Matt LeMay: observation

Transcript context

…That is a really good Nuance to what I said, and it makes all the sense in the world. Following these lines of what is the job for product manager, you have a really nice way of just thinking about it. What does a business expect from a product manager? Yeah. My favorite definition of product management comes from Melissa Perry's book Escaping the Build Trap, where she describes product management as facilitating a value exchange.You're facilitating a value exchange between a business and its customers. The actual shape and nature of that value exchange depends on so many things. It depends on your funding model, it depends on your business model, it depends on whether you're B2B or B2C, it depends on whether you're publicly traded or privately held. There are so many different variables that go into what a business expects from product teams. And one thing I've come to is that I'm probably too hesitant to generalize in general, aside from that generalization I just made, but I think that the best product managers and teams I've worked with are really curious to understand what success means to their particular business. So if that's a startup, how much runway do we have? What do we need to raise that next round? Are our investors looking for growth? Are they looking for profitability? What are they looking for in order for us to reach that next existential milestone? If we're a publicly traded company, what are investors looking for? What have we told shareholders? What's in our next prospectus? What are we saying we're going to deliver to the market at large? This information usually exists somewhere, but it's really easy to get disconnected from it as we go about the day-to-day work of doing product management. I've been in a lot of rooms having workshops and sessions with teams I work with, where they're pulling up the last town hall meeting to look for slides from their CEO because they're so busy, they have so many day-to-day things to deal with, that for them that town hall day is, like, "Okay, finally I can just not have to deal with people emailing me every 10 seconds. " It's a chance to take a deep breath and then get back to the stuff that really matters. But those top-level things, those promises that have been made to the market at large, to the board, to the shareholders, those are often a great place to start for understanding what exactly your business is looking for, so you can figure out how your team's work helps contribute to success in the terms that matter most to the business. That's an amazing segue to exactly where I'd wanted to go, which is this quote that is exactly what you just said, the question you should be asking, it's kind of a different version of the one you shared earlier, which is what are we doing to contribute to the success of the business?…

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