In this conversation, you’ll learn:
- The one question that predicts if your team will survive the next layoffs (and why most teams can’t answer it)
- Why following product “best practices” perfectly can actually accelerate your path to unemployment
- The “low-impact PM death spiral”—how teams accidentally make themselves irrelevant
- How to push back on executives without saying “no” (the options, plus a recommendation framework)
- The counterintuitive reason why the happiest PMs are also the most commercially minded
- The Liz Phair review that made Matt an internet villain for 22 years—and what it taught him about product management
Here are the key takeaways from “The one question that saves product careers” with Matt LeMay:
- The one question: If you were the CEO, would you fully fund your own team? If you can’t confidently say yes (and explain why), you’re at risk of being seen as low-impact and vulnerable in layoffs.
- Why best practices aren’t enough: Perfect OKRs, rituals, and frameworks in the “middle layer” can mask a weak line of sight to real business outcomes. You can do everything “right” and still be irrelevant if your work doesn’t move topline metrics that leaders care about.
- The low-impact PM death spiral: Teams avoid risk and ship cosmetic “rhinestone” features, making the product heavier and coordination harder, which further pushes teams toward more low-impact work—until the next reorg/layoffs.
- Impact-first mindset (for any org, any constraints):
- Treat constraints (regulation, B2B, quarterly targets) as guides, not excuses. They clarify what impact means in your context.
- Think like a CEO as a team. PM’s job is to facilitate CEO-level commercial thinking across engineering, design, and research—not to be the sole “mini-CEO”.
- Three-step playbook to become impact-first:
- Set team goals no more than one step away from company goals. There should be a simple, explainable “one hop” formula from your team metric to the company’s top metric (e.g., upgrades × LTV delta = revenue contribution).
- Keep impact first at every step. In OKRs, strategy, epics, and reviews, start from the company goal line and ask: does this get us closer? Subtract complexity that obscures that connection.
- Connect every piece of work to impact. Estimate impact in the same units as your goal (not abstract scores). Prioritization frameworks (ICE/RICE) only work if “I” is expressed as expected movement on your goal metric.
- Prioritization nuance: It’s okay to choose high-effort, uncertain bets if they’re the only path with plausible chance to hit the goal (e.g., redesign onboarding to drive upgrades). Smaller, certain tasks may be fine, but recognize if they cannot add up to the target.
- Pushing back without saying “no”: Present options with trade-offs and a recommendation. Anchor trade-offs in the impact goal and show how priorities/targets would need to shift if a new request displaces higher-impact work.
- Commercial mindset = happier PMs: PMs who embrace business realities report less stress—focus on what moves the business, do your best, and let go of what’s outside your control.
- Signals you’re on track:
- Leadership immediately understands your goal without a deck.
- You can write a simple sentence formula from your team metric to company outcomes.
- Your impact estimates are in the same unit as your goal (users, revenue, profit), not just “scores.”
- Sample questions to stress-test:
- Would I fund this team?
- What one sentence would we love to tell the CEO at year-end about our impact?
- Can we show, in one hop, how our goal rolls up to the company goal?
- Common anti-patterns to avoid:
- Multi-level cascading that loses the plot (goals too far from company outcomes)
- Abstract impact scoring with no tie to the target metric
- Feature factory shipping that adds complexity but not commercial results