The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay

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, we 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 of this company, 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 called 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 for a 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 at .6 or at .7.

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 Eriksson, Adrian Jozello, and Dan Corbin for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including Replit, Lovable, Bolt, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, JetPRD, Mobben, and more. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Matt LeMay. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret is a customer intelligence platform used by leading CX and product orgs like Canva, Notion, Perplexity, Strava, Hinge, and Linear to leverage the voice of the customer and build best in class products. Interpret unifies all customer conversations in real time from Gong recordings to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads and makes it available for your team for analysis and for action. What makes Interpret unique is its ability to build and update a customer-specific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback and connects that customer feedback to critical metrics like revenue and CSAT. If modernizing your voice of customer program to a generational upgrade is a 2025 priority like customer-centric industry leaders like Canva, Notion, Perplexity, and Linear, reach out to the team at interpret.com/lenny. That's E-N-T-E-R-P-R-E-T.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Pragmatic Institute, a trusted leader in product training and the go-to source for teams driving real results. This fall, they're back with the biggest event of the year, the Future of Product Management Summit. On October 16th, join thousands of product managers, marketers, and leaders for a free virtual experience built to tackle today's toughest challenges and explore the future of product. You'll hear from trusted voices like Teresa Torres and Matt LeMay, along with Pragmatic's expert instructors and other innovators who are transforming how teams tackle AI, prioritization, and product strategy. Whether you're building products, leading teams, or leveling up your career, this summit delivers practical insights designed to move your team forward. Registration is open but spots are limited. Save your seat at pragmaticinstitute.com/lenny. That's pragmaticinstitute.com/lenny. Matt, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.