169 / Matt LeMay’s Keys to Delivering Impact That Propels Your Business Forward

If you were the CEO of the company where you work, would you fund the work your team is doing? In the early pages of Matt LeMay’s latest book, Impact-first Product Teams, readers confront this existential question. And it hits pretty close to home: am I worthy of my company’s investment?

As he explains to Dan Sharp and guest co-host Nathan Shapiro, the book is organized not around frameworks, but around the questions and challenges posed by product teams who want to be able to answer ‘Yes.’

In this episode of Product Momentum, recorded live before delivering the closing keynote at ITX’s Product + Design Conference, Matt urges product teams and individual contributors to tie their daily efforts to the company’s desired business outcomes. He also encourages product leaders to be clear about their expectations: “It’s okay to demand concise, clear answers about how they’re cutting through irrelevant distractions to focus on what truly matters,” Matt says.

Here’s what we talked about:

Supporting the business model. Product teams and ICs need to be able to draw a direct line between their work and how the business makes money.

“The business is model is intrinsically customer centric,” Matt says. “It’s how we exchange value. To understand the business model, we need to understand our customers. If we don’t understand them, we can’t succeed at implementing our business model.”

Avoiding OKR overload. OKRs, like everything else, are best when used in moderation.

“The ‘by the books’ optimal number of objectives is five,” Matt explains, “with three to five key results. If you have many more than that. you’re not actually measuring anything. I’m sorry. If you have 25 things that matter, then nothing matters.”

Cultural hurdles to impact. Team members who claim their company isn’t doing product “the right way” create unnecessary obstacles to a strong organizational culture. As do product leaders who leave to their teams the task of making sense of every new strategy that’s dropped at their doorstep.

“It pains me to hear people say that because I believe each and every one of us has the opportunity to do meaningful work that makes our organizations better,” Matt explains, adding, “and I think we should ban executive off-sites …. If [leaders] can’t figure out what’s needed within the context of the people doing their day-to-day work…and if your instinct is to close yourself off from the people who will apply your strategy, then you probably don’t really know how strategy works. I will never budge on that.”

Be sure to catch our entire episode with Matt LeMay, where he discusses:

• How to ‘manage up’ with clear value.
• Using data to estimate impact and validate hypotheses.
• Measuring impact of platform teams.

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