The one question that saves product careers

Matt LeMay, longtime product leader and author of 'Product Management in Practice' and the new 'Impact First Product Teams', discusses why product teams must tie their work to business-critical outcomes to avoid layoffs. The conversation covers the low-impact PM death spiral, how to stress-test whether a team is high-impact, and a three-step approach to aligning team goals, decisions and prioritization with company goals.

01Key learnings

• Ask whether you would fully fund your own team if you were the CEO; if you can't answer confidently, that signals a risk worth addressing.
• Set team goals no more than one step away from company goals, so leadership immediately understands how your work contributes to the business.
• Keep impact first at every step, from OKRs and strategy to epics and daily backlog, rather than letting goals get cascaded into oblivion.
• Estimate impact in the same unit of measure as your goal, rather than building proprietary scoring systems that drift away from business outcomes.
• Avoid low-impact work that adds rhinestones to the car; low-impact work begets more low-impact work and eventually invites layoffs.
• When asked to build something low-impact, present options with trade-offs and a recommendation rather than a flat yes or no.
• Even when business is going well, stay curious about what is driving success so your team can keep contributing when things change.
• Treat business constraints like regulation, B2B status or quarterly targets as guides that shape the right decisions, not as excuses for doing product poorly.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.