The one question that saves product careers, Matt LeMay
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📓 Key Takeaways
📘 Layoffs and the Low-Impact PM Death Spiral
More product managers and teams are being laid off. Spotify's Daniel Ek made clear in 2024 that too many teams were doing "work around the work" instead of driving impact. This exposes the "low impact PM death spiral" - teams focus on cosmetic improvements and small features, which makes it harder to tackle high-impact work, until layoffs come.
📘 Think Like a CEO
A useful test is: If you were CEO, would you fully fund your own team? Many PMs struggle to answer. Teams exist at a cost, and if they don't clearly drive business outcomes, they are vulnerable. PMs should see their role as helping the whole team think like a CEO, not being the "mini-CEO" alone.
📘 Impact Over Best Practices
Product teams often obsess over OKRs, strategy documents, and process "done right." But cascading layers of abstraction disconnect the work from business outcomes. What matters is aligning directly with critical goals like revenue, growth, or retention - not just playing the OKR game.
📘 Three Steps to Becoming an Impact-First Product Team
- Set team goals no more than one step away from company goals. Orbit close to the centre of gravity - don't let goals cascade into oblivion.
- Keep impact first at every step. In strategy, OKRs, or writing epics, tie back to the company's top goals.
- Connect every bit of work back to impact. Estimate impact in the same unit of measure as company goals. Avoid abstract scoring systems that obscure the true connection to business success.
📘 Constraints Are Guides, Not Excuses
Teams often claim they "can't do product the right way" because they work in a regulated industry or have quarterly targets. In reality, these constraints are what shape the work. They should be embraced as context for making smarter commercial decisions.
📘 Courage to Push Back
Even if executives push for features, PMs must evaluate impact. Saying "no" outright rarely works. Instead, present options with trade-offs and a clear recommendation. This way you're guiding decisions with impact as the lens.
📘 Resilience and Happiness in Commercial Focus
Commercially-minded PMs often feel less stressed. Accepting that success depends on things outside your control frees you from chasing process perfection. Instead, your responsibility is to do your best to align with business impact.
📘 Good Questions for Teams
- If you were CEO, would you fund this team?
- What one sentence would you want to tell the CEO at year-end to show your impact?
💬 Top Quotes
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
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 that 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
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?
