Matt LeMay: commitment

Transcript context

…And so, what is this a reaction to? Because I imagine many people hearing this are, like, "Of course, PMs, product teams we're driving business impact, well, that's why we're here." That's not actually the case in most cases. So first of all, just what is this reaction to? Is this the reaction to people being, like, "Oh, we're just going to build great products, we're going to listen to customers,"? Talk about the flip side of this. I mean, there's a couple of things. I think the main one is just more product managers and teams are getting laid off. That's a really scary reality right now. And if you look at the messages that are being conveyed by CEOs when they lay off these teams, some of them are pretty clear. The message that Daniel Ek from Spotify sent out with their layoffs in 2024 said, "We still have too many teams doing work around the work and supporting work, rather than focusing on opportunities with real impact." And that really struck a nerve because I've been on those supporting teams before. I've done the work around the work. And I've assumed that if I was given work around the work to do, that surely it must be critical to the business, otherwise they wouldn't have hired me to do it. I don't think that is a safe assumption to make. I think especially given that we are no longer in a zero interest rate environment, given that hiring and retaining employees is expensive, given that companies are looking at cost savings, I think we are in a moment where it is really incumbent upon each product team and each member of each product team to be able to understand, articulate, and work towards the top line business impact of their own work. Awesome. So where this comes from is, one, if you are not driving something that is directly driving business growth, you're not as valuable to the company. You're the kind of person that they'd lay off.…

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