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Would You Fully
Fund Your Own Team?

Matt LeMay
Author, Impact First Product Teams & Product Management in Practice · Product consultant to hundreds of teams
AUG 14 2025
The Question

The Career-Saving Question

YOURTEAM'SWORKCEO OF THIS CO.would you fully fundyour own team?
"If you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund your own team? Most people I ask don't know the answer right away."
  • Post-ZIRP: hiring and retaining is expensive, boards want cost savings, PMs are getting laid off
  • Daniel Ek's 2024 Spotify layoff memo: "too many teams doing work around the work, rather than opportunities with real impact"
  • Every product team must be able to articulate its top-line business impact, not just its output
  • The question forces the team to have that conversation before someone else has it at them
Framework

Three Steps to Impact First

1.Team goals ≤ one step from company goals2.Keep impact first at every step, all year3.Measure work in the same unit as the goal
"Are we estimating and measuring impact in the same unit of measure as our goals? That keeps you honest."
  • Cascade goals only once, or they get watered down "into oblivion"
  • Impact-first isn't a planning-week ritual; it's the question you ask on every ticket, every quarter
  • Proprietary scoring systems feel smart and hide whether the work will actually move the goal
  • An IC PM can do all three without waiting for the org to do it first
Matt's testIn most companies he works with, if you ask how the team's lowest-level goals add up to the company's highest-level goals, people look at you like it's an impossible question. That gap is the whole problem.
Diagnosis

The Low Impact Death Spiral

  • Teams pick low-impact work — small features, cosmetic tweaks — because it's safer and less scrutinized
  • Matt's analogy: your car's engine or its paint job? Rhinestones every time, because the paint can't break the engine
  • Execs see the shiny paint and clap; the engine keeps quietly getting worse
  • Result: a whole company of teams doing what Ek called "work around the work"
OKR season theater

Three weeks of workshops, five to seven objectives, five to seven KRs each, aim for 0.6 to 0.7. The team feels rigorous. The company keeps missing the top-line goal.

The paycheck warning

"If your company goes out of business, they're not going to keep writing your paycheck for two years because all of your OKRs were a 0.6 or a 0.7."

Playbook

Realign Your Team Without Waiting

  • Ask the CEO question in your next team meeting; don't wait for someone to ask it at you
  • Rewrite your team goals so each one is a maximum of one step from a company goal
  • Estimate and measure every project in the same unit as those goals (revenue, retention, conversion)
  • If a stakeholder asks for a low-impact feature, name the impact gap out loud before you commit
You are the IC PM"You can follow all the best practices, but if your company goes out of business, they're not going to keep writing your paycheck." No excuses to wait on the org.
Contrarian

PM Comforts Matt Rejects

✗Small features are safe featuresINSTEAD →✓ Small features are the death spiral. Nothing looks broken, and nothing gets fixed.
✗Doing our OKRs means we're on strategyINSTEAD →✓ Most teams' lowest goals don't add up to the company's highest goals. OKR completion without that link is theater.
✗Wait for the org to fix productINSTEAD →✓ An IC PM can do all three steps without asking permission. Impact-first is a choice at your desk today.
✗Doing more work ≠ more impactINSTEAD →✓ Ek's letter names it: teams doing work around the work. Doing more of the same work does not survive the next layoff round.
Based on Matt LeMay's episode on Lenny's Podcast. All ideas on this page are from the episode.Watch on YouTube
GO DEEPER IN THE EPISODE
04:23 Matt’s background and transition to product management06:47 The goal of Matt's new book12:00 How to stress test your thinking as a PM15:32 Thinking like the CEO17:33 The role of a product manager23:36 The low-impact PM death spiral27:47 Case study: Mailchimp’s transition to a platform company32:53 Radical acceptance41:24 Embracing constraints in product management44:23 Steps to become an impact-first product team49:38 Setting effective goals01:02:15 Prioritization and impact estimation01:07:58 Navigating stakeholder management01:12:35 Summarizing the 3 steps01:16:36 Lightning round and final thoughts
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