The Product Manager’s Guide to Driving Business Impact
Skip the fluff. Hear the best bits.
Just 5 minutes. All value, no filler.
📓 Key Takeaways
📘 Founders sell vibes to investors. That’s fine when raising cash. But inside a company, teams need clarity. Teams aren’t shareholders. They’re the engine. And engines need more than moodboards and mission statements to run.
📘 You can raise a few rounds selling vision. Eventually, someone wants a return. That’s when reality hits. Founders often don’t prepare their teams for that crash. They sugar-coat the company’s state and never define what success looks like. Then one day it’s, “We’re out of money. Good luck out there.” And the team is left stunned.
📘 Layoffs don’t usually hit the execs. They hit the teams. But those teams were just building what they were told. That disconnect? It’s on leadership. But it’s product teams who pay for bad decisions with their jobs. So Matt Lemay argues: don’t wait for the perfect strategy. Figure out how your work connects to the business now. Or risk being the line item a CFO cuts.
📘 CEOs are support agents for the board. Founders don’t just make choices—they’re executing the board’s plan. Most PMs have no idea what boards care about. They should. It shapes the entire direction of the company. Learn what the board expects, then trace your team’s work directly back to that.
📘 The best goals are one step away from company outcomes. If the company’s chasing $10M in ARR, and multi-product users are worth more—then measure how many users your team can convert. Don’t go five layers deep in objectives, initiatives, and bets. Cut the fluff. Pick one.
📘 Most PMs ask: “What can I do with the team I have?” Wrong question. Ask: “What opportunity is worth chasing?” If it’s big, ask for more. If it’s small, shrink your team. Otherwise, you’re just keeping busy. That’s not product management. That’s overhead.
📘 One team should generate $3–5M in value per year. Why? Because most teams cost $1M to run. And some ideas will fail. So the wins need to carry the weight. That’s your bar. Miss it, and you’re not pulling your weight.
📘 Don’t just ask what “great” looks like. Define the floor. What’s the point where you abandon the plan? If you hit a wall after four weeks, stop. Don’t polish the same broken flow for three months. Kill it and move.
📘 You don’t need a revenue target for every team. But you do need revenue awareness. Maybe your job is to grow engagement. Maybe it’s activation. But someone needs to know how that ties back to dollars. Or it’s just a nice graph in an OKR doc.
📘 The ones holding out for the perfect “product-led” org. The ones who see themselves as martyrs in a broken company. Don’t be that PM. The happiest ones? The commercially-minded PMs. They make money. They move the business. They’re not stuck in a loop of frustration.
📘 To CEOs, boards, investors—they all want the same thing. A story that makes sense. A team that knows how their work ties to survival. Don’t wait to be told. Build your own one-pager. Define your impact. Make your pitch. Treat your CEO like your user. Just don’t do it with a 47-slide deck.
💬 Top Quotes
I would argue that the way that a lot of founders present to investors is also not grounded in a degree of reality that I would prefer to see, but I think that part of the challenge—that reality comes back to get you eventually, right? You can raise a certain number of rounds on vibes, but at a certain point someone's going to turn around and say, hey, that's nice, but we'd like some of that money we invested to have some returns now, please
And a lot of founders and CEOs just don't communicate that effectively to their teams. They don't say, look, here are the existential stakes of the decisions we're making. Here's what this business needs to live to fight another day. Here's what specifically success looks like. And in the absence of those clear goals, I don't think product teams can actually do what they need to do
I think product people tend to forget that most of us are working in the context of a corporation, which means that at the end of the day, we have to do things that are meaningful to the corporation if we want to keep our jobs and get promoted and do all the things that we generally want to do
I think our guts are finely tuned pattern recognition machines, right? There tends to be this dichotomy between data and gut. And I don't think that's quite accurate. I think our guts process qualitative information in a way that is very hard to kind of reduce down to a more quantitative system. So I trust the vibes. I think vibes are real. I'm a believer in vibes
If you are on a product team, you've got to figure out and make the case for why the work you're doing is valuable to the business. And just because nobody's asking you to do that doesn't mean you're not going to be evaluated against it
If product teams wait for a good strategy, in most organizations, they're going to be waiting a really long time. But if they can say, hey, we're working on this because we know the business has promised shareholders this return, and we're going to contribute this much of this return, then that's a much stronger position to be in
Everything orbits around the center of gravity that is the company's goals, rather than being cascaded so many levels away that you have no idea if anything matters anymore
When I started, I thought my job was to like find the next defensible thing to be busy with, right? It's like, well, I got this many engineers and this many designers, so like, what's the next thing we can do that I can point to and say, look, we're doing a good job. And that's how a lot of product managers come up
The commercially minded product managers I interviewed are probably the happiest product managers I've ever spoken to
The ones who are like, we'll never be product led, we'll never adopt the product operating model, nobody understands me, my life is a series of exercises in futility, and I'll never be recognized—it's like, yeah, you're going to be pretty miserable
Every product team should be able to draw a direct line between their work and those goals. Now, sometimes that direct line is we're not working towards those goals, right? I've worked with some teams, especially innovation teams, that are explicitly told, do not create revenue. Your job is not to make revenue. Your job is to explore new business models and new ways to create value
If you can understand what promises your company has made to the world at large, and you can tell them how your team is going to help them keep those promises, that, to me, sets up a product team very well to do good work
There are reasons why companies do long-term planning and trying to fight those reasons… it's just never worked for me. But kind of yes-ending around it—like, cool, yeah, do your five-year planning, let's make sure we have a quarterly business review to see how we're tracking towards that—that has actually worked better
It just doesn't make sense to me that we have these different cadences that are so disconnected from each other in a way that makes it really difficult for us to do any planning at all
Don't be afraid to tell that story. If you can stop assuming that somewhere somebody in a leadership position has this perfect narrative of everything and they're not giving it to you because they hate you, and you can instead be like, let me tell the story in the way that I see it… that might actually help everyone, including the CEO and the board, understand why this work matters and how the day-to-day work connects to the health of the business
