Matt LeMay: belief

Transcript context

…But maybe let me just think of that a little bit. Say the business is doing great, everything's great. The CEO's telling you all the things to build, that sales guys and girls are just like, "Here, ship these features, everything's great." And everything's working, business is growing. What thoughts there? Is it just, "Nah, leave it alone?" Or is your sense, "Okay, most often this will not last," and you should really start to work on these skills? It's funny, the teams I've worked with, when things are going well, are sometimes just as anxious as the teams I've worked with, when things are going poorly, because they have a hard time attributing success to what they're doing, right? They'll look at it and they'll say, "Yeah, we're doing great. But I think that honestly has more to do with marketing than it does with us." Or, "Yeah, we're doing great, but we're just in the right place at the right time. Our business is doing really well, our sector is doing really well. We're just growing along with everyone else who's growing." And I think, as with most things, if you approach it with curiosity, there's a lot to learn from it. So if you look at it, and you say, "Yeah, we can't necessarily take sole credit for this, but Marketing's doing awesome. Let's talk to them. What are they doing? Why is this going so well? What have they learned from this, that we can work with them more closely?" If your sector is just doing really well, be like, okay, well what about this is working right now? What might change in the future? How can we understand this?" So I think the challenge, when things are going well, is to keep that curiosity going, and to keep celebrating the things, not just that your team is doing, but that everyone is doing, and to take that time, where you have a little bit more leeway, where there's less pressure on you in the moment, to build those connections with other parts of the organization, to see where that really good work is happening. One thing that makes me sad is when teams look upon each other with envy and disgust, right, when it's, "This team's doing, they're doing great work, but they're not held to the same standards that we are, and it's not fair, and they're the team that everyone likes." It's like, "Go talk to them, because there's probably something you can learn from them. And if they're the team that's getting positive attention, that's doing meaningful work, there's probably a reason for that. And if you can understand that reason, and you can align your work, that team's work, that's probably going to be really good for you." Again, I think, in a lot of cases, it comes back down to that control thing, right? If we can't feel a sense of control over, "Things are going well because we did this," we tend to disconnect ourselves from things going well and say, "Well, I can't. It almost feels dangerous to engage with it because, what if we didn't do anything, but good things are still happening." And I think, just keeping that openness, keeping that curiosity going, puts you in a much better position for when things inevitably begin to either plateau or decline, which is the cyclical nature of all things. Wow. Profound there. To start to wrap up our conversation, what's maybe one question from the book, or even from this conversation, that you think product leaders, product teams should ask themselves to help them solve problems, that maybe they're not seeing, and to help their team operate better?…

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