going to be so heavy that you can't lift it to get to the engine anymore.

And that's exactly what happens in most product organizations.

As you have more and more teams adding in these little features, making little enhancements, adding features which might get some usage, but they're not going to take away anything meaningful.

They're not going to mess with the commercial engine of the business, you have more folks building in and the hood of the car gets heavier and heavier.

The product gets more and more complicated.

You have all these little bits that have little dependencies on each other.

And the product becomes, as I think most modern products are, a collection of loosely connected features rather than a single guided experience. does that mean that means internally building anything becomes a lot harder right because there's 10 product teams that have to manage dependencies whenever you want to build something So companies start adding program management layers.

They're like, we have too many meetings.

We need to reorg for program management because reorgs fix everything.

And we need to make sure that we have all these layers and people are connected and we're doing dependency management.

But as you add more of those things, it becomes harder and harder to do high impact work. the hood just gets heavier and heavier and heavier, which in turn sends teams deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of low impact work.

Low impact work begets low impact work. The more low impact work you do, the harder it is to do high impact work, the more likely you are to do low impact work and so on and so forth.

It goes and goes and goes until the next round of layoffs.

And this is a real problem. I've experienced this at, again, pretty much every company I've worked with.

And it's been really interesting to see how often the breaking of that cycle comes down to individual product teams being brave enough to look at their own work and look at what matters to the business and say, you know what? we are not going to incur the risk of being a low impact team anymore.

We are going to proactively seek out high impact work and we're going to deliver even if it means we have to coordinate with a lot of other teams, even if it means that suddenly the executive team takes a really big interest in the work that we're doing.

We're going to see that as signs that the work we're doing matters, not as things that are going to be an impediment to getting the work done.

As you just kind of alluded to, there's a big implication here of even if you are told to build a thing that the execs are really excited about, that is low impact in your opinion.

That's no excuse. You're still going to get fired eventually, even though they're like telling you to build it.

It sucks, but that's how it goes. And it's funny, I worked with MailChimp for three years leading up to their acquisition by Intuit when they were on this really interesting journey of going from a single product company to a platform company. which is a journey that a lot of companies are on, right?

Where they found success in one part of the market, And they say, you know what?

We recognize that there's a value add in working more horizontally. and giving people a suite of tools they can use.

We want to build these tools and really make sure that we are meeting the needs of our small and medium business customers.

So, I was brought on shortly after they did a reorg.

They went into a domains model. They had different teams that were supposed to be experts on different parts of this marketing platform that were building in new features.

And their VP product, Natalia Williams, who then became their CPO, she said, this is what great that we're doing this, but I'm worried that we're going to lose sight of the commercial fundamentals, right?

We have these teams building this really cool stuff, and we've been so clear that we're excited about the teams That are working on initiative that are building these new things that are building out this platform, but let's make sure we stay focused on, on making sure that the entire platform grows. in a healthy and sustainable way.

And that as we are adding in these new features and functionalities, We're not making this so crowded and complicated that it's harder for people to get value out of it.

So she set a very clear goal for the product team.

She wanted a specific change in the rate of users who successfully send their first email.

She was like, as we build these new things, email is still where people are coming in.

We want to make sure that they can do this successfully.

And she set a really ambitious goal for the entire product organization.

And she put it forth to the product teams and a lot of product teams were understandably hesitant to take this on for a number of reasons, right?

They said, this is like If we mess this up, that's the entire commercial heart of the business.

That's really risky. Other ones say, well, that's great, but we...

We're building out these new parts of the platform that are really important.

We don't want to risk slowing those things down.

There was one product manager I worked with. who really understood how important this was.

She had worked on enough different parts of the app at that point.

She had been on a growth team. So she really had that kind of user-centric, how do we hit the metrics we need to hit mindset.

And she came to me and she was like, I want to make sure we do this because I'm worried about what will happen if we don't do this.

Right. I don't want to be on the product team. that failed to deliver what matters most to the business.

So she went and worked with some user researchers and found where people were getting stuck.

She did this amazing study finding where people were getting stuck before they sent that first email.

And she gathered together a group of product managers.

I'll never forget this. I was onsite in Atlanta and she gathered together a group of product managers and she was like, look, These are the things we need to fix if we're going to hit this.

But if we fix these things, I think we can do it.

I think we can get there. there was a moment of silence where again, for totally understandable reasons, people were like, okay, this is great, I see it, but I'm kind of afraid that if we do this, and this product manager, I will never forget that she looks around the room and she says,

You know what? I am going to haunt all of you in your dreams if you do not take this on.

This is the most important thing for the business.

And everyone laughed. It was a strong comment, but it was a strong comment made in really good faith that in its own way, I think, acknowledged the fear that people had about taking this on.

She was like, look, this is really important.

And if we work together, if we care less about the constraints and parameters and borders of our domains and care more about how we work together, to deliver the thing that our leader has told us is the most important thing for the business, we can get this done.

And they did get it done, and they got it done through subtracting.

They streamlined the experience. They took out steps that people were getting stuck on.

They made things easier. They did the kinds of things that are rarely celebrated in the way that traditional feature launches were celebrated.

But because they had this clear impactful specific sense of what success looks like, they were able to take on that work themselves.

And it made the product better, made the business better.

And it was just a great moment of working with a great team.

That was an awesome example. I love just how much of a hero's journey this example was.

Along those lines, it's interesting how much courage it takes to do this because to your point, the easy thing is just, okay, everyone's just telling us to do this thing.

We're going to build this feature. Great, easy.

I don't have to put myself out there. And what you're pointing out there is it's up to you to recognize what you're doing is not high impact. and to have courage to push back and suggest something else.

The funny thing is it's courage, but it's also a kind of radical acceptance of reality.

There's a very kind of emotional philosophical dimension to this conversation.

Because I think it is in human nature to not want to be accountable for things outside of our control.

Impact is not something we can just check off a list, right?

If we're really working towards business impact, that means that there are things that might happen in the market that are going to affect us.

Our competitors might launch something. There might be pandemic or a war or something we didn't expect.

We are reliant upon customers to change their behavior to convert or to upgrade or to do whatever it is we hope they will do.

I use the word hope because again, can do our best to influence that behavior, but we can't just check a box.

And I think there is this very understandable human fear of being accountable for things that are beyond our control.

I get that so hard. But what I think the last couple of years have shown us is that We are accountable for things outside of our control.

The success of the businesses we work for is ultimately beyond our immediate control and you can follow all the best practices and have the highest velocity and do everything quote unquote right But if your company goes out of business, they're not going to say, yeah, we're going out of business, but we're going to keep writing your paycheck for two years because all of your OKRs were a 0.6 or a 0.7.

That's not how it works. The reality is that things outside of our control affect us.

And I think that if we can internalize that, there's a real freedom in it.

The thing that surprised me most when I was researching this book is that the commercially minded PMs I interviewed were also the happiest, which I did not expect at all.

As you said, I come from a music background.

I was expecting the business people to be really stressed out and like, I have to show up at work 92 hours a day to crush it and make sure that we hit the metrics and crush the numbers.

But they were just like, yeah, I work for a business and I do the best I can.

And then I go home. When I'm at work, my job is to help the business succeed.

And I do that by understanding our business model, by trying to do work that contributes to what the business wants In order to do that, if my goals are really impact level goals, I have to learn about our customers.

I have to do discovery. I have to do all these things that we're supposed to do, not because they're abstract best practices, but because that's how you build a successful product.

And then at the end of the day, I'm not fighting my company to do product the right way.

And if they can't do it the right way, I'm willing to die on this hill.

It's like, I work for a company. I don't get to make every decision.

There are things outside of my control. I'll do the best I can.

And I get to free up a little bit of energy to live the rest of my life.

To make this even less scary, hopefully, I'm curious what your answer is going to be here.

Do you find that people who take this leap and push back and try to change the way their team's are thinking and what they take on, do you find that even if they fail, even if the impact wasn't there and the project fails, they are seen more favorably and their career ends up doing better and they end up doing better even if the project fails.

I hope so. You know, I'm always super, again, it's outside of my control, right?

I can't say like, if you do these things, then you will be looked favorably.

You will be looked upon favorably by the people who manage you because I don't know those people and maybe they're not going to react well.

Maybe they're not actually, you know, People are not always rational and these things don't always play out the way you hope they will.

What I will say is there's a story in the book in Impact First Product Teams about somebody who worked for a dating app and they were given project to work on which had a very specific, ambitious revenue goal.

And at a certain point, it became clear that they were probably not going to be able to hit this because of other things they needed to do.

So they went to the finance team and said, hey, we have to adjust this down.

And the finance team said, yeah, of course you do.

That makes sense. Let's adjust it down together.

Would that conversation have played out the same way if they had not taken that step of saying proactively based on what is happening in the broader world, in the market? our product.

We no longer believe we are on track to hit this, but we want to adjust so that the company at large can make better predictions and resource things accordingly.

I don't know. But I think, again, if you are embracing that mindset that there are things outside of your control and your job is to do what you can. from where you sit to contribute to the success of the business, I think you're certainly doing so much more by telling the business honestly what you think is possible and what's going to happen. as opposed to stepping back from it and saying like oh well if we talk about it we're going to get in trouble and nobody's going to believe us and you know that just that simple withholding of information does its own kind of harm.

So I can't guarantee any kind of outcomes.

I can say, yes, this will be received with generosity and grace in all cases.

But I think it's the right thing to do. My sense is either you will be respected more highly because you're you're kind of solving problems for people that like higher ups that you're seeing things that they should be seeing.

And you write and they're like, oh, wow, Matt's amazing.

He saw all this stuff and changed. Or you realize this is not the company for me.

They're just not, they don't value this.

They just want me to ship this widget. And that's all they want from me.

I don't know why. I could, I could do, I could do more somewhere else.

I think you touched on something really important there, which is that when you understand the business model, you understand the real world ethics and priorities of the company you work for.

If you understand what the company is optimizing for, what they really care about, what trade-offs and sacrifices they're willing to make in order to achieve those goals.

That tells you a lot more than the mission statement, which usually sounds great.

But if you follow the money, if you follow the decision making, sometimes it paints a different picture.

And I think the more you can understand how the business model works, what that value exchange is, what value is being delivered, what value is being extracted.

That, I think, puts you in a better position to decide if I were to help the company achieve success.

Do I feel good about that? Do I feel like this is a company that if it achieves its goals has made the world a better place or not?

And the more you understand the business model, the better equipped you are to make those decisions with all the information available to you, I think.

That's such an important point. Today's episode is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude.

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That's claude.ai slash lenny. Okay, so let's shift to talking about how to actually what to do.

Yeah, kind of this concept of actions you can take regardless of how your company operates.

And that first part is really important.

Something that I've seen you big on is you don't let people have an excuse for not... pushing on this.

And we've talked about this in other ways, but just maybe share more of just like, you don't have an excuse no matter how your company operates to not think deeply about this and try to make change.

Yeah, I mean the reality is that most companies that product managers work at aren't big tech companies.

And when I work with product teams at those companies, at insurance companies or at banks or at CPG companies, or I worked with a company a while ago that makes audio equipment, which was obviously really fun for me.

The first thing they usually tell me is, well, you know, we can't do product the right way because we're a regulated industry. or because we're B2B, or because we have these quarterly earnings targets we need to hit.

And that always makes me a little sad because yes, there's a way of looking at it where you can say, all right, if these five famous companies do product management the right way, then anything that puts us in a different situation from those companies must mean that we're doing product management the wrong way. which is demoralizing and distressing and again, leads people to these kind of quixotic battles of like, I have to turn a bank into a search engine, which is not going to happen.

But the other way of looking at it is that those constraints are how you do product management.

Those are what guide you to the commercial decisions you should be making.

If you're regulated, your competitors are regulated too.

If you can really understand those constraints, figure out how to work well within them. that's a huge commercial advantage for your business.

If you're B2B, I honestly prefer working with B2B companies in a lot of situations because they have such immediate access to their customers and they can understand the whole system of their customers and their users and how these things connect in a way that's really immediate and actionable.

Similarly, if your company has quarterly financial targets to hit, congratulations.

You know what the business really cares about.

You don't have to go looking much farther than that. you don't necessarily need to cascade that 10 different levels into 45 OKRs.

If you can do work that you know feeds directly into what the company cares about the most.

So yes, these things are constraints. but they are the constraints that shape the work that we do.

And if we embrace them as such, if we treat them as guides, not restrictions.

If we say like, we're working with not against the commercial realities of our business.

And there's so much we can do. There's so much that product managers and product owners and project managers, that everybody working on product at every organization can do. if we again work with not against the realities of the companies we work for.

Okay, so I think that's really empowering.

You're not saying you need to change the way product is built at your company.

It's up to you. You're an ICPM. It's up to you.

No excuses. Well, what's a simple way to describe what you're actually saying which I think is gonna make people feel a lot better what I'm actually saying is is that the things you think you're fighting against are usually the things that are giving your work shape if you let them be.

Awesome. Let's talk about, you have three steps, three handy steps to become more of an impact-first product team.

So let's talk through them. What is step one?

Yeah, so the first step, and I think the most important and where a lot of my work plays out, is in setting team goals close to company goals.

No more than one step away from company goals.

This idea comes from Christina Woodke's book, Radical Focus.

She had a great episode. on your podcast that I just rewatched for inspiration before I came on here.

Nice move. But in that book, she has this visual where she says that most companies approach cascading OKRs as kind of this multi-level like, at the top is company goals, then department goals, then big team goals, then small team goals, and smaller team goals, which leads to the very situation I described, where you can't add those small team goals back up to the company goals.

She has a visual that she compares that to, which is like the company goal as a center of gravity, and then every other team goal orbiting one level around it.

And this blew my mind when I saw it for the first time, because whether you're doing OKRs or KPIs or North Star metrics, Whatever framework you're ostensibly using, if you use it well, it looks like that.

I worked with a team a while ago that was a traditional feature team at a FinTech company.

They were the team that was kind of like the team I worked with at MailChimp, kind of given new features to build to take this product and build it more into a multi-product platform.

And the business would say, go build this.

They'd build it. They'd celebrate. They'd say, go build this.

They'd build it. They'd celebrate. And then the business said, okay, we're going to do things a little bit differently now.

Now we have this top line revenue target.

We want to make this much more money next year.

And we want you to tell us how you're going to contribute to this.

And this was a really challenging conversation for this team because as much as people complain about being feature factories, again, it feels safer.

There's more control over that. If you're told what to build, you have a lot more control over whether or not you build it than you do over whether or not it generates revenue.

So we started having this conversation you know, what framework should we use?

How should we do this? And I was not asking very good questions.

I was kind of panicking too, to be honest.

And then I asked them, I was like, okay, Why does this team exist?

Why are we doing this at all? Why is the business investing in this big team to build all these features?

Why do we care if we're a single product? or a multi-product platform company.

And one of the team leaders said, oh, well, actually, the customer lifetime value of a multi-product user is much higher than that of a single product user.

I was like, oh. do we know how much higher?

And they said, yeah, we actually have a number on that.

And I was like, wow. So like, If we had a goal of converting a certain number of single product users to multi-product users, we know exactly how much revenue is on the line.

They were like, yeah, I guess so. So we were able to set a goal.

And from there, we had this conversation about, what's the number we would need to hit? to make this team feel like a good investment.

And we came to a specific number and that number informed every decision that was made by that team for the rest of the year.

We said by the end of the year, we need to convert this many single product users to multi-product users because if we do that, There's this much additional revenue which contributes this much to the company's top line revenue goal.

It's one step away. And when they went and shared that goal with company leadership, they got it right away.

They didn't have to say, well, why is this valuable?

They didn't have to say, what are your other OKRs?

Show us the deck. They got it. And that gave them so much leeway to make bolder decisions, to work more closely with other teams, to ask for the resources they needed.

And that process of arriving at that goal, that goal that is impactful and specific and one step away from what the company cares about the most, is probably the most valuable way I have spent my time with teams of late.

Because once you get to that, you see how everything else flows from there.

And the implication here is that if it's too far away from helping, from people understanding what the hell are you guys even doing to help the business, that's the problem you want to avoid.

So one extreme is, I don't know, it probably doesn't make sense for your team to have exactly the same goal as the company.

Say your company's trying to grow 100 million revenue, right?

Like that's not going to be your team's goal.

So it's almost like at that extreme is what's one step away from that?

What's your contribution to that company goal?

The other end is just like some 10 level deep.

We're going to improve conversion of this random step, which is going to grow this thing, which grows that, and then that grows revenue.

Exactly. What is your guidance on revenue based goals as goals for teams?

You know, I think, again, it depends. I know people have very strong opinions about teams should always or should never have revenue-based goals.

I don't think it's that simple. I think sometimes, yes, if your company is working towards revenue, having a revenue-based goal makes sense, or at least being able to put some value in terms of revenue on the work that your team is doing.

I've worked with some startups where they actively are not going after revenue because right now the name of the game is growth, right?

They want to show that they have enough users to raise that next round of investment.

I actually worked with one startup where their revenue was going up and their number of users was going up.

And we had to have a really interesting conversation around which one actually matters to our investors.

And we kind of wound up developing these two scenarios, the high growth scenario and the low growth scenario.

And talking to the product team, it was really clear that there was like no way they were going to hit the high growth scenario.

So they pivoted to focus on profitability so they could build more runway and raise that next round as a smaller business with a sustainable revenue base.

So I get why people are hesitant to commit to revenue goals.

I think that there are certainly situations where revenue goals would be too broad or not exactly what the business needs.

But at the end of the day, Money is how the impact of most teams is going to be measured.

And if you don't have a point of view on why your team is a good investment, either in the money return it brings or in another return that is equally or more important to the business, then again, that feels like a tenuous and risky position to be in.

To kind of get people's brains noodling in the right direction, what are some examples of good goals, like specific goals that your teams have set that are one step away from a company goal?

What are just some examples without naming companies?

I have a story to tell to that effect, which also sets up the second step here, which is to keep impact first at every step.

So I worked with a growth team at a tech company that is beloved by many people.

And I was brought on to help them set OKRs, right?

The company was doing OKRs across the board, and this team was going to set its growth OKRs.

So they had done a lot of reading, a lot of research into how to do OKRs the right way. they had read, unfortunately, they had not read Radical Focus or they hopefully would have done things differently.

They had read a lot of other books. They had printed out a lot of articles.

And they said, we're going to make sure we get this right.

We're going to put together a slide deck. that has five to seven objectives with five to seven key results each, and each key result is gonna have an owner, and we're gonna make sure that people are accountable for it.

And we're gonna really, really do this the right way.

We're gonna get that middle piece perfect.

So they spent a long time working on these OKRs.

OKR season ends. They file away the OKR deck, not to be seen until the next OKR season. we reconvene and spend a whole day scoring all of the OKRs, right?

And there are heated conversations about.

What's a .6 versus a .7? Is this a .9? Who really should be the owner of this key result?

Who contributed the most to it? And we get through this whole conversation.

Everyone's tired. And I'm like, there's just one question I need to ask.

I'm so sorry to do this to y'all, but how does this all add up to the company level growth goals?

People kind of look around and they're like, well, that, That wasn't what we did.

Like we set our team level OKRs and we went through the process and we made sure and we followed the OKRs.

We thought about the OKRs. And I said, yeah, but the company has a goal of let's call it bringing on a million new users in this year.

We're a growth team. How many users did we bring out? that there's a moment of silence and the leader of this team's really, really good leader.

She stands up and she's like, okay, we're going to do things differently.

She steps up to the whiteboard, puts one million on the right end of the whiteboard, draws a line, This is the year draws a little tick on the line.

This is where we are now. It's a smaller number than a million.

This is where we need to get to. If our conversation doesn't start with this, I don't want to have the conversation.

And if you are 51% sure that a different approach is going to get us 1% closer, I expect you to advocate for that approach.

And this is now how we are going to do everything.

I think about that all the time because it's subtracting steps, right?

It's making things less complicated. It actually is doing exactly what you described.

It's saying like, this is what the company cares about.

We're the growth team. We need to figure out how everything we're doing contributes to this.

And that story really stuck with me because it seems like it should be obvious, right?

If you're the growth team at a company with a growth goal, obviously that's gonna be something you care about.

But it's so easy in the day to day work of setting these intermediate goals, of doing strategy, of doing the things we do to make things just a little bit more complicated than they need to be.

So for this particular team and this particular moment, a good goal was looking at the company level goal and saying, if we're the team that's driving growth, We're accountable for this.

We're going to step up and we're going to do everything we can to make sure the company meets its ambition.

And it's so obvious, you know, if you come at it from the perspective you shared earlier, if you're the CEO, will I, would you fund this team?

Like if you see our goal is a million users, this team will drive us a hundred thousand users. assuming that's a lot for you like obviously we want that team to do great and we're going to give them the resources to do that because we they're going to contribute meaningfully to this goal.

Like it's very obvious as you see it. The trick is a lot of people think they are doing that and they're not.

Maybe one heuristic I think about as you're talking is just like, how do you know if you're doing this?

There should be a very simple spreadsheet formula of just Here's the company goal.

Here's your goal. There should be like one simple formula that translates up that adds to it. one why statement and or one mathematical operator is usually the way I think about it.

In some cases, like the story I told about that fintech company, It's something like upgraded users.

That's one step, right? You multiply that by the increased customer lifetime value.

In some cases, it's a smaller unit of the same thing.

So it's a subset of the revenue or growth that the company is trying to deliver.

I worked with a company recently that had a team rebuilding their ad tech platform.

This is a big company that does a lot of different things.

And at the heart of all of their different offerings is this ad tech platform.

And I was brought on to do a day long workshop with this company because this was a really important team and they were struggling to figure out what success looked like.

So I said, okay, what are your goals? And they said, here's the deck with our goals.

And I said, that's a lot of goals. I wouldn't be able to make decisions with those goals.

They said, oh, wait, wait, wait. No, we also have a Miro board because we went through this and we decided the deck was too much.

So we also have a Miro board. But as Miro boards tend to do, it kind of grew and grew and grew in all directions.

So now it's a big Miro board. Turned out they had two Miro boards because they had tried to do this twice.

So we sat down and we. did this really interesting kind of subtractive exercise where everybody got a post-it note to write down what they think the most important goal of the team is.

And then they would pair up and they would have to make it smaller each time, make it more concise.

If there were two things, get it down to one thing.

If there were 10 words, bring it down to eight words. make it smaller and more concise each time.

And we came up with two options. One was build a fantastic, wonderful, magical, beautiful platform to increase our team's profits by 20%.

Fair enough. The other one was build a stupendous, wonderful, fantastic platform to increase our team's profits in the next financial year from 20 million pounds to 100 million pounds.

And I'm looking at these and I'm like, okay, so we know that there is an expectation of revenue here, right?

There's an expectation that we will drive profitability.

But one of these is 20% and the other is 500%.

Where do these numbers come from? And the folks who had said 20%, they were like, that feels like a good return, right?

And what's interesting was, you know, I was telling the story when I was giving some talks recently and people will kind of laugh like, oh, they named the wrong number, but like, They were so brave to do that.

And them saying 20% is what actually unlocked the conversation at the team level.

Because somebody else in the room heard that and said, wait, I do remember something about profits.

There was some target we were supposed to hit, but I think I remember it being a lot bigger than that.

And they actually went back and found a town hall that their VP had given and buried in a slide in that town hall. was this hundred million pound profit target by the end of the next financial year.

So they have this number and they start to go like, oh gosh, that's a lot.

But it's a whole financial year, it'll be fine.

And we do, again, inspired by that leader I work with.

I just put this out on a whiteboard. I'm like, all right, 100 million in profits by the end of the next financial year.

Right now we're here. What else should be on this timeline? somebody said, well, we're launching this in October.

So I put October up there. I go, okay, so if we don't ship anything until October, and right now it's March, how much profit do we make until then?

And I said, about 10 million. Okay, so that means that between October and March, we need to generate 90 million pounds of profits.

And this team, I was worried that they were gonna freak out or they were gonna be like, oh, we can't do this, it's impossible.

But they were like, okay, it's time to step up.

It's time to do all these things that we need to do.

We need to ship sooner. We need to do more validation.

We need to do more testing. Can we commercialize things sooner?

Can we do more discovery to make sure that this is really going to have the impact we need to have?

Why are we doing this whole big relaunch?

Why don't we rebuild individual things? What impact will we have if we brought more people in top of funnel now?

Can we begin building our user base and then upgrade that user base?

What are the trade-offs if we do that versus if we bring people in?

All those things that I think is really the heart and the intent of these best practices. they came to life because this team had clarity.

They understood like, okay, we are accountable for something which is specific enough to drive some real urgency and which is impactful enough that we have to get out there and do all these things that we're supposed to do.

So that to me is a really good example of how if you start with this question of like, what is expected of this team?

What does success look like for us? It'll often lead you to the right neighborhood of what kind of unit of measure you want to look for, how the business is going to look to you, whether they're looking directly at revenue, whether they're looking at something else.

Okay, these stories are awesome. So basically, so far, the two steps that you've illustrated here of doing this correctly.

Step one is set team goals that are close to company goals.

And then step two is do this at every step of the product building process.

It's not just a one-time thing at the beginning.

Right. As you're doing OKRs, like that team I talked about, when you're thinking about your company strategy, when you're writing epics, whatever it is, keep that in mind. impactful goal, top of mind.

Don't let it slip away. Don't let it get cascaded into oblivion.

Because to your point, the examples you shared where you think you're just like, cool, we have our goal.

Let's go. And then you spend months doing this thing.

And then you forget, OK, this actually got disconnected from the company goal.

And everything you've worked hard to do is just, no one cares.

Yeah. Okay, what is step three? Step three is to connect every bit of work back to impact.

So this is when we get to the prioritization piece, right?

So impact estimation is something that is written about quite well, quite extensively in product management stuff. but it's something that's easy to not do.

I work with a lot of teams that want to know, again, the right best practice for doing Prioritization, whether that's, you know, should we use ice or rice or Moscow or whatever it is, what's the right way to do prioritization and. know again like it depends but if you don't have a clear and specific sense of what impact means You can't really prioritize effectively.

So this is where, again, everything comes back to that first step of the way you set goals.

So that team I told you about that had the goal of converting single product users to multi-product users.

One of the product managers on that team came back to me a few months later and said, hey, Matt, I could really use your help figuring out how to do prioritization.

Should we do ice? Should we do rice? Should we do Moscow?

I put together an ICE matrix where I scored impact and I scored certainty and I scored effort and I multiplied each one by each one and I have a list of the things we should do.

And I said, that's awesome. And I do really think it's awesome when people take the initiative to do the thing to say, like, I put this together.

Let's walk through it. So when they showed me this, you know, I said, let's start with impact.

I'm like, okay, well, here's the score for each one.

I was like, how do you, what's the score?

You're like, oh, you know, it's a lot of different things.

And I said, okay, well, we have a team goal of a certain specific number of users we need to convert by the end of the year.

So let's try to express impact as a function of that goal.

So rather than an abstract score, what is the most number of users we could convert in each of these different scenarios.

And understandably, they were kind of like, oh, you know what?

I don't know exactly. Let's just work through it.

We don't have to be precise, right? It's called impact estimation. not impact getting perfect number.

So for one of them, they were like, well, we can do this landing page.

I'm like, okay, well, how many people hit the landing page?

And they were like, oh, not that many. Like maybe a few hundred.

Okay, cool. So that's maybe a few hundred.

And there was one thing which they were really reluctant.

It had a high effort score and a medium certainty score.

And what they basically said was like, look, if we really wanted to do this, we could redesign the entire onboarding experience, right?

We could make it so that rather than us trying to like retroactively shuttle people into multi-product usage, we can understand them right when they join and get them into the right category of user right away.

That sounds amazing. What's the most impact that could have?

They were like, It would get us all the way there if we did it right.

But we'd have to work with these other teams and we'd have to work with marketing.

And there are so many dependencies and so many things outside of our control. that we don't know if we could do it.

And I said, that's okay. These are the trade-offs we make as product managers.

You will have some things to work on. that are gonna have less impact, but might be easier and more certain to deliver.

But if this thing could get us all the way there, if it's really the only thing we're looking at, which has really any chance of getting us to our goal, which remember, we came up with to answer the question, what does this team need to deliver to be a good investment for the business, then I think it's It's worth going for it.

It's worth having those conversations with other product teams.

It's worth talking to folks in marketing.

It's worth, you know, stretching ourselves a little bit and saying, this is going to be challenging to do, but if we can do it, we can really deliver on something which we're going to feel great about.

So, you know, the way that that third step manifests itself the most frequently tactically is are we estimating and measuring impact in the same unit of measure as our goals?

Because if we're doing that, then we're keeping ourselves honest and we're saying, does this actually have a chance of contributing Whereas again, if we get really clever and we come up with a proprietary scoring system and all these little intermediate steps, we can feel like we're doing really awesome work and being very, very terrible.

Smart. But we again run the risk that we are going to lose our connection with why we're setting about to do this work in the first place.

Such an important and often easily overlooked point, this idea that when you're doing rice or whatever version of ice that you do that impact should be based on impact to your goal, which is one level removed from the company goal. such like it feels so obvious as you talk about it and i hope most people know this but i feel like that's something people forget just like what does impact oh yes customers will be happier Again, this is not easy work, right?

Working in Prada means that we have so many different perspectives, so many different folks who have so many different priorities.

The stakeholder management piece of this is relentless and exhausting and it's really, really easy to lose sight of this stuff.

And it takes work and discipline and, as you said, bravery to keep bringing it back.

But I think, again, it is not only the right thing to do, but It helps you, at the end of the day, have a little bit more of a boundary between the work you're doing at your job and the stuff you're good at in your life.

Speaking of boundaries, a lot of the advice you share will involve people saying no. and pushing back and convincing people they're wrong, which is very hard.

That's not a natural happy place for most people.

Nope. What advice do you have? What have you learned works well for pushing back, helping people see how they're not, what they want you to build is wrong?

Yeah, so this is where I have the benefit, I suppose, of being a conflict-averse people pleaser.

So I've been through this. And I think the thing I am proudest of saying in product management practice is that If you're doing product management really well, you never have to say yes and you never have to say no.

You're giving people options and you're helping them understand the trade-offs.

So in keeping with this idea that there are things outside of your control, as a product manager, you're not always going to be the one who makes the decision. there are gonna be other people who come to you and say, build this, or who say, I don't see the value in that, do this, do that.

I want this, I want that. If those people are in a position of formal authority in the organization, I've certainly never had luck telling them no.

Furthermore, I've found myself in situations where they just know things that I don't know. where they're pursuing an acquisition.

So there are certain things that we have to do or can't do. where there's some serious financial challenge that they're working their way through right now, which is shifting around priorities, but they are not at liberty to discuss that with the broader organization.

It is quite possible that the folks who are asking you to do things that don't make sense, have access to information that you don't.

And that in trying to convince them otherwise, you are not only going to fail, but you are going to lose some of that trust and degrade that relationship that could in time be really important for you.

So I think the challenge is to say like, all right, you want me to build this thing?

Maybe. Let's look at the different things.

If you're going through these steps, if you say like, you know, I understand here's what our team's goals are.

Here's the stuff we're prioritizing. Here's the impact we think it could have.

If you're coming to me with something which is going to have more impact, heck yeah, I would love to build that.

That sounds amazing. But if it has an unclear impact or if it doesn't tie into this, then we might need to adjust the impact we're seeking to have, right?

If this is suddenly really important as with that story that was told in the book, right?

Sometimes it's like, all right, we got to do this.

Sure. That means that our impact projection is going to have to be adjusted this much.

You're not saying no, you're not saying yes.

You're helping someone who is in a position to make a decision understand the trade-offs that go into that decision.

And again, if you can do that, you're going to go home at the end of the day feeling better.

You're going to feel less like you lost a battle or that you were, you know, overridden by an unjust tyrant, that's gonna be more like, okay, I made sure they had all the information I would want to have if I were making that decision.

That decision is ultimately theirs to make and I'm going to do the best I can.

Tell me if you disagree. In my experience, you also want to recommend a path Because a lot of people don't want PMs just, here's all the options.

I have no opinion, no bias of any kind. You decide.

I find people want you to have a perspective.

Absolutely. Options and a recommendation is kind of the magic formula.

When I was working with MailChimp, we actually did a workshop with all the product managers at the company where we had people role play trying to sell in a single option versus multiple options with a recommendation and it was amazing how when you present a single option People's instinct is just to like... Well, I don't know.

You start poking holes in it, not because you're a jerk, but because... you're looking at one thing and you're like, well, what about this?

What about that? Again, all of your own anxieties and fears, and the things that you don't feel represented in there and where you're worried, what if this happens, what if that happens?

All of that kind of detracts from the momentum.

Whereas if you come in and say, here are three options, here are the trade-offs, here's the one we recommend, then every little bit of back and forth makes those options clearer and stronger.

I feel like people might miss that nuance in the way we talked about it, so I think that's a really important point to make there. let me come back to the three steps just for folks that are just like, cool, I'm excited.

I'm motivated. I'm going to Change of the way we operate.

I'll summarize real quick. So step one is set team goals close to company goals.

Step two is keep impact first at every step, don't forget, as you're building throughout the year.

And then step three is connect every bit of work back to impact.

Yeah. I think again, it's important to remind people this may be hard and annoying and maybe things are Going fine.

Everyone's telling you what to build. You're building and shipping and things are, it seems to be going all right.

I think an important part of this is just like, if you believe what you're building is not helping the business grow and succeed, either they'll let you go someday because you're not doing something that matters or the business will not work out and you'll be in trouble.

So it's like even if you don't want to do this.

You need to really seriously think about this, even though it's really hard.

Yeah. But maybe let me just think of that a little bit.

Say the business is doing great. Everything's great.

CEOs telling you all the things to build that sales guys and girls are just like, here, ship these features, everything's great and everything's working, business is growing.

What thoughts there are just like, is it just, nah, leave it alone?

Or is your sense, okay, most often this will not last and you should really start to work on these skills.

You know, it's funny, the teams I've worked with when things are going well are sometimes just as anxious as the teams I've worked with when things are going poorly. because they have a hard time attributing success to what they're doing, right?

They'll look at it and they'll say, yeah, we're doing great, but I think that honestly has more to do with marketing than it does with us.

Or yeah, we're doing great, but We're just in the right place at the right time.

Our business is doing really well. Our sector is doing really well.

We're just growing along with everyone else who's growing.

And I think as with most things, if you approach it with curiosity, There's a lot to learn from it.

So if you look at it and you say, yeah, we can't necessarily take sole credit for this, but marketing is doing awesome.

Let's talk to them. What are they doing?

Why is this going so well? What have they learned from this that we can work with them more closely?

If your sector is just doing really well, be like, okay, well, what about this is working right now?

What might change in the future? How can we understand this?

So I think the challenge when things are going well is to keep that curiosity going. and to keep celebrating the things, not just that your team is doing, but that everyone is doing.

And to take that time where you have a little bit more leeway where there's less pressure on you in the moment to build those connections with other parts of the organization to see where that really good work is happening.

You know, one thing that makes me sad is when teams look upon each other with envy and disgust, right?

When it's like this team's doing, like they're doing great work, but they're not held to the same standards that we are.

And it's not fair. And, you know, they're the team that everyone likes.

It's like, go talk to them because there's probably something you can learn from them.

And if they're the team that's getting positive attention, that's doing meaningful work, there's probably a reason for that.

And if you can understand that reason and you can align your work with that team's work, that's probably going to be really good for you.

So again, I think in a lot of cases, it comes back down to that control thing, right?

If we can't feel a sense of control over things are going well, because we did this, we tend to disconnect. ourselves from things going well and say like, well, I can't.

It almost feels dangerous to engage with that because what if we didn't do anything but good things are still happening.

And I think just keeping that openness, keeping that curiosity going, puts you in a much better position for when things inevitably begin to either plateau or decline, which is the cyclical nature of all things.

Wow. Profound there. Maybe to start to wrap up our conversation, what's maybe one question from the book or even from this conversation that you think Product leaders, product teams should ask themselves to help them solve problems that maybe they're not seeing and to help their team operate better.

I mean, I love the would you fund this team if you were the CEO question.

I know that that can feel a little confrontational sometimes.

So a gentler way of bringing that up is to say, what's one sentence you'd want to be able to say at the end of this year that would leave you feeling awesome about this team's work?

What's something, at the end of the year, everything went really well for this team.

You run into the CEO in the hallway and you say, I feel awesome because we did this.

And you'll sometimes get very different answers from different people on the team, building on those answers, saying like, okay, this is what you care about.

This is what I care about. This is... What I'm worried about, this is what I'm excited about.

That's how you get that magical people in a room building together or musicians in a room writing their next song.

What a callback to the beginning. Getting that conversation out in the open and getting people to talk about their perspectives and their expectations with the goal of bringing it together to create something better.

Bam. Matt, is there anything else that you wanted to cover or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

I think we covered it. I just leave people with, again, this hope that you can start to see the commercial realities and constraints of your business as opportunities as guideposts, as things that shape and structure your work, not as things that you single-handedly need to change or break down or transform.

Cause you probably can't and that's okay.

That's empowering stuff. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

Are you ready? Ready as I'm going to be.

Question one, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

Radical Focus by Christina Wodka is obviously like I cited a lot in my book.

I think it's the best book about OKRs. I love her style of writing.

I love the way she tells stories. I love the focus on focus.

This idea that again, the way you do it is less important than the result of the way of doing it.

I just find that so, so inspiring always.

The other book, this is a bit of a curveball, is by Alan Watts, the Buddhist philosopher.

It's called The Wisdom of Insecurity. And a lot of the way I talk about control and giving up control comes from that book.

It opens with a concept called the law of reverse effort. which is that sometimes the harder you try, the worse you make things.

And when it comes to setting goals, doing OKRs, doing strategy, I think about this a lot, that there is a tendency sometimes to put effort towards the overcomplication of things, which in turn Makes those things less effective what they are ultimately intended to achieve so highly recommend that book it it helped me a lot through some dark times mentally.

There's an idea in the book, he talks about how trying to keep yourself perpetually safe in an imagined future is effectively killing yourself to the present.

And that hit hard. That hit me really, really, really hard.

Highly recommend that book if if the things we've talked about today make you even a fraction of as anxious and fearful as they make me when I navigate them in my work, then I highly recommend The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts.

I was going to ask what the title is because that sounds really powerful.

Amazing. Amazing pick. Second question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

God, so especially when I'm in kind of worky, writey mode, my brain shuts off to all things that are not trash.

So I have been watching a lot of trash. I watched Temptation Island, the new season of Temptation Island on Netflix.

I loved it so much. It's Mark L. Wahlberg, who is the host of Antiques Roadshow. weaponizing therapy speak to torture people in this bizarre scenario and I

I should not love it, but I am only a human and a messy bitch who lives for the drama sometimes.

So I enjoyed that very much. I think it's the first Temptation Island call-out, and I love it.

Okay. Favorite product you recently discovered that you really love?

Yeah, so I'm really glad you asked this question because as a musician, I live in this world of niche products, which is so much fun because the economies of scale for music creators are just totally different, right?

You don't need to build a product that's gonna have like a billion users and create a huge return.

Like you can do something that like, a few hundred or a few thousand people get a lot of use out of and love.

And you're in this fun realm of kind of hybrid physical and digital and different types of things.

And when you asked me this question, the first thing that came to mind was this. which is made by an amplifier builder who goes by Milkman Sound in the San Francisco Bay Area. who took basically the circuit of a Fender amplifier and made a version of it that fits into this handy compact lightweight form factor.

So for me, as somebody who is no longer 22 years old and still occasionally tours with my friend's band, and has back problems, the fact that I can carry this really powerful amplifier around in this really well-designed aesthetically pleasing form factor. just feels like such a joy.

It's one of those products that really understands what quality means to its particular audience and I can go on tour and have things sound really nice without having to lug like a giant heavy thing.

And I love that. It's something for which I am truly grateful.

This makes me want to play music randomly.

But just so I understand how this works, do you still plug that into a speaker? yeah so you can have like i have a little speaker you can also plug direct into the soundboard at a club or for recording okay got it so and it has a little headphone jack too.

So if I want to practice in the hotel room before we play, I can also use this It does everything you would need this device to do and nothing more.

And it does it really well. And that is so delicious to me to have a product.

Another great pick. that I'm like, this does exactly what I need. so well and it's a delightful product.

Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life? come back to something my mom told me, I'm sure you've experienced this too.

When you're a person creating things in the world, there's a tendency to. look at the numbers and look at like, how am I doing?

And did this resonate? Is this good? Did this work?

And I've definitely worked on things, especially in my musical life, where the amount of effort and love and time and care that went into something didn't feel like it showed up in the result of that thing or the way it was received.

And I was talking to my mom about this once and she said, you know, I really believe that no good work is wasted. even if you don't see it right away, when you put good work out into the world, even if it only finds a few people It's never wasted.

If you do work you really believe in, it's going to have some positive effect on the world. that really stuck with me.

And I've carried that with me even when I think about how to write and what to say.

And when I start to worry about outsmarting myself and should I be more strategic in the way I message this and should I say something I don't really totally believe.

There have been a few times, not recently, but a few times like 10 years ago where I dabbled in writing clickbaity headlines because I was like, ooh, is this going to get more attention?

And There was one in particular that got really thoughtful critique from some people I really respect.

And I was like, I don't want to do this.

Like, I don't want to I don't want to put work I don't believe in out into the world.

And even if it doesn't do what I hoped it would do, I'm going to go forth with the belief that no good work is wasted.

I totally believe that. Final question. You wrote a ton of music reviews over the years.

I'm curious if there's one that was just like very, like people super disagreed with it or just one that you're super proud of.

I mean, I am a villain in certain corners of the internet for a review I wrote of Liz Phair's self-titled album.

I wrote this review when I was 19, when my worldview was toxic and very much in progress.

It was a really condescending, arrogant review written from a place of unearned condescension and arrogance not that condescension and arrogance should necessarily be earned um But it felt...

It felt righteous at the time in a way that is dangerous, right?

That toxic righteousness where you're like, I'm fighting something bad.

But then you realize that what, what you're fighting is not actually bad.

You're actually punching sideways and down, but you don't have the wherewithal and the maturity to realize that you are not where you think you are in relation to people and culture and yourself.

So I apologized for that review in 2019 and Liz Phair and I actually had a really nice little Twitter back and forth.

This was back when Twitter was still like a place where this kind of thing could happen.

And it was it was nice. to wrap that up in that way.

I still, you know, I still don't feel good about it because It was playing into some really toxic and hurtful dimensions of discourse, but what can you do if not look back on it and say like, yeah, I was wrong.

I was just flat out wrong. And beyond being wrong, I was being a jerk. will still periodically be somebody posted this a meme creator on instagram posted that review a couple months ago with a caption like, Matt LeMay, you will be dealt with.

And I was like, yeah. Yeah, like if I read that now, I would probably say something pretty similar.

So I think... As I said, I'm a conflict-diverse people pleaser.

I went through my kind of edgelord phase, and I don't think it did any good for me or for anyone else.

Wow, that was a much more profound answer than expected.

I can't believe people are still referencing this review from a long time ago.

How many years? 2020. It was 2003, so it was 22 years ago.

It was more than half my life ago. But this is the wild thing is that on the internet, it still looks new.

The first talk I ever gave in London actually was at a Red Monk event.

And I brought my teenage diary with me to make the point that like if something has you know 10 years of age on it as paper it it's contextualized by its own material existence right but somebody will go like oh i wonder what pitchfork thought of this record they'll see my jerk ass review and be like, Pitchfork published this jerk ass review.

Who was the jerk ass reviewer who wrote it?

And they'll find me and be like, hey, you.

You're a jerk ass because you wrote this jerk ass review.

And I'll be like, yes, I did write that jerk ass review from the place of being a jerk ass. but I like to think I am, you know, a person who has lived 22 years of life since then.

Your frontal cortex has developed more since then.

I think it doesn't stop developing until 25, 26.

I hope so. Matt, this was awesome. We covered so much ground.

We touched on everything I was hoping to and more.

Two follow-up questions. Where can folks find you online, talk about the sort of work you do with companies, and how can listeners be useful to you?

Yeah, so you can find me online at mattlemay.com.

Pretty straightforward. And in terms of how folks can be useful to me, hopefully I can be useful to them. whether that's through the books or through coming in to work with your company and help your teams focus.

I find that facilitating these conversations is a really big value add.

It's hard to have these conversations to do this. without some outside help sometimes.

So again, whether it's in book form or in me form, I hope that I can be useful to you and having these conversations in a way that's less scary, more accessible and leads you down that road to doing impactful work.

Awesome. And matlamay.com. And then what's the name of the book?

Where do they find it? Impact First Product Teams.

You can find it at all the places where you find books on Amazon.

There's an author-read audiobook, which I recorded right here in this room with this microphone.

I did all the musical interludes myself. because it was a great way to procrastinate when I did not actually want to read the book.

But I hope you will find it fun. Matt, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks so much, Lenny. This was great. Bye everyone.

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[Breaking the Low-Impact Death Spiral: A Guide to Impact-First Product Management]-[The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay]

📋 Summary

The Core Problem: The Low-Impact Death Spiral

The "Mini-CEO" Mindset

Three Steps to Becoming an Impact-First Team

Embracing Reality and Courage

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript