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 Eck from Spotify sent out with their layoffs in 2024, we still have too many teams doing work around the work. Even if you're told to build a thing that the execs are really excited about, you're still gonna get fired eventually. If you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund your own own team. Frankly, most of the people I ask that question to don't know the answer right away. Which is something called a low impact PM death spiral. 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 gonna keep writing your paycheck for two years because all of your OKRs were a point six or a point seven. Seven. Today my guest is Matt Lemay. Matt is a long time 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, Adrien Josilo, and Dan Corbin for suggesting topic 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, Jep PRD Mobbin, and more. Check it out at Lenny's Newsletter dot com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Matt.

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