Matt LeMay: belief

Transcript context

…In some cases, like the story I told about that FinTech company, it's something like upgraded users. That's one step, right? You multiply that by the increased customer lifetime value. In some cases, it's a smaller unit of the same thing. So it's a subset of the revenue or growth that the company's trying to deliver. I worked with a company recently that had a team rebuilding their ad tech platform. This is a big company that does a lot of different things, and at the heart of all of their different offerings is this ad tech platform. And I was brought on to do a day long workshop with this company because this was a really important team and they were struggling to figure out what success looked like. So I said, "Okay, what are your goals?" And they said, "Here's the deck with our goals." I said, "That's a lot of goals. I wouldn't be able to make decisions with those goals." They said, "Oh wait, wait, wait, no, we also have a Miro board. We went through this and we decided the deck was too much. So we also have a Miro board," but as Miro boards tend to do, it kind of grew and grew and grew in all directions. So now it's a big board. Turned out they had two Miro boards because they had tried to do this twice. So we sat down and we did this really interesting kind of subtractive exercise, where everybody got a post-it note to write down what they think the most important goal of the team is. And then they would pair up and they would have to make it smaller each time, make it more concise. If there were two things, get it down to one thing. If there were 10 words, bring it down to eight words, make it smaller and more concise each time. And we came up with two options. One was build a fantastic, wonderful, magical, beautiful platform to increase our team's profits by 20%. Fair enough. The other one was, build a stupendous, wonderful, fantastic platform to increase our team's profits in the next financial year from 20 million pounds to a hundred million pounds. And I'm looking at these and I'm like, "Okay, so we know that there is an expectation of revenue here. There's an expectation that we will drive profitability, but one of these is 20% and the other is 500%. Where do these numbers come from?" And the folks who had said 20%, they were like, "That feels like a good return." And what's interesting was when I was telling the story, when I was giving some talks recently, and people would kind of laugh like, "Oh, they named the wrong number." But they were so brave to do that, and them saying 20% is what actually unlocked the conversation at the team level, because somebody else in the room heard that and said, "Wait, I do remember something about profits. There was some target we were supposed to hit, but I think I remember it being a lot bigger than that." use somebody else in the room heard that and said, "Wait, I do remember something about profits. There was some target we were supposed to hit, but I think I remember it being a lot bigger than that. " And they actually went back and found a town hall that their VP had given and buried in a slide in that town hall was this hundred million pound profit target by the end of the next financial year. So they have this number and they start to go like, "Oh gosh, that's a lot, but it's a whole financial year. It'll be fine." And we do, again, inspired by that leader I worked with, I just put this out on a whiteboard. I'm like, "All right, a hundred million in profits by the end of the next financial year right now we're here. What else should be on this timeline?" Somebody said, "Well, we're launching this in October." So I put October up there. I go, "Okay, so if we don't ship anything until October, and right now it's March, how much profit do we make until?" And they said, "About 10 million." I'm like, "Okay. So that means that between October and March, we need to generate 90 million pounds of profits." And this team, I was worried they were going to freak out or they were going to be like, "Oh, we can't do this. It's impossible." But they were like, "Okay, it's time to step up. It's time to do all these things that we need to do. We need to ship sooner. We need to do more validation. We need to do more testing. Can we commercialize things sooner? Can we do more discovery to make sure that this is really going to have the impact we need to have? Why are we doing this whole big relaunch? Why don't we rebuild individual things? What impact will we have if we brought more people in top of funnel now? Can we begin building our user base and then upgrade that user base? What are the trade-offs if we do that versus if we bring people in?" All those things that I think is really the heart and the intent of these best practices. They came to life because this team had clarity. They understood like, "Okay, we are accountable for something which is specific enough to drive some real urgency, and which is impactful enough that we have to get out there and do all these things that we're supposed to do." So that to me, is a really good example of how if you start with this question of like, well, what's expected of this team? What does success look like for us? It'll often lead you to the right neighborhood of what kind of unit of measure you want to look for, how the business is going to look to you, whether they're looking directly at revenue, whether they're looking at something else. Okay. These stories are awesome. So basically, so far, the two steps that you've illustrated here of doing this correctly, step one is set team goals that are close to company goals. And then step two is, do this at every step of the product building process. It's not just a one-time thing at the beginning.…

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