Matt LeMay: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. Basically describes the job of a product manager very practically, very specifically, better than any other book out there. You have a new book out called Impact First Product Teams. I asked you what the goal of this book was and you said the goal was what are the steps that individual product teams can take to align their work to business critical outcomes, regardless of how their organizations approach product development? And I thought this was a really nice way of framing this conversation. There's two important parts to the sentence that you gave me. One is aligning your work to business critical outcomes, and the other is steps an individual product team can take, regardless of other business functions. So let me start with this first part. This is kind of you named your book after this concept of impact, first: Why is aligning work to impact and to business critical outcomes so important? It's important because at the end of the day, it is those business critical outcomes against which you and your team will be evaluated. That's the reality of working for a business, right? If you are contributing to the business in a way that the business at large can understand, that the CEO can understand, that the CFO can understand, if your team is a good investment for the business, then the business will continue making that investment. If your team is not a good investment for the business or you don't really know if your team is a good investment for the business, but you figure you're showing up, so probably it's fine, you guess, then that puts you in a really tenuous position, and a position that I think we've all seen not work out terribly well for everybody in recent history. 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.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.