Matt LeMay
Co-founder and Partner, Sudden Compass. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authoroperatorfounderjournalist@mattlemay ↗LinkedIn ↗mattlemay.com ↗
Matt LeMay advises product and leadership teams at companies like Spotify, Mailchimp, and Google, having previously held product leadership roles at Bitly and Songza. He is the author of Impact-First Product Teams, Product Management in Practice, and Agile for Everybody, and a former writer for Pitchfork.
1shows
1appearances
21statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Matt LeMay said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
PMs should empower their entire team to think like CEOs
“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. So if the product manager takes that on as their sole responsibility and says, I'm the mini CEO, I think about t…”
Teams without a clear ROI point of view are in a risky position
“At the end of the day, money is how the impact of most teams is going to be measured. And if you don't have a point of view on why your team is a good investment, either in the money return it brings or in another return that is equally or more important to th…”
Measure impact using the exact same unit as your goals
“The way that that third step manifests itself the most frequently tactically is, are we estimating and measuring impact in the same unit of measure as our goals? Because if we're doing that, then we're keeping ourselves honest and we're saying, does this actua…”
Engineers often identify team impact goals before product managers do
“In my consulting work, it's more often than not been an engineer who's actually able to get to that specific impact level goal for the team. Sometimes before the product manager does,”
Cascading goals through intermediate layers increases risk of failure
“You've actually spent so much time and energy being really clever and cascading these things into these intermediate steps that each step has incurred more and more risk that we might not achieve that impact we seek to drive.”
Day-to-day sprint tasks never cleanly trace up to business impact
“I don't think I've ever worked for a company where these things add up to a perfect breadcrumb trail. You can trace back from, we prioritized these bits of work in this sprint because it adds up to this objective, which is part of this strategy, which adds up …”
Low-impact product work begets more low-impact work until layoffs occur
“Low impact work begets low impact work. The more low impact work you do, the harder it is to do high impact work, the more likely you are to do low impact work and so on and so forth. It goes and goes and goes until the next round of layoffs.”
Effective team goals orbit directly one level around the central company goal
“Whether you're doing OKRs or KPIs or Northstar metrics, whatever framework you're ostensibly using, if you use it well, it looks like that.”
Effective product managers never say yes or no to stakeholders
“The thing I am proudest of saying in product management practice is that if you're doing product management really well, you never have to say yes, and you never have to say no. You're giving people options and you're helping them understand the trade-offs.”
Spotify's 2024 layoff memo targeted teams doing 'work around the work'
“The message that Daniel Ek from Spotify sent out with their layoffs in twenty-twenty-four said, we still have too many teams doing work around the work and supporting work rather than focusing on opportunities with real impact.”
Product teams must articulate direct top-line business impact
“I think we are in a moment where it is really incumbent upon each product team and each member of each product team to be able to understand, articulate, and work towards
The top line business impact of their own work.”
Most modern software products become disconnected collections of features
“The product becomes As I think most modern products are, a collection of loosely connected features rather than a single guided experience.”
Mailchimp achieved core activation goals by subtracting features rather than adding them
“And they 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 that are rarely celebrated in the way that traditio…”
Commercially minded product managers are the happiest PMs
“You know, the thing that surprised me most when I was researching this book is that the commercially minded PMs I interviewed were also the happiest, which I did not expect at all.”
Business models reveal company ethics better than mission statements
“When you understand the business model, you understand the real world ethics and priorities of the company you work for, right? If you understand what the company's optimizing for, what they really care about, what trade-offs and sacrifices they're willing to …”
Mastering regulatory constraints creates a massive commercial advantage
“If you're regulated, your competitors are regulated too. If you can really understand those constraints and figure out how to work well within them, that's a huge commercial advantage for your business.”
Constraints that product managers fight against actually define their work
“What I'm actually saying Is that the things you think you're fighting against are usually the things that are giving your work shape. If you let them be.”
Team goals should link to company goals via a single mathematical operator
“One why statement and or one mathematical operator is usually the way I think about it.”
Presenting multiple options with a recommendation beats pitching a single option
“Options and a recommendation is kind of the magic formula. I did when I was working with Mailchimp, we actually did a workshop with all the product managers at the company where we had people like, Role play trying to sell in a single option versus multiple op…”
Product teams in booming businesses are often as anxious as struggling teams
“The teams I've worked with when things are going well are sometimes just as anxious as the teams I've worked with when things are going poorly, because They have a hard time attributing success to what they're doing, right?”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Matt's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-founder and Partner, Sudden Compass | 1 | 21 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |