The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay
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What single question can predict if my product team will survive the next layoffs?
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 are 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 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 gonna keep writing your paycheck for two years because all of your OKRs were a point six or a point 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. 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 asks you to build, and so
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 Josilo, 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, Mobbin, and more. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.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 CXN product orgs like Canva, Notion, Perplexity, Strong. Bra, 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/slash Lenny. That's E-N-T-E-R-P-R-E-T.com slash 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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What single question can predict if my product team will survive the next layoffs?
0:00–14:50
2
How does the “low‑impact PM death spiral” develop and why does it matter?
14:50–30:33
3
Why can following best‑practice frameworks actually increase the risk of being laid off?
30:33–47:03
4
What are the three steps to become an impact‑first product team?
47:03–1:00:18
5
How can product teams align their work with business‑critical outcomes?
1:00:18–1:14:14
6
What framework helps product managers push back on executive requests without saying “no”?
1:14:14–1:28:26
7
How did the Mailchimp‑to‑platform transition illustrate impact‑first product management?
1:28:26–1:31:58
8
What practical advice can product leaders apply today to avoid low‑impact work?
1:31:58–1:32:05
Speakers
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