"more product managers and teams are getting laid off. The problem is the message that Daniel E from Spotify sent out with their layoffs in 2024. We still have too many teams doing work around the work..."

">> You have three steps to become more of an impact first product team. >> So, the first is in setting team goals, no more than one step away from company goals. Don't let it get cascaded into oblivio..."

"Today, my guest is Matt Lame. Matt is a longtime product leader, author of one of the most popular and practical books in the field of product management called Product Management in Practice. And ove..."

"steps an individual product team can take to align their work to business critical outcomes regardless of how their organization approaches product development. Tips for how to push back on stupid ide..."

"A huge thank you to Martin Ericson, Adrienne Joelo, and Dan Corbin for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your..."

"With that, I bring you Matt Lame. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret is a customer intelligence platform used by leading CX and product orgs like Canva, Notion, Perplexity, Straa, ..."

"righteous fact of the universe, right? My team would always be there for all time and it was just a matter of us finding the next thing to work on, which meant, you know, doing discovery and making co..."

">> Absolutely. I think that's that's exactly it. Yeah. Okay. And we'll talk about what to actually do and the steps you recommend to fix this problem, but I want to keep talking about impact because s..."

">> I think the way I've come to think about it is that the product manager is responsible for the whole team thinking like a CEO, if that makes sense. >> I love that. >> So, if the product manager tak..."

"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..."

"doesn't mean that your OKRs are going to add up to what your investors or your shareholders need to see. So, I think there's a tendency among product teams to really sweat the middle and to get really..."

"I've experienced this at again pretty much every company I've worked with. And it's been really interesting to see how often the breaking of that cycle comes down to individual product teams being bra..."

"but that's how it goes. And it's funny, I worked with Mailchimp for three years leading up to their acquisition by into it when they were on this really interesting journey of going from a single prod..."

"product team. She wanted a specific change in the rate of users who successfully send their first email. She was like, "As we build these new things, email is still where people are coming in. We want..."

"I'm worried about what'll happen if we don't do this right. I don't want to be on the product team that failed to deliver what matters most to the business. So, she went and worked with some user rese..."

"did get it done. And they got it done through subtracting. They streamlined the experience. They took out steps that people were getting stuck on. They made things easier. They did the kinds of things..."

"don't have to put myself out there. And what you're pointing out there is uh it's up to you to recognize what you're doing is not high impact and to have courage to push back and suggest something els..."

"works. The reality is that things outside of our control affect us. And I think that if we can internalize that, there's a real freedom in it. You know, the thing that surprised me most when I was res..."

"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 t..."

"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..."

"delivered, what value is being extracted, that I think puts you in a better position to decide, you know, if I were to help the company achieve success, do I feel good about that? Do I feel like this ..."

">> that's such an important point. Today's episode is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. I use Claude at least 10 times a day. I use it for researching my podcast guest, for brainsto..."

"workflow. If you want to try it out, get started at claude.ai/enny. And using this link, you get an incredible 50% off your first 3 months of the pro plan. That's claude.ai/enny. Okay, so let's shift ..."

"sad because yes, there's a way of looking at it where you can say, "All right, if these five famous companies do product management the right way, then anything that puts us in a different situation f..."

"huge commercial advantage for your business. If you're B2B, I honestly prefer working with B2B companies in a lot of situations because they have such immediate access to their customers and they can ..."

"product managers and product owners and project managers that everybody working on product at every organization can do if we again work with not against the realities of the companies we work for. >>..."

"the most important and where a lot of my work plays out is in setting team goals close to company goals. No more than one step away from company goals. This idea comes from Christina Wood's book, Radi..."

"this much more money next year, and we want you to tell us how you're going to contribute to this." And this was a really challenging conversation for this team because as much as people complain abou..."

"able to set a goal and from there we had this conversation about, you know, what's the number we would need to hit to make this team feel like a good investment and we came to a specific number and th..."

"from there. >> And the implication here is that if it's too far away from helping from people understanding what the hell are you guys even doing to help the business, that's the problem you want to a..."

"what's a 6 versus a 7, is this a 0.9? Who really should be the owner of this key result? Who contributed the most to it? And um you know, we we get through this whole conversation. Everyone's tired an..."

"And I think about that all the time because it's subtracting steps, right? It's making things less complicated. It actually is doing exactly what you described. It's saying like this is what the compa..."

"think about as you're talking is just like how do you know if you're doing this is there should be a very simple spreadsheet formula of just here's the company goal here is your goal there should be l..."

"did this really interesting kind of subtractive exercise where everybody got a post-it note to write down what they think the most important goal of the team is. And then they would pair up and they w..."

"there and do all these things that we're supposed to do. So you know that to me is a really good example of how if you start with this question of like what is what is expected of this team? What does..."

"cares. >> Yeah. Okay. Uh what is step three? >> Step three is to connect every bit of work back to impact. So this is when we get to the prioritization piece, right? So impact estimation is something ..."

"awesome when people take the initiative to do the thing to say like I put this together let's walk through it. So when they showed me this you know I said let's start with impact. They're like okay we..."

"like retroactively shuttle people into multi-product usage, we can understand them right when they join and get them into the right category of user right away. I'm like, that sounds amazing. What's t..."

"goal which is one level removed from the company goal such like it feels so obvious as you talk about it and I hope most people know this but I feel like that's something people forget just like what ..."

"advice you share will involve people saying no and pushing back and convincing people they're wrong, which is very hard. That's not a natural happy place for most people. >> Nope. >> What advice do yo..."

"only going to fail, but you are going to lose some of that trust and degrade that relationship that could in time be really important for you. So I think the challenge is to say like all right you wan..."

"you disagree. In my experience, you also want to recommend a path because a lot of people don't want PMs just here's all the options. I have no opinion, no bias of any kind. you decide. Um, I find it ..."

"make there. Let me come back to the three steps just for folks that are just like, "Oh, I'm excited. I'm motivated. I'm going to change the way we operate." Uh I'll summarize real quick. So step one i..."

">> Yeah. >> But maybe let me just think of that a little bit. Say the business is doing great. everything's great. CEO is telling you all the things to build, the sales guys and girls are just like he..."

"the organization to see where that really good work is happening. Um, you know, one thing that that makes me sad is when teams look upon each other with envy and disgust, right? When it's like this te..."

"something, you know, at the end of the year, everything went really well for this team. You run into the CEO in the hallway and you say, "I feel awesome because we did this." And and you'll sometimes ..."

"tendency sometimes to put effort towards the over complication of things which in turn makes those things less effective what they are ultimately intended to achieve. So highly recommend that book. It..."

"Watts. >> I was going to ask what the title is because that sounds really powerful. Uh amazing, amazing pick. Second question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? God..."

"know I enjoyed that very much. >> I think it's the first Temptation Island call out and I love it. Um, okay. Favorite product or Yeah. favorite product you recently discovered that you really love? >>..."

"form factor just feels like such a a joy. It's one of those products that really understands what quality means to its particular audience. And I can go on tour and and have things sound really nice w..."

">> Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life? >> I come back to something my mom told me. I'm I'm sure you've experienced this, t..."

">> I totally believe that. Final question. You wrote a ton of music reviews over the years. I'm curious if there's one that was just like very like people super disagreed with it or just one that you'..."

"like to think I I am uh you know a person who has lived 22 years of life since then. >> Your frontal cortex has developed more since then. I think it doesn't stop until 25 26. >> Matt, this was awesom..."