Matt LeMay: uncertainty

Transcript context

…To make this even less scary, hopefully, I'm curious what your answer is going to be here. Do you find that people who take this leap and push back and try to change the way their teams are thinking and what they take on, do you find that even if they fail, even if they impact wasn't there and the project fails, they're seen more favorably and their career ends up doing better and they end up doing better even if the project fails? I hope so. I'm always super, again, it's outside of my control. I can't say, if you do these things, then you will be looked upon favorably by the people who manage you because I don't know those people, and maybe they're not going to react well. Maybe they're not actually... People are not always rational, and these things don't always play out the way you hope they will. What I will say is there's a story in the book, in Impact-First Product Teams about somebody who worked for a dating app, and they were given a project to work on, which had a very specific ambitious revenue goal. And at a certain point, it became clear that they were probably not going to be able to hit this because of other things they needed to do. So they went to the finance team and said, "Hey, we have to adjust this down." And the finance team said, "Yeah, of course you do. That makes sense. Let's adjust it down together." Would that conversation have played out the same way if they had not taken that step of saying proactively, " Based on what is happening in the broader world in the market, our product, we no longer believe we are on track to hit this, but we want to adjust so that the company at large can make better predictions and resource things accordingly"? I don't know. But I think again, if you are embracing that mindset that there are things outside of your control and your job is to do what you can from where you sit to contribute to the success of the business, I think you're certainly doing so much more by telling the business honestly what you think is possible and what's going to happen, as opposed to stepping back from it and saying like, "Oh, well, if we talk about it, we're going to get in trouble and nobody's going to believe us." And just that simple withholding of information does its own kind of harm. So I can't guarantee any kind of outcomes. I can't say, "Yes, this will be received with generosity and grace," in all cases, but I think it's the right thing to do. My sense is either you will be respected more highly because you are kind of solving problems for people, like higher ups that you're seeing, things that they should be seeing, and you're right, and they're like, "Oh, wow, Matt's amazing. He saw all this stuff and changed." Or you realize this is not the company for me. They don't value this. They just want me to ship this widget and that's all they want from me. I could do more somewhere else.…

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