The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay

When Product Work Loses Its Purpose: The Case for Impact-First Teams

Layoffs and belt-tightening have forced product teams to reckon with a blunt truth: good process alone won’t protect your job or your product if the work you do doesn’t move the business needle. In a conversation with Matt LeMay, author of Impact First Product Teams, the focus shifts from checklists and best practices to measurable contribution — practical steps any product team can use to make their work one step away from the company’s most important outcomes.

Why Align Team Goals Close To Company Outcomes Matters

LeMay argues that teams must set goals no more than one step away from company-level objectives, for example turning single-product users into multi-product customers where lifetime value increases are obvious and quantifiable. That proximity turns ambiguity into a clarifying yardstick: when leaders and stakeholders can immediately see how a team contributes to top-line revenue or key commercial KPIs, teams gain permission to make bolder choices and win resources to coordinate across domains.

How The Low Impact PM Death Spiral Starts And How To Break It

The podcast names a common pattern: teams choose small, safe-feature work because it’s low risk and visible, while the product’s complexity balloons and high-impact work becomes harder. LeMay calls this the low impact PM death spiral — dozens of teams add cosmetic features, dependencies multiply, program-management layers grow, and the company loses the ability to do the hard, revenue-driving work. The cure is subtractive: identify the commercial engine, remove friction, and prioritize work that moves the single commercial metric closest to company success.

Three Practical Steps To Become An Impact-First Product Team

• Set team goals one step away from company goals: pick a measurable unit that maps directly to the company’s top outcome.
• Keep impact first at every step: bake that one-step-away goal into strategy, OKRs, epics, and sprint work so it never drifts.
• Connect every bit of work back to impact: when prioritizing, estimate impact in the same unit of measure as the goal and present trade-offs concretely.

These moves aren’t theoretical. LeMay describes teams that discovered a single, obvious metric — like improving the rate of users who send their first email or converting single-product users to multi-product users — and reorganized priorities around it. That clarity powered cross-team collaboration, enabled faster decisions, and created measurable business outcomes.

How To Push Back Without Burning Bridges

LeMay offers a humane method for saying “no” without drama: never only present a flat refusal; present options and a recommendation, explain trade-offs in business terms, and estimate impact relative to the team’s goal. When an executive asks for a low-impact widget, frame the conversation around the team’s one-step-away metric and demonstrate what would need to change to make that request worth the business cost.

Constraints Are Not Excuses — They Are Guides

Whether you work in regulated industries, B2B, or finance, constraints define the shape of good product work. Instead of trying to copy big-tech processes, use your company’s commercial constraints as guardrails that make your decisions clearer and more defensible. Teams that embrace constraints and translate them into measurable units of impact often outperform peers who chase process purity.

Measuring Impact: Practice Practical Estimation

Impact estimation doesn’t require perfect math. The recommendation is to estimate using ranges tied to the team’s goal — how many users might a change move, how much revenue could a change generate — and to be explicit about certainty and effort. That approach keeps prioritization honest and helps teams choose whether to pursue big, risky bets that materially move the metric or smaller, safer experiments that inch toward the goal.

In short, the conversation reframes product work as a commercial act: set goals that are clearly connected to company outcomes, keep those goals front and center through every decision, and measure impact in the same unit as your goal. When teams do this, they stop adding rhinestones to a heavy hood and start lifting it up to tend the engine.

The end result is a product practice that balances courage with discipline: a willingness to take on cross-team coordination and difficult bets when the estimated impact justifies the risk, and the clarity to say no, offer alternatives, and surface trade-offs when it does not. These choices make teams demonstrably more valuable and better aligned with what the business actually needs.

Key takeaways include focusing on one-step-away goals, estimating impact in goal-aligned units, treating constraints as strategic guides, and always offering options plus a recommendation when stakeholders push for work that doesn’t clearly move the company forward.

For teams facing uncertainty, layoffs, or confusing roadmaps, the message is practical and clear: align work with business-critical outcomes, make impact measurable, and keep that clarity at the center of every decision so that your team’s work can be recognized as a defensible investment in company success.