拯救产品职业生涯的那一个问题 | Matt LeMay
The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay
The Full Interview Transcript
Matt LeMay: More product managers and teams are getting laid off. The problem is the message that Daniel Ek from Spotify sent out with their layoffs in 2024, we still have too many teams doing work around the work.
Introducing Our Guest Today
Lenny Rachitsky: Even if you are told to build the thing that the execs are really excited about, you’re still going to get fired eventually.
Matt LeMay: If you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund your own team? Frankly, most of the people I ask that question to don’t know the answer right away.
From Pitchfork to Product Management
Lenny Rachitsky: Which is something you call the low impact PM Death Spiral.
The Importance of Business Outcomes
Matt LeMay: Is the dynamic in which every medium to large company I’ve ever worked with finds itself in, one way or another.
It starts with adding little features here and there, making little cosmetic improvements until the next round of layoffs.
Lenny Rachitsky: You have three steps to become more of an impact first product team.
The Reality Facing Product Teams
Matt LeMay: So the first is in setting team goals, no more than one step away from company goals. Don’t let it get cascaded into oblivion.
Lenny Rachitsky: You’re an ICPM. It’s up to you. No excuses.
Expressing Impact on Your Resume
Matt LeMay: You can follow all the best practices, but 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: Today my guest is Matt Lameé. 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.
Over the course of his consulting practice, he’s worked with hundreds of product teams, helping them improve how they operate and drive more impact, more consistently.
From that experience, he wrote and recently published a new book called Impact First Product Teams, that I could not agree more with.
In our conversation, Matt shares why it is so essential to align all of your work with business critical outcomes, especially if you fear layoffs at your company.
We talk about the low impact death spiral that many product teams fall into. What 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 ideas that execs ask you to build, and so much more.
The message in this episode is one that I believe every product manager needs to hear, especially if you don’t work at a high-flying Silicon Valley tech company.
A huge thank you to Martin Erickson, Adrian Joselow, 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 favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including Replit, Lovable, Bolt, NNN, Linear Superhuman, Descript, Wispr Flow, Gamma Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, JetPRD, Mobbin, and more. Check it out at Lenny’snewsletter.com and click bundle.
What makes Enterpret unique is its ability to build and update a customer-specific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback, and connects that customer feedback to critical metrics like Revenue and CSAT.
If modernizing your voice of customer program to a generational upgrade is a 2025 priority, like customer-centric industry leaders like Canva, Notion, Perplexity, and Linear, reach out to the team at interpret.com/Lenny. That’s E-N-T-E-R-P-R-E-T dot com slash Lenny.
This fall, they’re back with the biggest event of the year: the Future of Product Management Summit. On October 16th, join thousands of product managers, marketers, and leaders for free virtual experience built to tackle today’s toughest challenges and explore the future of product.
You’ll hear from trusted Voices like Teresa Torres and Matt Lameé, along with Pragmatic’s expert instructors and other innovators who are transforming how teams tackle AI, prioritization and product strategy.
Whether you’re building products, leading teams, or leveling up your career, this summit delivers practical insights designed to move your team forward.
Registration is open, but spots are limited. Save your seat at pragmaticinstitute.com /Lenny, that’s pragmaticinstitute.com/Lenny.
Matt, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Stress Test: Fully Funding Your Team
Matt LeMay: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really, really excited to be here.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’m even more excited. You have a really interesting background. I usually don’t spend time on background, but I thought this would be fun.
I was looking at your LinkedIn and your background. The beginning of your career you spent 13 years at Pitchfork reviewing music.
Are Product Managers Mini-CEOs?
Matt LeMay: Yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: Reviewing artists. Pitchfork was a massive deal. I don’t know where it is today, but it was the most influential music review site. Is it still a big deal or is it less so?
The Essence of Product Management: Value Exchange
Matt LeMay: It is still a big deal. It was much less of a big deal when I started working for them and I was a 16-year-old music nerd, writing record reviews in my bedroom at my parents’ apartment.
The Low-Impact PM Death Spiral
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, so what I’m hearing is you helped make them a big deal. Excellent. That’s impacts. We’re going to talk all about impact.
The Courage to Break the Cycle
Matt LeMay: If I were better at telling my own story, that’s exactly what I’d be saying, is that before I started, I was product manager number one at Pitchfork.
Lenny Rachitsky: Funny enough, you look at your resume, you went into product management from Pitchfork. Very typical career path.
By the way, if you’re on YouTube watching, there’s a lot of musical paraphernalia behind you, an awesome guitar, so clearly there’s a thread of music throughout your background.
The MailChimp Case Study
Matt LeMay: Yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: Let me ask you this question: what is most similar about making music, and even critiquing music, and building great product?
Aggressively Accepting Reality
Matt LeMay: The magic lies in the way people work together. That’s really what I think has been the consistent thread between all the work that I’ve done.
I spent years as a touring musician. I still occasionally tour in my friend Will Chef’s band. And it’s that magic of people with different perspectives, different ideas, building into something that is somehow greater than the sum of its individual parts and perspectives.
That’s what makes this interesting. That’s what makes music magical. That’s what makes product development interesting, especially in the age of AI.
When people have the opportunity to, I think, close themselves off from the messier parts of human interaction, from those moments where you realize that your perspective might be limited, that somebody else might be able to expose you to something, show you a way of working, show you a way of seeing that you haven’t seen before, I think that those interactions, that ability to learn from and build with each other, is only going to become more valuable and more precious, frankly, as technology continues to do what technology does.
Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, what a beautiful answer.
Taking Action Despite Company Dynamics
Matt LeMay: Thank you.
Three Steps to an Impact-First Product Team
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that. So let’s get to the task at hand.
Step One: Aligning Team and Company Goals
Matt LeMay: Yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: So you’re known for writing one of the most popular books in the field of product management called Product Management in Practice.
Are Revenue Goals Right for Teams?
Matt LeMay: I suppose I am.
Examples of Good Goals
Lenny Rachitsky: Yes. Basically describes the job of a product manager very practically, very specifically, better than any other book out there.
You have a new book out called Impact First Product Teams. I asked you what the goal of this book was and you said the goal was what are the steps that individual product teams can take to align their work to business critical outcomes, regardless of how their organizations approach product development?
And I thought this was a really nice way of framing this conversation. There’s two important parts to the sentence that you gave me.
One is aligning your work to business critical outcomes, and the other is steps an individual product team can take, regardless of other business functions.
So let me start with this first part. This is kind of you named your book after this concept of impact, first: Why is aligning work to impact and to business critical outcomes so important?
Refining Goals Through Subtraction
Matt LeMay: It’s important because at the end of the day, it is those business critical outcomes against which you and your team will be evaluated. That’s the reality of working for a business, right?
If you are contributing to the business in a way that the business at large can understand, that the CEO can understand, that the CFO can understand, if your team is a good investment for the business, then the business will continue making that investment.
If your team is not a good investment for the business or you don’t really know if your team is a good investment for the business, but you figure you’re showing up, so probably it’s fine, you guess, then that puts you in a really tenuous position, and a position that I think we’ve all seen not work out terribly well for everybody in recent history.
Lenny Rachitsky: And so, what is this a reaction to? Because I imagine many people hearing this are, like, “Of course, PMs, product teams we’re driving business impact, well, that’s why we’re here.”
That’s not actually the case in most cases. So first of all, just what is this reaction to? Is this the reaction to people being, like, “Oh, we’re just going to build great products, we’re going to listen to customers,”? Talk about the flip side of this.
Visualizing Goals as Timelines
Matt LeMay: I mean, there’s a couple of things. I think the main one is just more product managers and teams are getting laid off. That’s a really scary reality right now.
And if you look at the messages that are being conveyed by CEOs when they lay off these teams, some of them are pretty clear.
The message that Daniel Ek from Spotify sent out with their layoffs in 2024 said, “We still have too many teams doing work around the work and supporting work, rather than focusing on opportunities with real impact.”
And that really struck a nerve because I’ve been on those supporting teams before. I’ve done the work around the work. And I’ve assumed that if I was given work around the work to do, that surely it must be critical to the business, otherwise they wouldn’t have hired me to do it.
I don’t think that is a safe assumption to make. I think especially given that we are no longer in a zero interest rate environment, given that hiring and retaining employees is expensive, given that companies are looking at cost savings, 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. So where this comes from is, one, if you are not driving something that is directly driving business growth, you’re not as valuable to the company. You’re the kind of person that they’d lay off.
Step Three: Linking Every Task to Impact
Matt LeMay: Yeah.
Impact Should Tie to Team Goals
Lenny Rachitsky: There’s also a flip side of finding a job. It feels like if you have shown impact in your resume, “Here’s all the impact I’ve driven,” this also helps you get hired. True?
Matt LeMay: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it’s the most common resume advice I see, is show the number, show the impact, say what you did.
I have a friend who does resume coaching, and I showed her my resume a couple of years ago. And she said, “I love your resume except for one thing. Why do you write like a little girl? Say what you did, say what your contributions were. Don’t say ‘I helped. I may have maybe helped people do this’. Say the impact. Put the number on it.” And I think I needed to hear that from her because I think there is a tendency, especially for those of us who do really thrive in that collaborative environment, who our nature is to not want to take credit for work that could only exist via the contributions of many people with diverse experiences and perspectives.
It’s really hard to say, “Well, I did this and I contributed to that,” but that’s part of why I wrote this book at the team level, because I think for folks, like myself, who really enjoy and thrive in that team environment, if you can look at the product team as the foundational unit of impact and say, “We delivered this. We were able to work together to have this impact for the business,” that feels really good and also speaks directly to the work that that team did together.
On Saying No and Pushing Back
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s a really interesting insight. I think a lot of this comes from just PMs naturally are trained to deflect credit and to include, say ‘we’ in everything and just this person did that. So I get where that comes from. So most listeners will probably still be thinking, “Yes, I’m driving impact, I’m great. I don’t have a problem here. I don’t to change, need to change anything.” What are some ways to stress test your thinking? Maybe some questions to ask yourself or maybe your team of just, like, “Okay, maybe I’m not?”
The Magic of Options and Recommendations
Matt LeMay: So the first question I ask most of the teams I work with is if you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund your own team?
And that is a small question that can provoke some big reactions. Because, for me, when I was working as a product manager, I truly believed that my job was to find the next most defensible thing to build, build it, celebrate it, find the next most defensible thing to build, and so on and so forth. Rinse and repeat forever and ever.
I kind of assumed that the existence of my team was this 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 doing discovery and making concessions to what leadership wanted and doing all that stakeholder management.
But the idea that my team came at a cost to the business, that at some point somebody might look at my team on a spreadsheet and say, “Who are these very expensive people? Why do we need them? Do we actually need them?” It just wasn’t something that crossed my mind because I wasn’t in the room for those conversations. That wasn’t how I was thinking about my team’s work.
So I like asking this question because it’s a perspective shift. It gets you thinking if you were personally accountable for the existential market-level success of this business, would you invest in your team?
And frankly, most of the people I ask that question to don’t know the answer right away. They’re not sure. They say, “I think so,” or, “Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because… ” And then you can see the gears turning.
And again, to me that is a risky situation to be in because if you can’t answer that question as a member of the team, nobody else in the organization is going to be as well-equipped to answer that question as you are.
So bringing that question to the team, asking it and answering it proactively and collaboratively and being ready to say, “Okay, if we can’t answer this confidently, what are the changes we need to make? Do we need to change our purview? Do we need to change our goals? Who do we need to talk to? What do we need to do in order to make this happen, in order to answer that question confidently?” We are much better off having that conversation at the team level than waiting for someone else to have it for us, or at us.
Lenny Rachitsky: So is kind of the signal here is if you can’t confidently say yes, asking yourself this question or your team talking through this and having a clear answer, there’s maybe a potential problem that you need to work on?
The Three-Step Framework Recap
Matt LeMay: Absolutely. I think that’s exactly it, yeah.
When Everything Goes Well
Lenny Rachitsky: 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 sometimes it takes a while for people to be convinced, “Okay, I need to really do this,” versus, “Okay, here’s the ways to do this.”
Staying Open and Curious
Matt LeMay: Yeah. It has taken me until now, until writing this book to be convinced, and I still feel like I need to be convinced a little bit sometimes.
Lenny Rachitsky: I think the layoffs are a really good convincing function for people.
A Question Worth Asking Yourself
Matt LeMay: Yes.
Lightning Q&A Round
Lenny Rachitsky: Where they’re seeing all these PMs being laid off and just, like, “How do I avoid that?” And this is basically the answer to that, is here’s how you avoid getting laid off.
There’s an interesting implication in what you describe here where you encourage the PM and the product team to think like the CEO.
This touches on something I’ve been meaning to write about, but I haven’t, which is a lot of people, there’s this argument are PMs the mini CEO?
In my mind, the PM is 100% the mini CEO, in terms of they think like the CE or they should within the team. They’re the same; their job is to think about the business like a CEO within the team.
Obviously they’re not in charge of everyone. They can’t let get anyone go. The reporting lines are not the same. But I feel like that’s a really good lens for the job of a PM, is just you’re like the mini CEO on a team, making sure you’re building the right things, thinking about the business, solving real problems that matter.
Recommended Books and Shows
Matt LeMay: 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that.
My Favorite Products
Matt LeMay: So if the product manager takes that on as their sole responsibility and says, “I’m the mini CEO. I think about the business,” that’s a missed opportunity.
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, because the engineer is thinking in systems, is thinking about, “Okay, I know this system, I know this other system. I’ve had this conversation with this person. I think I see how this can all fit together.”
Sometimes it’s a designer or a UX researcher who understands what customers need and who has that direct firsthand knowledge.
So I think the way that I certainly initially misinterpreted the mini CEO thing was you are solely in charge of this, as opposed to you are the person who brings that kind of CEO-level commercial thinking to the team. And I’ve been much more inclined of late to see the product manager’s job as to bring in and facilitate that conversation, rather than to be the sole owner of that conversation.
My Personal Life Motto
Lenny Rachitsky: That is a really good Nuance to what I said, and it makes all the sense in the world.
Following these lines of what is the job for product manager, you have a really nice way of just thinking about it. What does a business expect from a product manager?
Matt LeMay: Yeah. My favorite definition of product management comes from Melissa Perry’s book Escaping the Build Trap, where she describes product management as facilitating a value exchange.You’re facilitating a value exchange between a business and its customers.
The actual shape and nature of that value exchange depends on so many things. It depends on your funding model, it depends on your business model, it depends on whether you’re B2B or B2C, it depends on whether you’re publicly traded or privately held. There are so many different variables that go into what a business expects from product teams.
And one thing I’ve come to is that I’m probably too hesitant to generalize in general, aside from that generalization I just made, but I think that the best product managers and teams I’ve worked with are really curious to understand what success means to their particular business.
So if that’s a startup, how much runway do we have? What do we need to raise that next round? Are our investors looking for growth? Are they looking for profitability? What are they looking for in order for us to reach that next existential milestone?
If we’re a publicly traded company, what are investors looking for? What have we told shareholders? What’s in our next prospectus? What are we saying we’re going to deliver to the market at large?
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 and sessions with teams I work with, where they’re pulling up the last town hall meeting to look for slides from their CEO because they’re so busy, they have so many day-to-day things to deal with, that for them that town hall day is, like, “Okay, finally I can just not have to deal with people emailing me every 10 seconds.” It’s a chance to take a deep breath and then get back to the stuff that really matters.
But those top-level things, those promises that have been made to the market at large, to the board, to the shareholders, those are often a great place to start for understanding what exactly your business is looking for, so you can figure out how your team’s work helps contribute to success in the terms that matter most to the business.
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s an amazing segue to exactly where I’d wanted to go, which is this quote that is exactly what you just said, the question you should be asking, it’s kind of a different version of the one you shared earlier, which is what are we doing to contribute to the success of the business?
Matt LeMay: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: So what is it that you think people are thinking instead most often?
Matt LeMay: It’s interesting. We live in a world where for the last 20 years of product development, we’ve been all about best practices. We love best practices.
And I love best practices too. I think best practices can be really valuable, can be really useful. I love how much knowledge sharing there is out there. When I started 15 years ago, it was so much harder to get any sense of how anybody was doing anything.
But I think the downside of this is that there are a lot of folks who are really, really fixated on doing things the right way. And a lot of the writing and thinking about doing things the right way exists in kind of this middle layer, between impact and day-to-day work.
So if you have impact, the overall success of the business, revenue, growth, profits. Then from there you set objectives and you do initiatives, and then you do bets, and then you make a strategy, and then you do your day-to-day work.
I think the tendency among a lot of product teams is to key to those middle pieces, to say, “Okay, what we’re doing is on strategy. What we’re doing is part of objectives. We did OKRs, right? We spent three weeks coming up with our OKRs for three months. It’s OKR season, everybody. We have to pretend to care about our goals, and I read a book that says we have to have five to seven objectives with five to seven key results, and we want the score of each one to be a 0.6 or a 0.7.”
And at the end of the day, 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.
Each time we abstract things out, each time we cascade things from impact to something else until we wind up with a checklist of features to build, we’re assuming that if we then build that checklist of features… We will have a successful business.
But honestly, most of the companies and teams I work with, if I ask them how their lowest-level goals add up to their highest-level goals, they look at me like I just asked them the most impossible question in the world.
Because by the time you get things down to that level, maybe it’s going to work, maybe it’s not going to work. There are assumptions baked into each of those levels.
You might go through the motions of doing OKRs the right way or doing strategy the right way, but that doesn’t guarantee that your strategy is going to work. It 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 stressed out if the middle is not in perfect theoretical harmony with itself. If the objectives are a little out of line with the initiatives, are a little out of line with the bets, are a little out of line with the domains.
But at the end of the day, 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 to this initiative, which is part of this bet, which will deliver this much impact.” It’s just not how things work in the real world.
Lenny Rachitsky: I feel like a lot of listeners are, like, “That sounds very familiar,” exactly what you just described. Again, we’re going to talk about what to change and how to make work better to actually align your teams with impact. But I want to first talk about something that follows this thread you’re on, which is something you call the Low Impact PM Death Spiral. Talk about what that looks like.
Matt LeMay: The Death Spiral.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love the hands.
Matt LeMay: The Low Impact Death Spiral is the dynamic in which every-
… impact death spiral is the dynamic in which every medium to large company I’ve ever worked with finds itself in one way or another. And honestly, a lot of small product companies do as well, and it goes something like this. It starts with teams taking on low impact work. Adding little features here and there, making little cosmetic improvements because it’s easier, it invites less scrutiny and you’re less likely to mess up something important, right? The analogy I use sometimes is if you’re working on a car, if you put your hands in the engine, you might make the car run really well or you might make it so that the car doesn’t run at all. If you have the option of doing that or decking out the car with a paint job and rhinestones and making it look really, really cool, what are you going to choose to do? I know for me, I would choose the rhinestones every time because then the car runs however it runs. Whoever else is the expert in engines can fix the engine, but I’m going to do this thing which everyone can see. All the executives can look at it and say, “Wow, look at how cool this car looks,” and it’s not going to do any harm, right? What’s the worst that could happen? We can always take the paint off.
The problem is if you have 10 teams adding rhinestones to a car, eventually the hood of the car is going to be so heavy that you can’t lift it to get to the engine anymore, and that’s exactly what happens in most product organizations. As you have more and more teams adding in these little features, making little enhancements, adding features, which might get some usage, but they’re not going to take away anything meaningful, they’re not going to mess with the commercial engine of the business. You have more folks building in and the hood of the car gets heavier and heavier, the product gets more and more complicated.
You have all these little bits that have little dependencies on each other and the product becomes as, I think most modern products are a collection of loosely connected features rather than a single guided experience. What does that mean? That means internally, building anything becomes a lot harder, right? Because there’s 10 product teams that have to manage dependencies whenever you want to build something, so companies start adding program management layers. They’re like, “We have too many meetings. We need to reorg for program management because reorgs fix everything and we need to make sure that we have all these layers and people are connected and we’re doing dependency management.” But as you add more of those things, it becomes harder and harder to do high-impact work.
The hood just gets heavier and heavier and heavier, which in turn sends teams deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of low-impact work. 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, and this is a real problem.
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 brave enough to look at their own work and look at what matters to the business and say, “You know what? We are not going to incur the risk of being a low-impact team anymore. We are going to proactively seek out high- impact work and we’re going to deliver, even if it means we have to coordinate with a lot of other teams. Even if it means that suddenly the executive team takes a really big interest in the work that we’re doing. We’re going to see that as signs that the work we’re doing matters not as things that are going to be an impediment to getting the work done.”
Lenny Rachitsky: As you just kind of alluded to, there’s a big implication here of even if you are told to build a thing that the execs are really excited about, that is low impact in your opinion, that’s no excuse. You’re still going to get fired eventually, even though they’re telling you to build it. It sucks, but that’s how it goes.
Matt LeMay: It’s funny, I worked with MailChimp for three years leading up to their acquisition by Intuit, when they were on this really interesting journey of going from a single product company to a platform company, which is a journey that a lot of companies are on. Where they’ve found success in one part of the market and they say, “You know what? We recognize that there’s a value add in working more horizontally and giving people a suite of tools they can use. We want to build these tools and really make sure that we are meeting the needs of our small and medium business customers.”
So I was brought on shortly after they did a reorg. They went into a domains model. They had different teams that were supposed to be experts on different parts of this marketing platform that were building in new features and their VP product, Natalia Williams, who then became their CPO, she said, “This is great that we’re doing this, but I’m worried that we’re going to lose sight of the commercial fundamentals. We have these teams building this really cool stuff and we’ve been so clear that we’re excited about the teams that are working on initiative, that are building these new things, that are building out this platform, but let’s make sure we stay focused on making sure that the entire platform grows in a healthy and sustainable way. And that as we are adding in these new features and functionalities, we’re not making this so crowded and complicated that it’s harder for people to get value out of it.”
So she set a very clear goal for the 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 to make sure that they can do this successfully.” And she set a really ambitious goal for the entire product organization. And she put it forth to the product teams and a lot of product teams were understandably hesitant to take this on, for a number of reasons. They said, “If we mess this up, that’s the entire commercial heart of the business. That’s really risky.”
Other ones said, “That’s great, but we’re building out these new parts of the platform that are really important. We don’t want to risk slowing those things down.” There was one product manager I worked with who really understood how important this was. She had worked on enough different parts of the app at that point. She had been on a growth team, so she really had that kind of user-centric, how do we hit the metrics we need to hit mindset? And she came to me and she was like, “I want to make sure we do this because 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 researchers and found where people were getting stuck. She did this amazing study finding where people were getting stuck before they sent that first email and she gathered together a group of product managers. I’ll never forget this. I was on site in Atlanta and she gathered together a group of product managers and she was like, “Look, these are the things we need to fix if we’re going to hit this, but if we fix these things, I think we can do it. I think we can get there.” And there was a moment of silence where again, for totally understandable reasons, people were like, “Okay, this is great. I see it, but I’m kind of afraid that if we do this,” and this product manager, I will never forget that.
She looks around the room and she says, “You know what? I’m going to haunt all of you in your dreams if you do not take this on. This is the most important thing for the business.” And everyone laughed. It was a strong comment, but it was a strong comment made in really good faith that in its own way, I think acknowledged the fear that people had about taking this on. She was like, “Look, this is really important and if we work together, if we care less about the constraints and parameters and borders of our domains and care more about how we work together to deliver the thing that our leader has told us is the most important thing for the business, we can get this done.”
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 traditional feature launches were celebrated, but because they had this clear, impactful, specific sense of what success looks like, they were able to take on that work themselves and it made the product better, made the business better, and it was just a great moment of working with a great team.
Lenny Rachitsky: That was an awesome example. I love just how much of a hero’s journey this example is. Along those lines, it’s interesting how much courage it takes to do this. Because to your point, the easy thing is just, “Okay, everyone’s just telling us to do this thing. We’re going to build this feature. Great, easy. I don’t have to put myself out there.” And what you’re pointing out there is 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 else.
Matt LeMay: The funny thing is, it’s courage, but it’s also a kind of radical acceptance of reality. There’s a very kind of emotional philosophical dimension to this conversation because I think it is in human nature to not want to be accountable for things outside of our control. Impact is not something we can just check off a list. If we’re really working towards business impact, that means that there are things that might happen in the market that are going to affect us, right? Our competitors might launch something, there might be a pandemic or a war or something we didn’t expect. We’re reliant upon customers to change their behavior, to convert or to upgrade or to do whatever it is we hope they will do.
I use the word hope because again, we can do our best to influence that behavior, but we can’t just check a box. And I think there is this very understandable human fear of being accountable for things that are beyond our control. I get that so hard, but what I think the last couple of years have shown us is that we are accountable for things outside of our control. The success of the businesses we work for is ultimately beyond our immediate control.
And you can follow all the best practices and have the highest velocity and do everything quote-unquote “right”, but if your company goes out of business, they’re not going to say, “Yeah, we’re going out of business, but we’re going to keep writing your paycheck for two years because all of your OKRs were a 0.6 or a 0.7.” That’s not how it 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. 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.
As you said, I come from a music background. I was expecting the business people to be really stressed out, and like, “I have to show up at work 92 hours a day to crush it and make sure that we hit the metrics and crush the numbers.” But they were just like, “Yeah, I work for a business and I do the best I can, and then I go home. When I’m at work, my job is to help the business succeed. And I do that by understanding our business model, by trying to do work that contributes to what the business wants. In order to do that, if my goals are really impact level goals, I have to learn about our customers. I have to do discovery, I have to do all these things that we’re supposed to do, not because they’re abstract best practices, but because that’s how you build a successful product.”
And then at the end of the day, I’m not fighting my company to do product the right way, and if they can’t do it the right way, I’m willing to die on this hill. It’s like, ” I work for a company. I don’t get to make every decision. There are things outside of my control. I’ll do the best I can, and I get to free up a little bit of energy to live the rest of my life.”
Lenny Rachitsky: To make this 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 take on, do you find that even if they fail, even if they impact wasn’t there and the project fails, they’re seen more favorably and their career ends up doing better and they end up doing better even if the project fails?
Matt LeMay: I hope so. I’m always super, again, it’s outside of my control. I can’t say, if you do these things, then you will be looked upon favorably by the people who manage you because I don’t know those people, and maybe they’re not going to react well. Maybe they’re not actually… People are not always rational, and these things don’t always play out the way you hope they will. What I will say is there’s a story in the book, in Impact-First Product Teams about somebody who 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 hit this because of other things they needed to do.
So they went to the finance team and said, “Hey, we have to adjust this down.” And the finance team said, “Yeah, of course you do. That makes sense. Let’s adjust it down together.” Would that conversation have played out the same way if they had not taken that step of saying proactively, ” Based on what is happening in the broader world in the market, our product, we no longer believe we are on track to hit this, but we want to adjust so that the company at large can make better predictions and resource things accordingly”?
I don’t know. But I think again, if you are embracing that mindset that there are things outside of your control and your job is to do what you can from where you sit to contribute to the success of the business, I think you’re certainly doing so much more by telling the business honestly what you think is possible and what’s going to happen, as opposed to stepping back from it and saying like, “Oh, well, if we talk about it, we’re going to get in trouble and nobody’s going to believe us.” And just that simple withholding of information does its own kind of harm. So I can’t guarantee any kind of outcomes. I can’t say, “Yes, this will be received with generosity and grace,” in all cases, but I think it’s the right thing to do.
Lenny Rachitsky: My sense is either you will be respected more highly because you are kind of solving problems for people, like higher ups that you’re seeing, things that they should be seeing, and you’re right, and they’re like, “Oh, wow, Matt’s amazing. He saw all this stuff and changed.” Or you realize this is not the company for me. They don’t value this. They just want me to ship this widget and that’s all they want from me. I could do more somewhere else.
Matt LeMay: Well, I think you touched on something really important there, which is that 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 make in order to achieve those goals, that tells you a lot more than the mission statement. Which usually sounds great, but if you follow the money, if you follow the decision-making, sometimes it paints a different picture.
And I think the more you can understand how the business model works, what that value exchange is, what value is being delivered, what value is being extracted, that I think puts you in a better position to decide, if I were to help the company achieve success, do I feel good about that? Do I feel like this is a company that if it achieves its goals has made the world a better place or not? And the more you understand the business model, the better equipped you are to make those decisions with all the information available to you, I think.
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s such an important point.
Claude can handle incredibly complex multi-step work. You can throw 100-page strategy document at it and ask it for insights, or you can dump all your user research and ask it to find patterns. With Claude 4 and the new integrations, including Claude 4 Opus, the world’s best coding model, you get voice conversations, advanced research capabilities, direct Google Workspace integration, and now MCP connections to your custom tools and data sources. Claude just becomes part of your workflow. If you want to try it out, get started at claude.ai/lenny and using this link, you get an incredible 50% off your first three months of the pro plan. That’s claude.ai/lenny.
Okay, so let’s shift to talking about how to actually, what to do. This concept of actions you can take regardless of how your company operates. And that first part is really important. Something that I’ve seen you big on is you don’t let people have an excuse for not pushing on this. And we’ve talked about this in other ways, but just maybe share more of just like you don’t have an excuse no matter how your company operates, to not think deeply about this and try to make change.
Matt LeMay: Yeah, I mean, the reality is that most companies that product managers work at aren’t big tech companies. And when I worked with product teams at those companies, at insurance companies or at banks or at CPG companies, or I worked with a company a while ago that makes audio equipment, which was obviously really fun for me, the first thing they usually tell me is, “Well, we can’t do product the right way because we’re a regulated industry,” or, “because we’re B2B,” or, “because we have these quarterly earnings targets we need to hit.”
And that always makes me a little 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 from those companies must mean that we’re doing product management the wrong way,” which is demoralizing and distressing, and again, leads people to these kind of quixotic battles of like, “I have to turn a bank into a search engine,” which is not going to happen.
But the other way of looking at it is that those constraints are how you do product management. Those are what guides you to the commercial decisions you should be making. If you’re regulated, your competitors are regulated too. If you can really understand those constraints, figure out how to work well within them, that’s a 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 understand the whole system of their customers and their users and how these things connect in a way that’s really immediate and actionable.
Similarly, if your company has quarterly financial targets to hit, congratulations, you know what the business really cares about. You don’t have to go looking much farther than that. You don’t necessarily need to cascade that 10 different levels into 45 OKRs if you can do work that you know feeds directly into what the company cares about the most.
So yes, these things are constraints, but they’re the constraints that shape the work that we do. And if we embrace them as such, if we treat them as guides, not restrictions, if we say we’re working with not against the commercial realities of our business, there’s so much we can do. There’s so much that 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. So I think that’s really empowering. You’re not saying, “You need to change the way product is built at your company. It’s up to you. You’re an ICPM, it’s up to you. No excuses.” What’s a simple way to describe what you’re actually saying, which I think is going to make people feel a lot better?
Matt LeMay: 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Let’s talk about, you have three steps, three handy steps to become more of an impact-first product team. So let’s talk through them. What is step one?
Matt LeMay: Yeah, so the first step, and I think 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 Wodtke’s book Radical Focus. She had a great episode on your podcast that I just re-watched for inspiration before I came on here.
Lenny Rachitsky: Nice move.
Matt LeMay: But in that book, she has this visual where she says that most companies approach cascading OKR as kind of this multi-level, like at the top is company goals, then department goals, then big team goals, then small team goals, and smaller team goals. Which leads to the very situation I described where you can’t add those small team goals back up to the company goals. She has a visual that she compares that to, which is the company goal as a center of gravity, and then every other team goal orbiting one level around it. And this blew my mind when I saw it for the first time, because whether you’re doing OKRs or KPIs or north star metrics, whatever framework you’re ostensibly using, if you use it well, it looks like that.
I worked with a team a while ago that was a traditional feature team at a FinTech company. They were the team that was kind of like the team I worked with at MailChimp, kind of given new features to build to take this product and build it more into a multi-product platform. And the business would say, “Go build this.” They’d build it, they’d celebrate, they’d say, “Go build this.” They’d build it, they’d celebrate. And then the business said, “Okay, we’re going to do things a little bit differently. Now we have this top line revenue target. We want to make 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 about being feature factories, again, it feels safer, right? There’s more control over that. If you’re told what to build, you have a lot more control over whether or not you build it than you do over whether or not it generates revenue. So we started having this conversation, what framework should we use? How should we do this? And I was not asking very good questions. I was kind of panicking too, to be honest. And then I asked them, I was like, “Okay, why does this team exist, right? Why are we doing this at all? Why is the business investing in this big team to build all these features? Why do we care if we’re a single-product company or a multi-product platform company?”
And one of the team leaders said, “Oh, well actually, the customer lifetime value of a multi-product user is much higher than that of a single-product user.” I was like, “Oh, do we know how much higher?” And they said, “Yeah, we actually have a number on that.” And I was like, “Wow. So if we had a goal of converting a certain number of single-product users to multi-product users, we know exactly how much revenue is on the line.” They were like, “Yeah, I guess so.” So we were able to set a goal, and from there we had this conversation about 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-
To make this team feel like a good investment. And we came to a specific number and that number informed every decision that was made by that team for the rest of the year. We said, “By the end of the year, we need to convert this many single product users to multi-product users because if we do that, there’s this much additional revenue which contributes this much to the company’s top line revenue goal.” It’s one step away.
And when they went and shared that goal with company leadership, they got it right away. They didn’t have to say, “Well, why is this valuable?” They didn’t have to say, “What are your other OKRs? Show us the deck.” They got it. And that gave them so much leeway to make bolder decisions, to work more closely with other teams to ask for the resources they needed. And that process of arriving at that goal, that goal that is impactful and specific and one step away from what the company cares about the most, is probably the most valuable way I have spent my time with teams of late. Because once you get to that, you see how everything else flows from there.
Lenny Rachitsky: And the implication here is that if it’s too far away from people understanding what the hell are you guys even doing to help the business? That’s the problem you want to avoid.
Matt LeMay: Exactly.
Lenny Rachitsky: So one extreme is, I don’t know, it probably doesn’t make sense for your team to have exactly the same goal as the company. Say your company’s trying to grow a hundred million revenue rate, that’s not going to be your team’s goal. So it’s almost like that extreme is what’s one step away from that? What’s your contribution to that company goal?
The other end is just some 10 level deep, we’re going to improve conversion of this random step, which is going to grow this thing which grows that, and then that grows revenue.
Matt LeMay: Exactly.
Lenny Rachitsky: What is your guidance on revenue-based goals as goals for teams?
Matt LeMay: I think, again, it depends. I know people have very strong opinions about teams should always or should never have revenue-based goals. I don’t think it’s that simple. I think sometimes yes, if your company is working towards revenue, having a revenue-based goal makes sense, or at least being able to put some value in terms of revenue on the work that your team is doing. I’ve worked with some startups where they actively are not going after revenue because right now the name of the game is growth, right? They want to show that they have enough users to raise that next round of investment. I actually worked with one startup where their revenue was going up, and their number of users was going up, and we had to have a really interesting conversation around which one actually matters to our investors. And we kind of wound up developing these two scenarios, the high growth scenario and the low growth scenario.
And talking to the product team, it was really clear that there was no way they were going to hit the high growth scenario. So they pivoted to focus on profitability so they could build more runway and raise that next round as a smaller business with a sustainable revenue base.
So I get why people are hesitant to commit to revenue goals. I think that there are certainly situations where revenue goals would be too broad or not exactly what the business needs, but 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 the business, then again, that feels like a tenuous and risky position to be in.
Lenny Rachitsky: To kind of get people’s brains noodling in the right direction. What are some examples of good goals, like specific goals that your teams have set that are one step away from a company goal? What are just some examples without naming companies?
Matt LeMay: I have a story to tell to that effect, which also sets up the second step here, which is to keep impact first at every step.
So, I worked with a growth team at a tech company that is beloved by many the people. And I was brought on to help them set OKRs, right? The company was doing OKRs across the board, and this team was going to set its growth OKRs. So they had done a lot of reading, a lot of research into how to do OKRs the right way. They had read, unfortunately, they had not read Radical Focus or they hopefully would’ve done things differently, they had read a lot of other books. They had printed out a lot of articles and they said, “We’re going to make sure we get this right. We’re going to put together a slide deck that has five to seven objectives with five to seven key results each, and each key result is going to have an owner and we’re going to make sure that people are accountable for it. And we’re going to really, really do this the right way. We’re going to get that middle piece perfect.”
So they spent a long time working on these OKRs, OKR season ends. They file away the OKR deck not to be seen until the next OKR season. We reconvene, and spend a whole day scoring all of the OKRs. And there are heated conversations about what’s a 0.6 versus a 0.7? Is this a 0.9? Who really should be the owner of this key result? Who contributed the most to it? And we get through this whole conversation, everyone’s tired. And I’m like, “There’s just one question I need to ask. I’m so sorry to do this to y’all, but how does this all add up to the company level growth goals?”
People look around and they’re like, “Well, that wasn’t what we did. We set our team level OKRs and we went through the process and we made sure, and we followed the OKRs, we thought about the OKRs,” and I said, “Yeah, but the company has a goal of let’s call it bringing on a million new users in this year. We’re a growth team. How many users did we bring on?”
And there’s a moment of silence. And the leader of this team’s a really, really good leader. She stands and she’s like, “Okay, we’re going to do things differently.” She steps up to the whiteboard, puts 1 million on the right end of the whiteboard, draws a line, “This is the year,” draws a little tick on the line. “This is where we are now. It’s a smaller number than a million. This is where we need to get to. If our conversation doesn’t start with this, I don’t want to have the conversation. And if you are 51% sure that a different approach is going to get us 1% closer, I expect you to advocate for that approach. And this is now how we are going to do everything.”
And I think about that all the time, because it’s subtracting steps. It’s making things less complicated. It actually is doing exactly what you described. It’s saying, “This is what the company cares about. We’re the growth team. We need to figure out how everything we’re doing contributes to this.”
That story really stuck with me because it seems like it should be obvious, right? If you’re the growth team at a company with a growth goal, obviously that’s going to be something you care about. But it’s so easy in the day-to-day work of setting these intermediate goals, of doing strategy, of doing the things we do to make things just a little bit more complicated than they need to be. So for this particular team and this particular moment, a good goal was looking at the company level goal and saying, “If we’re the team that’s driving growth, we’re accountable for this. We’re going to step up and we’re going to do everything we can to make sure, the company meets its ambition.”
Lenny Rachitsky: And it’s so obvious if you come at it from the perspective you shared earlier. If you’re the CEO, would you fund this team? If you see our goal is a million users, this team will drive us a hundred thousand users. Assuming that’s a lot for you. Obviously we want that team to do great and we’re going to give them the resources to do that. They’re going to contribute meaningfully to this goal. It’s very obvious as you see it. The trick is a lot of people think they’re doing that and they’re not. Maybe one heuristic I think about as you’re talking is just like, how do you know if you’re doing this? There should be a very simple spreadsheet formula of just here’s the company goal, here’s your goal. There should be one simple formula that translates up that adds to it.
Matt LeMay: One Y statement and or one mathematical operator is usually the way I think about it.
Lenny Rachitsky: There we go.
Matt LeMay: In some cases, like the story I told about that FinTech company, it’s something like upgraded users. That’s one step, right? You multiply that by the increased customer lifetime value. In some cases, it’s a smaller unit of the same thing. So it’s a subset of the revenue or growth that the company’s trying to deliver.
I worked with a company recently that had a team rebuilding their ad tech platform. This is a big company that does a lot of different things, and at the heart of all of their different offerings is this ad tech platform. And I was brought on to do a day long workshop with this company because this was a really important team and they were struggling to figure out what success looked like.
So I said, “Okay, what are your goals?” And they said, “Here’s the deck with our goals.” I said, “That’s a lot of goals. I wouldn’t be able to make decisions with those goals.” They said, “Oh wait, wait, wait, no, we also have a Miro board. We went through this and we decided the deck was too much. So we also have a Miro board,” but as Miro boards tend to do, it kind of grew and grew and grew in all directions. So now it’s a big board. Turned out they had two Miro boards because they had tried to do this twice.
So we sat down and we 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 would have to make it smaller each time, make it more concise. If there were two things, get it down to one thing. If there were 10 words, bring it down to eight words, make it smaller and more concise each time.
And we came up with two options. One was build a fantastic, wonderful, magical, beautiful platform to increase our team’s profits by 20%. Fair enough. The other one was, build a stupendous, wonderful, fantastic platform to increase our team’s profits in the next financial year from 20 million pounds to a hundred million pounds.
And I’m looking at these and I’m like, “Okay, so we know that there is an expectation of revenue here. There’s an expectation that we will drive profitability, but one of these is 20% and the other is 500%. Where do these numbers come from?” And the folks who had said 20%, they were like, “That feels like a good return.” And what’s interesting was when I was telling the story, when I was giving some talks recently, and people would kind of laugh like, “Oh, they named the wrong number.” But they were so brave to do that, and them saying 20% is what actually unlocked the conversation at the team level, because somebody else in the room heard that and said, “Wait, I do remember something about profits. There was some target we were supposed to hit, but I think I remember it being a lot bigger than that.” And they actually went back and found a town hall that their VP had given and buried in a slide in that town hall was this hundred million pound profit target by the end of the next financial year.
So they have this number and they start to go like, “Oh gosh, that’s a lot, but it’s a whole financial year. It’ll be fine.” And we do, again, inspired by that leader I worked with, I just put this out on a whiteboard. I’m like, “All right, a hundred million in profits by the end of the next financial year right now we’re here. What else should be on this timeline?” Somebody said, “Well, we’re launching this in October.” So I put October up there. I go, “Okay, so if we don’t ship anything until October, and right now it’s March, how much profit do we make until?” And they said, “About 10 million.” I’m like, “Okay. So that means that between October and March, we need to generate 90 million pounds of profits.”
And this team, I was worried they were going to freak out or they were going to be like, “Oh, we can’t do this. It’s impossible.” But they were like, “Okay, it’s time to step up. It’s time to do all these things that we need to do. We need to ship sooner. We need to do more validation. We need to do more testing. Can we commercialize things sooner? Can we do more discovery to make sure that this is really going to have the impact we need to have? Why are we doing this whole big relaunch? Why don’t we rebuild individual things? What impact will we have if we brought more people in top of funnel now? Can we begin building our user base and then upgrade that user base? What are the trade-offs if we do that versus if we bring people in?”
All those things that I think is really the heart and the intent of these best practices. They came to life because this team had clarity. They understood like, “Okay, we are accountable for something which is specific enough to drive some real urgency, and which is impactful enough that we have to get out there and do all these things that we’re supposed to do.”
So that to me, is a really good example of how if you start with this question of like, well, what’s expected of this team? What does success look like for us? It’ll often lead you to the right neighborhood of what kind of unit of measure you want to look for, how the business is going to look to you, whether they’re looking directly at revenue, whether they’re looking at something else.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. These stories are awesome. So basically, so far, the two steps that you’ve illustrated here of doing this correctly, step one is set team goals that are close to company goals. And then step two is, do this at every step of the product building process. It’s not just a one-time thing at the beginning.
Matt LeMay: Right. As you’re doing OKRs, like that team I talked about, when you’re thinking about your company strategy, when you’re writing epics, whatever it is, keep that impactful goal top of mind. Don’t let it slip away. Don’t let it get cascaded into oblivion.
Lenny Rachitsky: Because to your point, the examples you shared where you think you’re just like, “Cool, we have our goal, let’s go.” And then you spend months doing this thing and then you forget, okay, this actually got disconnected from the company goal.
Matt LeMay: Exactly.
Lenny Rachitsky: Everything you’ve worked hard to do is just, no one cares.
Matt LeMay: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. What is step three?
Matt LeMay: 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 that is written about quite well, quite extensively in product management stuff, but it’s something that it’s easy to not do. I work with a lot of teams that want to know, again, the right best practice for doing prioritization, whether that’s should we use ICE or RICE or MoSCoW or whatever it is, what’s the right way to do prioritization? And again, it depends, but if you don’t have a clear and specific sense of what impact means, you can’t really prioritize effectively. So this is where, again, everything comes back to that first step of the way you set goals.
So that team I told you about that had the goal of converting single product users to multi-product users, one of the product managers on that team came back to me a few months later and said, “Hey, Matt, I could really use your help figuring out how to do prioritization. Should we do ICE? Should we do RICE? Should we do MoSCoW? I put together an ICE matrix where I scored impact and I scored certainty and I scored effort, and I multiplied each one by each one, and I have a list of the things we should do.”
And I said, “That’s awesome.” And I do really think it’s awesome when people take the initiative to do the thing to say, “I put this together, let’s walk through it.” So when they showed me this, I said, “Let’s start with impact.” They’re like, “Okay, well here’s the score for each one.” I was like, “What’s the score?” They’re like, “Oh, it’s a lot of different things.” And I said, “Okay, well, we have a team goal of a certain specific number of users we need to convert by the end of the year, so let’s try to express impact as a function of that goal. So rather than an abstract score, what is the most number of users we could convert in each of these different scenarios?”
And understandably, they were kind of like, “Oh, you know what? I don’t know exactly.” I’m like, “Let’s, just work through it. We don’t have to be precise. It’s called impact estimation, not impact getting perfect number.” So for one of them, they were like, “Well, we can do this landing page.” I’m like, “Okay, well how many people hit the landing page?” And they were like, “Not that many, maybe a few hundred.” I’m like, “Okay, cool. So that’s maybe a few hundred.”
And there was one thing which they were really reluctant. It had a high effort score and a medium certainty score. And what they basically said was like, “Look, if we really wanted to do this, we could redesign the entire onboarding experience. We can make it so that rather than us trying to retroactively shuttle people into multi-product usage, we can understand them when they join and get them into the right category of user right away.”
I’m like, “That sounds amazing.” What’s the most impact that could have? They were like, “It would get us all the way there if we did it right, but we’d have to work with these other teams and we’d have to work with marketing. And there are so many dependencies and so many things outside of our control that we don’t know if we could do it.” And I said, “That’s okay. These are the trade-offs we make as product managers, you will have some things to work on that are going to have less impact, but might be easier and more certain to deliver. But if this thing could get us all the way there, if it’s really the only thing we’re looking at, which has really any chance of getting us to our goal, which remember we came up with to answer the question, what does this team need to deliver to be a good investment for the business, then I think it’s worth going for it.
“It’s worth having those conversations with other product teams. It’s worth talking to folks in marketing. It’s worth stretching ourselves a little bit and saying, ‘This is going to be challenging to do, but if we can do it, we can really deliver on something which we’re going to feel great about.’”
So the way 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 actually have a chance of contributing?” Whereas again, if we get really clever and we come up with a proprietary scoring system and all these little intermediate steps, we can feel like we’re doing really awesome work and being very, very terribly smart. But we again, run the risk that we are going to lose our connection with why we’re setting about to do this work in the first place.
Lenny Rachitsky: Such an important and often easily overlooked point. This idea that when you’re doing RICE or whatever version of ICE that you do, that impact should be based on impact to your goal, which is one level removed from the company goal. 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 is impact? Oh yeah, customers will be happier.
Matt LeMay: Again, this is not easy work, right? Working in product means that we have so many different perspectives, so many different folks who have so many different priorities. The stakeholder management piece of this is relentless and exhausting, and it’s really, really easy to lose sight of this stuff. And it takes work and discipline and as you said, bravery to keep bringing it back. But I think again, it is not only the right thing to do, but it helps you at the end of the day, have a little bit more of a boundary between the work you’re doing at your job and the stuff you’re good at in your life.
Lenny Rachitsky: Speaking of boundaries, a lot of the 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.
Matt LeMay: Nope.
Lenny Rachitsky: What advice do you have? What have you learned works well for pushing back, helping people see how they’re not… What they want you to build is wrong.
Matt LeMay: So this is where I have the benefit, I suppose, of being a conflict-averse, people pleaser. So I’ve been through this, and I think the thing I am proudest of saying in product management and 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.
So in keeping with this idea that there are things outside of your control, as a product manager, you’re not always going to be the one who makes the decision. There are going to be other people who come to you and say, “Build this,” or who say, “I don’t see the value in that. Do this, do that. I want this, I want that.” If those people are in a position of formal authority in the organization, I’ve certainly never had luck telling them no.
Furthermore, I’ve found myself in situations where they just know things that I don’t know. Where they’re pursuing an acquisition, so there are certain things that we have to do or can’t do. Where there’s some serious financial challenge that they’re working their way through right now, which is shifting around priorities, but they are not at liberty to discuss that with the broader organization. It is quite possible that the folks who are asking you to do things that don’t make sense, have access to information that you don’t. And that in trying to convince them otherwise, you are not 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, “All right, you want me to build this thing? Maybe. Let’s look at the different things.”
If you’re going through these steps, if you say, “I understand, here’s what our team’s goals are, here’s the stuff we’re prioritizing, here’s the impact we think it could have.” If you’re coming to me with something which is going to have more impact, heck yeah, I would love to build that. That sounds amazing.
But if it has an unclear impact or if it doesn’t tie into this, then we might need to adjust the impact we’re seeking to have. If this is suddenly really important, as with that story that was told in the book, right? Sometimes it’s like, all right, we got to do this. Sure. That means that our impact projection is going to have to be adjusted this much.
You’re not saying no, you’re not saying yes. You’re helping someone who is in a position to make a decision, understand the trade-offs that go into that decision. And again, if you can do that, you’re going to go home at the end of the day feeling better. You’re going to feel less like you lost a battle or that you were overridden by an unjust tyrant, and it’s going to be more like, “Okay, I made sure they had all the information I would want to have if I were making that decision. That decision is ultimately theirs to make, and I’m going to do the best I can.”
Lenny Rachitsky: Tell me if 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.” I find that people want you to have a perspective.
Matt LeMay: Absolutely. 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 roleplay trying to sell in a single option versus multiple options with a recommendation. And it was amazing how when you present a single option, people’s instinct is just to, well, I don’t know, you start poking holes in it. Not because you’re a jerk, but because-
You start poking holes in it, not because you’re a jerk, but because you’re looking at one thing and you’re like, “Oh, well, what about this? What about that?”
Again, all of your own anxieties and fears and the things that you don’t feel represented in there, and where you’re worried, “What if this happens? What if that happens?”
All of that kind of detracts from the momentum, whereas if you come in and say, “Here are three options, here are the trade-offs, here’s the one we recommend,” then every little bit of back and forth makes those options clearer and stronger.
Lenny Rachitsky: I feel like people might miss that nuance, in the way we talked about it, so I think that’s a really important point to make there.
Let me come back to the three steps, just for folks that are, “Cool, I’m excited, I’m motivated. I’m going to change the way we operate.” I’ll summarize real quick.
So step one is, set team goals close to company goals. Step two is keep impact first at every step. Don’t forget, as you’re building throughout the year. And then, step three is connect every bit of work back to impact.
Matt LeMay: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: I think, again, it’s important to remind people, this may be hard and annoying, and maybe things are going fine. Everyone’s telling you what to build, you’re building and shipping, and things are, it seems to be going all right.
I think an important part of this is just, if you believe what you’re building is not helping the business grow and succeed, either, they’ll let you go someday, because you’re not doing something that matters. Or the business will not work out, and you’ll be in trouble.
So it’s like, even if you don’t want to do this something, you need to really seriously think about this, even though it’s really hard.
Matt LeMay: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: But maybe let me just think of that a little bit. Say the business is doing great, everything’s great. The CEO’s telling you all the things to build, that sales guys and girls are just like, “Here, ship these features, everything’s great.”
And everything’s working, business is growing. What thoughts there? Is it just, “Nah, leave it alone?” Or is your sense, “Okay, most often this will not last,” and you should really start to work on these skills?
Matt LeMay: It’s funny, 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?
They’ll look at it and they’ll say, “Yeah, we’re doing great. But I think that honestly has more to do with marketing than it does with us.”
Or, “Yeah, we’re doing great, but we’re just in the right place at the right time. Our business is doing really well, our sector is doing really well. We’re just growing along with everyone else who’s growing.”
And I think, as with most things, if you approach it with curiosity, there’s a lot to learn from it. So if you look at it, and you say, “Yeah, we can’t necessarily take sole credit for this, but Marketing’s doing awesome. Let’s talk to them. What are they doing? Why is this going so well? What have they learned from this, that we can work with them more closely?”
If your sector is just doing really well, be like, okay, well what about this is working right now? What might change in the future? How can we understand this?”
So I think the challenge, when things are going well, is to keep that curiosity going, and to keep celebrating the things, not just that your team is doing, but that everyone is doing, and to take that time, where you have a little bit more leeway, where there’s less pressure on you in the moment, to build those connections with other parts of the organization, to see where that really good work is happening.
One thing that makes me sad is when teams look upon each other with envy and disgust, right, when it’s, “This team’s doing, they’re doing great work, but they’re not held to the same standards that we are, and it’s not fair, and they’re the team that everyone likes.”
It’s like, “Go talk to them, because there’s probably something you can learn from them. And if they’re the team that’s getting positive attention, that’s doing meaningful work, there’s probably a reason for that. And if you can understand that reason, and you can align your work, that team’s work, that’s probably going to be really good for you.”
Again, I think, in a lot of cases, it comes back down to that control thing, right? If we can’t feel a sense of control over, “Things are going well because we did this,” we tend to disconnect ourselves from things going well and say, “Well, I can’t. It almost feels dangerous to engage with it because, what if we didn’t do anything, but good things are still happening.”
And I think, just keeping that openness, keeping that curiosity going, puts you in a much better position for when things inevitably begin to either plateau or decline, which is the cyclical nature of all things.
Lenny Rachitsky: Wow. Profound there. To start to wrap up our conversation, what’s maybe one question from the book, or even from this conversation, that you think product leaders, product teams should ask themselves to help them solve problems, that maybe they’re not seeing, and to help their team operate better?
Matt LeMay: I mean, I love the, “Would you fund this team, if you were the CEO question?” I know that that can feel a little confrontational sometimes. So, a gentler way of bringing that up is to say, “What’s one sentence you’d want to be able to say at the end of this year, that would leave you feeling awesome about this team’s work? What’s something?”
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 you’ll sometimes get very different answers from different people on the team, building on those answers, saying, “Okay, this is what you care about. This is what I care about. This is what I’m worried about. This is what I’m excited about.”
That’s how you get that magical, people in a room building together, or musicians in a room writing their next song, right?
Lenny Rachitsky: What a call, back to the beginning.
Matt LeMay: And then-
Lenny Rachitsky: I love this.
Matt LeMay: It’s getting that conversation out in the open, and getting people to talk about their perspectives and their expectations, with the goal of bringing it together, to create something better.
Lenny Rachitsky: Bam. Matt, is there anything else that you wanted to cover or leave listeners with before we get to a very exciting lightning round?
Matt LeMay: I think we covered it. I just leave people with, again, this hope that you can start to see the commercial realities and constraints of your business as opportunities, as guideposts, as things that shape and structure your work, not as things that you single-handedly need to change, or break down, or transform, because you probably can’t. And that’s okay.
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s empowering stuff. With that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
Matt LeMay: As ready as I’m going to be.
Lenny Rachitsky: Question one. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
Matt LeMay: Radical Focus, by Christina Wodtke, is obviously, I cite it a lot in my book, I think it’s the best book about OKRs. I love her style of writing. I love the way she tells stories.
I love the focus on focus, this idea that again, the way you do it is less important than the result of the way of doing it. I just find that so inspiring, always.
The other book, this is a bit of a curveball, is by Alan Watts, the Buddhist philosopher. It’s called The Wisdom of Insecurity. And a lot of the way I talk about control, and giving up control, comes from that book.
It also has a concept. It opens with a concept called the law of reverse effort, which is that sometimes, the harder you try, the worse you make things. When it comes to setting goals, doing OKRs, doing strategy, I think about this a lot, that there is a tendency sometimes to put effort towards the overcomplication of things, which in turn makes those things less effective, what they’re ultimately intended to achieve. So, highly recommend that book. It helped me a lot through some dark times, mentally.
There’s an idea in the book. He talks about how trying to keep yourself perpetually safe in an imagined future is effectively killing yourself to the present. And ooh, that hit hard. That hit me really, really, really hard. So, highly recommend that book.
If the things we’ve talked about today make you even a fraction of, as anxious and fearful as they make me when I navigate them in my work, then I highly recommend The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts.
Lenny Rachitsky: I was going to ask what the title is, because that sounds really powerful. Amazing, amazing pick.
Second question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you’ve really enjoyed?
Matt LeMay: God. So especially, when I’m in work-y write-y mode, my brain shuts off to all things that are not trash. So I have been watching a lot of trash.
I watched Temptation Island, the new season of Temptation Island on Netflix. I loved it so much. It’s Mark L. Wahlberg, who is the host of Antiques Roadshow, just weaponizing therapyspeak to torture people, in this bizarre scenario.
And I should not love it, but I am only a human, and a messy bitch who lives for the drama, sometimes, so …
Lenny Rachitsky: So good.
Matt LeMay: I know. I enjoyed that very much.
Lenny Rachitsky: I think it’s the first Temptation Island call-out, and I love it. Okay, favorite product or … Yeah, favorite product you’ve recently discovered, that you really love?
Matt LeMay: Yeah, so I’m really glad you asked this question, because as a musician, I live in this world of niche products, which is so much fun, because the economies of scale for music creators are just totally different, right?
You don’t need to build a product that’s going to have a billion users, and create a huge return. You can do something that a few hundred or a few thousand people get a lot of use out of and love. You’re in this fun realm of hybrid, physical and digital, and different types of things. And when you asked me this question, the first thing that came to mind was this, which is made by an amplifier builder who goes by Milkman Sound, in the San Francisco Bay area, who took, basically, the circuit of a Fender amplifier, and made a version of it that fits into this handy, compact, lightweight form factor.
So for me, as somebody who is no longer 22 years old, and still occasionally tours with my friend’s band, and has back problems, the fact that I can carry this really powerful amplifier around, in this really well-designed, aesthetically pleasing form factor, just feels like such 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 have things sound really nice, without having to lug a giant, heavy thing. And I love that. It’s something for which I am truly grateful.
Lenny Rachitsky: This makes me want to play music randomly, but just so I understand how this works, do you still plug that into a speaker, or is that-
Matt LeMay: Yeah, so I have a little speaker.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. Oh, okay.
Matt LeMay: You can also plug direct into the soundboard at a club, or for recording.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, got it.
Matt LeMay: And it has a little headphone jack, too. So if I want to practice in the hotel room, before you play, I can also use this.
It does everything you would need this device to do, and nothing more, and it does it really well. And that is so delicious to me, to have a product-
Lenny Rachitsky: Another great pick.
Matt LeMay: … that I’m like, “This does exactly what I need. It does it so well, and it’s a delightful product.”
Lenny Rachitsky: Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, find useful in work, or in life?
Matt LeMay: I come back to something my mom told me. I’m sure you’ve experienced this, too. When you’re a person creating things in the world, there’s a tendency to look at the numbers, and look at, “How am I doing? And did this resonate? Is this good? Did this work?”
And I’ve definitely worked on things, especially in my musical life, where the amount of effort and love, and time and care that went into something, didn’t feel like it showed up in the result of that thing, or the way it was received.
I was talking to my mom about this once, and she said, “I really believe that no good work is wasted. Even if you don’t see it right away, when you put good work out into the world, even if it only finds a few people, it’s never wasted. If you do work you really believe in, it’s going to have some positive effect on the world.”
And that really stuck with me. I’ve carried that with me, even when I think about how to write, and what to say, and when I start to worry about outsmarting myself, and should I be more strategic in the way I message this, and should I say something I don’t really totally believe?
There’ve been a few times, not recently, but a few times, 10 years ago, where I dabbled in writing click bait-y headlines, because I was like, “Ooh, is this going to get more attention?” And there was one in particular, that got really thoughtful critique from some people I really respect.
I was like, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to put work I don’t believe in out into the world,” and even if it doesn’t do what I hoped it would do, I’m going to go forth with the belief that no good work has wasted.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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 very, people super disagreed with it, or just one that you’re super proud of?
Matt LeMay: I mean, I am a villain, in certain corners of the internet-
Lenny Rachitsky: Say more.
Matt LeMay: … for the review I wrote of Liz Phair’s self-titled album. I wrote this review when I was 19, when my worldview was toxic, and very much in progress. It was a really condescending, arrogant review, written from a place of unearned condescension and arrogance.
Not that condescension and arrogance should necessarily be earned, but it felt righteous at the time, in a way that is dangerous, right? That toxic righteousness where you’re like, “I’m fighting something bad.” But then you realize that what you’re fighting is not actually bad.
You’re actually punching sideways and down, but you don’t have the wherewithal and the maturity to realize that you are not where you think you are, in relation to people and culture, and yourself. So I apologized for that review in 2019, and Liz Phair and I actually had a really nice little Twitter back and forth.
This was back when Twitter was still a place where this kind of thing could happen, and it was nice to wrap that up in that way. I still don’t feel good about it, because it was playing into some really toxic and hurtful dimensions of discourse.
But what can you do, if not look back on it and say, “Yeah, I was wrong. I was just flat-out wrong, and beyond being wrong, I was being a jerk.” Somebody posted this, a meme creator on Instagram, posted that review a couple months ago, with a caption, ” Matt LeMay, you will be dealt with.”
And I was like, “Yeah, yeah. If I read that now, I would probably say something pretty similar.” So I think, as I said, I’m a conflict averse people pleaser.
I went through my kind of edgelord phase. And I don’t think it did any good for me, or for anyone else.
Lenny Rachitsky: Wow. That was a much more profound answer than I expected. I can’t believe people are still referencing this review from a long time ago. How many years? How …
Matt LeMay: 22? It was 2003, so it was 22 years ago. It was more than half my life ago. But this is the wild thing, is that on the internet, it still looks new.
The first talk I ever gave, in London, actually, was at a Red Monk event, and I brought my teenage diary with me, to make the point that if something has 10 years of age on it as paper, it’s contextualized by its own material existence, right?
But somebody will go, “Oh, I wonder what Pitchfork thought of this record,” they’ll see my jerk-ass review, and be, “Pitchfork published this jerk-ass review. Who was the jerk-ass reviewer who wrote it?”
And they’ll find me, and be like, “Hey, you, you’re a jerk-ass, because you wrote this jerk-ass review.” And I’ll be like, “Yes, I did write that jerk-ass review, from the place of being a jerk-ass.” But I like to think I am a person who has lived 22 years of life since then.
Lenny Rachitsky: Your frontal cortex has developed more since then. I think it doesn’t stop-
Matt LeMay: God, I hope so.
Lenny Rachitsky: Until 25, 26. Matt, this was awesome. We covered so much ground. We’ve touched on everything I was hoping to, and more.
Two follow-up questions. Where can folks find you online, talk about the sort of work you do with companies, and how can listeners be useful to you?
Matt LeMay: Yeah, so you can find me online at matlemay.com, pretty straightforward, and in terms of how folks can be useful to me, hopefully I can be useful to them, whether that’s through the books, or through coming into work with your company, and help your teams focus.
I find that facilitating these conversations is a really big value add. It’s hard to have these conversations to do this without some outside help sometimes. So again, whether it’s in book form or in me form, I hope that I can be useful to you, and having these conversations in a way that’s less scary, more accessible, and leads you down that road to doing impactful work.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome, and mattlemay.com. And then, what’s the name of the book? Where do they find it
Matt LeMay: Impact-First Product Teams. You can find it at all the places where you find books, on Amazon. There’s an author read audiobook, which I recorded right here in this room, with this microphone. I did all the musical interludes myself …
Lenny Rachitsky: Why?
Matt LeMay: Because it was a great way to procrastinate, when I did not actually want to read the book. But I hope you will find it fun.
Lenny Rachitsky: Matt, thank you so much for being here.
Matt LeMay: Thanks so much, Lenny. This was great.
Lenny Rachitsky: Bye, everyone.
Speaker 1 (01:31:44): Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.
Also, please consider giving us a rating, or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes, or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Reformatted by reformat_english_direct.py
拯救产品职业生涯的那一个问题 | Matt LeMay
文字稿
Matt LeMay: 越来越多的产品经理和团队正在被裁员。问题在于 Spotify 的 Daniel Ek 在 2024 年裁员时发出的那条信息——我们仍然有太多团队在做围绕工作的工作。
Lenny Rachitsky: 即便你被要求去构建高管们非常兴奋的东西,你最终也还是会被裁掉。
Matt LeMay: 如果你是这家公司的 CEO,你会全额资助你自己的团队吗?坦率地说,我问过这个问题的大多数人并不能马上给出答案。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这就是你所说的”低影响力 PM 死亡螺旋(Low Impact PM Death Spiral)”。
Matt LeMay: 这是一种我所见过的每一家中大型公司都以这样或那样的方式陷入其中的动态。它从在这里那里添加小功能、做一些小的表面改善开始,直到下一轮裁员。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你有三个步骤可以让团队变得更加以影响力为先(impact first)。
Matt LeMay: 第一步是在设定团队目标时,距离公司目标不超过一步之遥。不要让目标被逐级分解到无影无踪。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你是一名 ICPM。这取决于你自己,没有借口。
Matt LeMay: 你可以遵循所有最佳实践,但如果你的公司倒闭了,他们不会因为你的 OKR 都达到了 0.6 或 0.7 而继续给你发两年工资。
嘉宾介绍
Lenny Rachitsky: 今天的嘉宾是 Matt LeMay。Matt 是一位资深产品领导者,也是产品管理领域最受欢迎、最实用的著作之一——《Product Management in Practice》的作者。
在他的咨询实践中,他与数以百计的产品团队合作,帮助他们改善运营方式,更持续地创造更大的影响力。
基于这些经验,他撰写并最近出版了一本新书——《Impact First Product Teams》,对此我深表赞同。
在我们的对话中,Matt 分享了为什么将你所有的工作与业务关键成果(business critical outcomes)对齐如此重要,尤其是当你担心公司可能会裁员时。
我们讨论了许多产品团队陷入的”低影响力死亡螺旋”,单个产品团队可以采取哪些步骤将工作与业务关键成果对齐——无论其组织如何进行产品开发,以及如何回推高管要求你构建的愚蠢想法等等实用建议。
这一期的信息是我认为每一位产品经理都需要听到的,尤其是如果你并不在一家炙手可热的硅谷科技公司工作的话。
非常感谢 Martin Erickson、Adrian Joselow 和 Dan Corbin 为这次对话提供了话题和问题建议。
如果你喜欢这个播客,别忘了在你喜欢的播客应用或 YouTube 上订阅和关注。
(跳过赞助商广告段落)
从 Pitchfork 到产品管理
Lenny Rachitsky: 那么,Matt,非常感谢你能来,欢迎来到播客。
Matt LeMay: 非常感谢你的邀请,我真的非常激动能来这里。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我甚至更激动。你的背景非常有趣,我通常不会花时间聊背景,但我觉得这次会很 fun。
我看了你的 LinkedIn 和你的经历。你职业生涯的早期在 Pitchfork 度过了 13 年,做音乐评论。
Matt LeMay: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 评论音乐人和艺术家。Pitchfork 当年可是一件大事。我不知道它现在怎么样了,但它曾经是最具影响力的音乐评论网站。它现在还是个大平台吗,还是没那么大了?
Matt LeMay: 它现在仍然是个大平台。不过当我开始为他们工作时,它远没有后来那么大的影响力——那时候我还是个 16 岁的音乐迷,在父母公寓的卧室里写唱片评论。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好吧,所以听上去是你帮它变成了一个大平台。很好,这就是影响力。我们接下来就要聊聊影响力。
Matt LeMay: 如果我更擅长讲自己的故事,我就会这么说的——在我开始之前,我就是 Pitchfork 的一号产品经理。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有趣的是,你看他的简历,他从 Pitchfork 走进了产品管理。多么典型的职业路径。
顺便说一下,如果你在 YouTube 上看这期节目,Matt 身后有很多音乐相关的物件,一把很棒的吉他,所以音乐显然贯穿了他的整个经历。
Matt LeMay: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我来问你一个问题:制作音乐,甚至评论音乐,与构建优秀的产品,最相似的地方是什么?
Matt LeMay: 魔力在于人们协作的方式。我认为这才是我所有工作之间一以贯之的线索。
我曾做了多年巡演音乐人,现在偶尔还会在我朋友 Will Chef 的乐队里巡演。那种魔力来自——拥有不同视角、不同想法的人,共同构建出某种大于其各个部分和视角之和的东西。
正是这一点让这一切有趣,让音乐充满魔力,也让产品开发令人着迷,尤其是在 AI 时代。
Matt LeMay: 我认为,当人们有机会将自己封闭起来,远离人际互动中那些更混乱的部分——那些让你意识到自己的视角可能有限、别人或许能向你展示某种你从未见过的工作方式或看待事物的方式的时刻——我认为,随着技术继续做技术该做的事,这种互动、这种相互学习和共同构建的能力,坦率地说,只会变得更加珍贵、更加有价值。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇,回答得真漂亮。
Matt LeMay: 谢谢。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢。那我们进入正题吧。
Matt LeMay: 好。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你以撰写产品管理领域最受欢迎的书籍之一而闻名,书名叫《Product Management in Practice》。
Matt LeMay: 算是吧。
Lenny Rachitsky: 是的。这本书非常务实地、非常具体地描述了产品经理的工作,比市面上任何其他书都做得更好。
你有一本新书叫《Impact First Product Teams》。我问你这本书的目标是什么,你说目标是:个别的产品团队可以采取哪些步骤,使自己的工作与业务关键成果对齐——无论他们所在组织以何种方式开展产品开发?
我觉得这是对这场对话非常好的一个框架。你给我的这句话中有两个重要部分。一是将工作与业务关键成果对齐,二是无论其他业务职能如何,个别产品团队可以采取的步骤。
那就从第一部分开始吧。你实际上用自己的书名命名了”以影响力为先”这个概念:为什么将工作与影响力、与业务关键成果对齐如此重要?
业务关键成果的重要性
Matt LeMay: 之所以重要,是因为归根结底,你和你的团队就是以那些业务关键成果来被评估的。这就是为一家企业工作的现实,对吧?
如果你以一种整个企业都能理解的方式——CEO 能理解、CFO 能理解的方式——为企业做出贡献,如果你的团队对企业来说是一项好的投资,那企业就会继续进行这项投资。
如果你的团队对企业来说不是一项好的投资,或者你其实并不知道自己是不是一项好的投资,但你想你每天都在出现,大概没什么问题吧,你自己猜的——那你就处于一个非常脆弱的位置。而且我认为,在最近的经历中,我们都见过这种状况对所有人来说结局并不怎么好。
Lenny Rachitsky: 那么,这是在回应什么现象?因为我猜很多人听到这里会觉得,“当然啊,PM、产品团队——我们就是在推动业务影响力,这正是我们存在的原因。”
但大多数情况下并非如此。首先,这到底是在回应什么?是在回应那些认为”我们只要做好产品、倾听客户就够了”的人吗?来谈谈这个问题另一面。
产品团队面临的现实
Matt LeMay: 有几个原因。我认为最主要的一个就是,越来越多的产品经理和团队正在被裁员。这是当前一个非常令人恐惧的现实。
如果你看看 CEO 们在裁撤这些团队时传达的信息,有些信息相当明确。
Daniel Ek 在 Spotify 2024 年裁员时发出的信息说:“我们仍然有太多团队在围绕工作本身做工作、在支持工作,而不是专注于具有真正影响力的机会。”
这句话真的触动了我的神经,因为我以前就在那些做支持工作的团队待过。我做过那种围绕工作本身的工作。而且我之前默认,既然把这种围绕工作本身的工作分配给了我,那它一定对业务至关重要,否则他们不会雇我来做。
我不认为这是一个安全的假设。我认为,特别考虑到我们已不再处于零利率环境中,考虑到招聘和留住员工的成本很高,考虑到公司正在寻求节约成本,我认为我们正处在这样一个时刻:每个产品团队以及每个产品团队的每位成员,都有责任去理解、清晰表达并朝着自身工作的顶层业务影响力努力。
Lenny Rachitsky: 很好。所以这一切的出发点就是,如果你没有在推动直接驱动业务增长的事情,你对公司的价值就没那么高。你就是那种会被裁掉的人。
Matt LeMay: 对。
Lenny Rachitsky: 找工作时还有另一面。感觉如果你在简历上展示了影响力,“这是我推动的所有影响力”,这也有助于你被录用。对吗?
简历中的影响力表达
Matt LeMay: 绝对的。是的。这大概是我见过的最常见的简历建议——展示数字、展示影响力、说明你做了什么。
我有一个朋友做简历辅导,几年前我把简历给她看。她说:“我很喜欢你的简历,除了一点——你为什么写得像个小女孩一样?直接说你做了什么,说你的贡献是什么。别说’我帮助了,我可能也许帮助人们做了这个’。说出影响力,把数字写上去。“我觉得我需要从她那里听到这些,因为我觉得我们中有些人确实有一种倾向——尤其是那些在协作环境中真正如鱼得水的人,我们的天性是不想把只有通过许多拥有不同经验和视角的人共同贡献才能存在的成果归功于自己。
说”嗯,我做了这个,我为那个做出了贡献”真的很难。但这也是我在团队层面写这本书的原因之一,因为我认为,对于像我这样真正享受并在团队环境中茁壮成长的人来说,如果你能把产品团队视为影响力的基本单元,说”我们交付了这个。我们能够共同协作,为业务产生了这样的影响力”——那感觉非常好,同时也直接体现了那个团队一起完成的工作。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这是一个很有意思的洞察。我觉得很多这背后是因为 PM 天然就被训练成把功劳推给别人、在所有事情上说”我们”、总是说”这个人做了那个”。所以我理解这背后的原因。不过大多数听众可能仍然在想,“对啊,我在推动影响力,我很棒。我没有这个问题。我不需要改变任何事情。” 有什么方法可以对自己的想法做压力测试?也许是一些可以问自己或者团队的问题,就像——“好吧,也许我其实并不是?“
压力测试:你会全额资助自己的团队吗?
Matt LeMay: 我问大多数与我合作的团队的第一个问题是:如果你是这家公司的 CEO,你会全额资助你自己的团队吗?
这是一个小问题,但能引发很大的反应。因为对我自己来说,当我做产品经理的时候,我真心相信我的工作就是找到下一个最能站得住脚的东西来构建,把它构建出来,庆祝一下,再找下一个最能站得住脚的东西来构建,如此循环往复,永无止境。
我多少默认了我团队的存在是宇宙中一个理所当然的事实,对吧?我的团队会永远存在下去,我们要做的只是找到下一个可以工作的事情,这意味着要做探索、向领导层的要求做出让步、做所有那些利益相关者管理的工作。
Matt LeMay: 但我的团队对业务来说是有成本的,某一天可能会有人在电子表格上看到我的团队,然后说:“这些非常昂贵的人是谁?我们为什么需要他们?我们真的需要他们吗?“——这个想法从来没有出现在我的脑海中,因为我没有参与过那些对话。那不是我思考团队工作的方式。
所以我喜欢问这个问题,因为它是一种视角的转换。它让你思考:如果你个人要对这家企业在市场层面的存亡成功负责,你会投资你的团队吗?
坦白说,大多数被我问到这个问题的人无法立刻给出答案。他们不确定。他们说”我觉得会吧”或者”嗯,会的,因为……”然后你能看到他们的思维在转动。再说一次,对我来说这是一个有风险的处境,因为如果你作为团队的一员都无法回答这个问题,组织里没有其他人比你更有能力回答这个问题。
所以把这个问题带到团队中,主动地、协作地提出并回答它,准备好说:“好吧,如果我们不能自信地回答这个问题,我们需要做哪些改变?我们需要改变职责范围吗?我们需要改变目标吗?我们需要和谁谈?我们需要做什么才能自信地回答这个问题?“我们在团队层面进行这个对话,远比等待别人替我们进行——或者对着我们进行——要好得多。
Lenny Rachitsky: 那么这里的一个信号是不是:如果你不能自信地回答”是”,通过问自己这个问题或团队讨论得出一个明确的答案,那可能就存在一个需要解决的问题?
Matt LeMay: 完全正确。我觉得就是这样,是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我们稍后会谈到具体该怎么做、你推荐哪些步骤来解决这个问题,但我想继续谈谈影响力,因为有时候人们需要一段时间才能被说服——“好吧,我真的需要这样做”——而不是”好吧,这是具体的做法。”
Matt LeMay: 是的。我自己直到现在,直到写这本书,才被说服,而且有时候我仍然觉得自己还需要被说服一点。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我认为裁员对人们来说是一个非常好的说服机制。
Matt LeMay: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 人们看到所有这些产品经理被裁掉,就想,“我怎么避免这种情况?“而这基本上就是这个问题的答案——这就是你如何避免被裁员。
产品经理是”迷你 CEO”吗?
你描述的这些内容中有一个有趣的含义,就是你鼓励产品经理和产品团队像 CEO 一样思考。这触及了一个我一直想写但还没写的话题——很多人在争论:产品经理是不是”迷你 CEO”(mini CEO)?在我看来,产品经理百分之百是”迷你 CEO”——就他们在团队中像 CEO 一样思考,或者说应该如此而言。他们是一样的;他们的工作就是在团队中像 CEO 一样思考业务。显然他们不负责管理所有人,不能解雇任何人,汇报关系也不一样。但我觉得这是看待产品经理工作的一个非常好的视角——你就是团队中的”迷你 CEO”,确保你在构建正确的东西,思考业务,解决真正重要的问题。
Matt LeMay: 我想我现在对这件事的思考方式是:产品经理的责任是让整个团队都像 CEO 一样思考,如果这样说有意义的话。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢这个说法。
Matt LeMay: 所以如果产品经理把这当作自己唯一的责任,说”我是迷你 CEO,我来思考业务”,那其实是一个错失的机会。在我的咨询工作中,很多时候实际上是一位工程师能够率先达到团队具体的影响力层级目标,有时甚至比产品经理还快,因为工程师用系统思维在思考——“好的,我了解这个系统,我也了解那个系统。我跟这个人谈过。我觉得我可以看出这些怎么组合在一起。“有时候是一位设计师或用户研究人员,他们理解客户需要什么,拥有直接的第一手知识。
所以我最初对”迷你 CEO”这个说法的误解是——你独自负责这一切——而不是你是那个将这种 CEO 层级的商业思维带入团队的人。最近我更倾向于认为,产品经理的工作是引入并促进这种对话,而不是独自拥有这场对话。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这是对我所说的话的一个非常好的细化,而且完全说得通。
产品管理的本质:价值交换
顺着产品经理的工作到底是什么这个思路,你有一种非常好的方式来思考它。企业对产品经理的期望是什么?
Matt LeMay: 是的。我最喜欢的产品管理定义来自 Melissa Perri 的书《Escaping the Build Trap》,她把产品管理描述为促进一种价值交换(value exchange)。你在促进企业与客户之间的价值交换。这种价值交换的实际形态和本质取决于很多东西——取决于你的资金模式,取决于你的商业模式,取决于你是 B2B 还是 B2C,取决于你是上市公司还是私有公司。有太多不同的变量影响着企业对产品团队的期望。
我得出的一个结论是,我可能过于不愿意做概括了——除了刚才那个概括之外——但我认为我合作过的最优秀的产品经理和团队,都非常渴望理解成功对他们的特定企业意味着什么。如果是初创公司,我们的资金跑道(runway)还有多长?我们需要什么才能融到下一轮?我们的投资者在追求增长还是盈利?他们在寻找什么,以便我们达到下一个存亡攸关的里程碑?如果是上市公司,投资者在寻找什么?我们向股东承诺了什么?我们的下一份招股说明书里有什么?我们向整个市场承诺要交付什么?
这些信息通常存在于某个地方,但随着我们进行日常的产品管理工作,很容易与之脱节。我曾在很多房间里与我合作的团队进行工作坊和讨论会,他们会调出上次全员大会的内容去寻找 CEO 的幻灯片,因为他们太忙了,有太多日常事务要处理,以至于对全员大会那天的看法就是:“好吧,终于可以不用担心每十秒就有人给我发邮件了。“那是一个喘口气的机会,然后回去做”真正重要”的事情。但那些顶层的东西——那些向整个市场、向董事会、向股东做出的承诺——往往是理解你的企业到底在寻找什么的最佳起点,这样你才能弄清楚你的团队工作如何帮助企业以对企业最重要的指标取得成功。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这是一个非常好的过渡,正好引向我想去的地方,就是你刚才说的那句话,那个你应该问的问题——它某种程度上是你之前分享的那个问题的另一个版本,即:我们正在做什么来为企业的成功做出贡献?
Matt LeMay: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 那么你觉得人们大多数时候在想的是什么?
Matt LeMay: 这很有意思。我们生活在一个这样的世界里——过去 20 年的产品开发,大家都在追求最佳实践。我们热爱最佳实践。我也喜欢最佳实践。我认为最佳实践确实可以很有价值、很有用。我很欣赏现在有这么多知识分享。15 年前我刚入行时,想了解别人是怎么做事的,比现在难得多。
但我觉得这带来的一个负面影响是,有很多人非常、非常执着于”以正确的方式做事”。而大量关于”以正确方式做事”的写作和思考,实际上存在于影响力与日常工作之间的那个中间层。
也就是说,最上面是影响力——企业的整体成功、收入、增长、利润。然后从这里出发,你设定目标,开展项目,做出押注,制定战略,然后才是你的日常工作。
我认为很多产品团队的倾向是紧紧抓住这些中间环节不放,说:“好吧,我们做的事是符合战略的。我们做的事是属于目标的。我们做了 OKRs,对吧?我们花了三个星期来制定未来三个月的 OKRs。现在是 OKR 季节,各位。我们得装作很在乎我们的目标,而且我读了一本书,书上说我们必须有五到七个目标,每个目标有五到七个关键结果,每个的得分要达到 0.6 或 0.7。”
到头来,你实际上花了大量的时间和精力在耍小聪明,把这些东西逐级向下拆解到这些中间步骤中,而每一个步骤都累积了越来越多的风险——我们可能无法实现我们想要驱动的影响力。
每次我们把事物抽象化,每次我们把影响力逐级向下拆解成别的东西,最终得到一个要开发的功能清单时,我们都在做一个假设:只要我们照着这个功能清单把功能开发出来……我们就会拥有一个成功的企业。
但说实话,我合作过的大多数公司和团队,如果我问他们最底层的目标如何逐级汇聚到最高层的目标,他们看我的眼神就像我问了他们世界上最不可能回答的问题。
因为当事情被拆解到那个程度时,可能行得通,也可能行不通。每一个层级中都嵌入了各种假设。
你可以在流程上把 OKRs 做对,把战略做对,但这并不能保证你的战略会奏效。这不意味着你的 OKRs 最终能加总到你的投资者或股东需要看到的成果。
所以我认为产品团队有一种倾向,就是在这个中间层上过分纠结,如果中间层内部不能在理论上达到完美的一致,就会非常焦虑——如果目标跟项目有点对不上,项目跟押注有点对不上,押注跟领域有点对不上。
但说到底,我不觉得我曾为任何一家公司工作过,这些东西能形成一条完美的面包屑轨迹让你追溯回去:“我们在这次迭代中优先做了这些工作,因为它们加起来是这个目标,这个目标是这个战略的一部分,这个战略属于这个项目,这个项目是这个押注的一部分,最终会带来这么多影响力。“现实世界不是这样运转的。
低影响力 PM 死亡螺旋
Lenny Rachitsky: 我觉得很多听众会觉得,“听起来太熟悉了”,跟你刚才描述的一模一样。我们接下来会谈到要改变什么、如何让工作变得更好、真正让你的团队与影响力对齐。但我想先谈谈顺着你这个思路往下走的一个东西,就是你所说的低影响力 PM 死亡螺旋。聊聊它是什么样的。
Matt LeMay: 死亡螺旋。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我喜欢你那个手势。
Matt LeMay: 低影响力 PM 死亡螺旋是这样一种动态——我合作过的每一家中大型公司,或多或少都会陷入其中。说实话,很多小型产品公司也一样。它大致是这样的:一开始,团队接手低影响力的工作。到处加一些小功能,做一些小的表面改进,因为这更简单,受到的审视更少,而且你不太可能搞砸什么重要的东西。我有时用的一个比喻是:如果你在修一辆车,如果你把手伸进发动机里,你可能让车跑得很好,也可能让车彻底趴窝。如果你可以选择做那个,还是给车做外观改装——喷漆、镶水钻,让它看起来特别炫酷——你会选哪个?我知道我的话,我每次都会选水钻。因为这样车该跑还怎么跑。发动机的事让别的懂发动机的专家去修,而我要做的是所有人都能看到的东西。所有高管都能看着它说:“哇,看这车多酷。“而且不会造成任何损害,对吧?最坏能怎样?大不了把漆去掉。
问题是,如果你有 10 个团队都在给车镶水钻,最终引擎盖会变得太重,你根本掀不开了。而这恰恰就是大多数产品组织中发生的事情。越来越多的团队往里塞这些小功能,做些小优化,添加一些可能有用户使用但不会带来任何实质性改变的功能,它们不会去碰企业的商业引擎。有更多的人在构建东西,引擎盖越来越重,产品越来越复杂。
所有这些小零件之间都存在微小的依赖关系,产品变成了一大堆松散连接的功能集合,而不是一个统一的引导式体验——我认为大多数现代产品都是如此。这意味着什么?这意味着在内部,构建任何东西都变得更加困难,对吧?因为有 10 个产品团队,每当你想构建什么东西,都要处理依赖关系。所以公司开始加项目管理(program management)层。他们说:“我们会议太多了。我们需要为项目管理做一次组织重组,因为重组能解决一切问题,我们需要确保有所有这些层级,让人们互相连接起来,做好依赖管理。“但随着你不断添加这些东西,做高影响力工作就越来越难。
引擎盖变得越来越重、越来越重、越来越重,这反过来又把团队推向越来越深的低影响力工作的兔子洞。低影响力工作滋生低影响力工作。你做的低影响力工作越多,做高影响力工作就越难,你就越有可能继续做低影响力工作,如此循环往复。一直转、一直转、一直转,直到下一轮裁员。这是一个真实的问题。
打破循环的勇气
Matt LeMay: 我在几乎所有合作过的公司中都经历过这种情况。有趣的是,打破这个循环往往取决于个别产品团队是否有勇气审视自己的工作,审视什么对企业真正重要,然后说:“你知道吗?我们不想再承担做一个低影响力团队的风险了。我们要主动寻找高影响力的工作并交付成果,哪怕这意味着我们需要与许多其他团队协调。哪怕这意味着高管团队突然对我们做的工作产生了极大的关注。我们要把这看作是我们的工作很重要的信号,而不是把它当成完成工作的障碍。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 正如你刚才暗示的那样,这里有一个很重要的推论——即使你被要求构建一个高管非常兴奋的东西,但在我看来它是低影响力的,这也不是借口。你最终仍然会被裁员,尽管是他们让你建的。这很糟糕,但事实就是如此。
MailChimp 的案例
Matt LeMay: 有趣的是,我曾与 MailChimp 合作了三年,一直到他们被 Intuit 收购。当时他们正处于一段非常有趣的旅程中——从一家单一产品公司转型为平台公司,这也是很多公司正在走的路。他们在市场的某个领域取得了成功,然后说:“你知道吗?我们认识到,横向拓展、为用户提供一套完整的工具组合是有增值空间的。我们想构建这些工具,真正确保我们满足中小企业客户的需求。”
我被请进去是在他们进行了一次组织重组之后不久。他们转向了领域模型,有不同的团队分别负责这个营销平台的不同部分,构建新功能。他们的产品副总裁 Natalia Williams,后来成为了首席产品官,她说:“我们这样做很好,但我担心我们会忽视商业基本面。我们有这些团队在构建很酷的东西,我们对那些负责推进项目、构建新事物、搭建平台的团队感到非常兴奋,这一点我们已经表达得很清楚。但我们要确保整个平台以健康、可持续的方式增长。确保在添加这些新功能的同时,不会让产品变得如此拥挤和复杂,以至于人们更难从中获得价值。”
她为产品团队设定了一个非常明确的目标。她希望提升用户成功发送第一封邮件的比率。她说:“随着我们构建这些新东西,邮件仍然是用户进来的入口。我们要确保他们能顺利完成这件事。“她为整个产品组织设定了一个非常有雄心的目标,并把它交给各个产品团队。很多产品团队出于完全可以理解的原因,对承担这个任务犹豫不决。他们说:“如果我们搞砸了,这可是整个公司的商业心脏。风险太大了。”
还有的团队说:“这很好,但我们正在搭建平台中这些非常重要的新部分。我们不想冒险拖慢那些工作的进度。“有一位与我合作的产品经理真正理解了这件事的重要性。她当时已经在应用的不同部分工作过,还做过增长团队,所以她真正具备那种以用户为中心、如何达成我们所需指标的思维方式。她来找我,说:“我想确保我们做这件事,因为我担心如果我们不做会发生什么。我不想成为那个没能交付对企业最重要之事的产品团队。”
于是她去和用户研究员合作,找出用户卡在了哪里。她做了一项出色的研究,找出了用户在发送第一封邮件之前在哪里卡住了。然后她召集了一群产品经理——我永远不会忘记这一幕。我当时在亚特兰大现场,她召集了一群产品经理,说:“看,如果我们要达成这个目标,这些就是我们必须要修复的问题。如果我们修复了这些问题,我认为我们能做到。我认为我们能达成目标。“然后有了一阵沉默——同样,出于完全可以理解的原因,人们在想:“好的,这很好。我看明白了,但我有点害怕如果我们做了这件事会怎样。“这位产品经理,我永远不会忘记她。
她环顾房间,说:“你们知道吗?如果你们不接这件事,我会在你们的梦里缠着你们不放。这是对企业最重要的事情。“大家都笑了。这句话说得很重,但出于真心,以它自己的方式承认了人们对承担这件事的恐惧。她说:“看,这真的很重要。如果我们协作,如果我们少关心各自领域的边界、限制和条条框框,多关心如何协同交付我们的领导者告诉我们的对企业最重要的事情,我们就能做到。”
他们确实做到了,而且他们是通过”做减法”做到的。他们简化了体验,去掉了用户容易卡住的步骤,让事情变得更简单。他们做的这些事情,很少能像传统的功能上线那样被庆祝。但因为他们对成功有清晰、有影响力、具体的定义,他们能够自己承担起这项工作。这让产品变得更好,让业务变得更好,这是一个与优秀团队合作的美好时刻。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这是一个非常棒的案例。我喜欢这个例子,它简直是一段英雄之旅。沿着这个思路,有趣的是做这件事需要多大的勇气。因为正如你所说,容易的做法就是:“好吧,大家都让我们做这件事。我们就建这个功能。很好,很简单。我不需要把自己暴露出去。“而你所指出的是,这取决于你自己去认识到你正在做的事不是高影响力的,并有勇气提出异议,建议别的方案。
激进地接受现实
Matt LeMay: 有意思的是,这是勇气,但也是一种对现实的激进接受。这个对话有一个非常情感化、哲学化的维度,因为我认为人的本性就是不想为自己无法控制的事情负责。影响力不是我们可以简单打个勾就完成的事情。如果我们真正追求的是业务影响力,那就意味着市场中可能会发生影响我们的事情——竞争对手可能推出新产品,可能会出现一场疫情或战争,或者我们意料之外的事情。我们依赖客户改变他们的行为——转化、升级,或做任何我们希望他们做的事。
我用”希望”这个词,因为同样,我们可以尽最大努力去影响那些行为,但我们不能只是打个勾。我认为存在一种非常可以理解的人性恐惧——害怕为自己无法控制的事情负责。我完全理解这一点。但我认为过去几年向我们展示的是,我们确实要为自己无法控制的事情负责。我们所服务的企业的成功,最终超出了我们直接掌控的范围。
你可以遵循所有最佳实践,保持最高的交付速度,做一切所谓”正确”的事,但如果你的公司倒闭了,他们不会说:“是的,我们倒闭了,但我们会继续给你发两年工资,因为你所有的 OKRs 都达到了 0.6 或 0.7。“现实不是这样运作的。现实是,我们无法控制的事情会影响我们,而我认为如果我们能够内化这一点,其中其实蕴含着真正的自由。在研究这本书的过程中,最让我惊讶的是,我采访的那些具有商业思维的 PM 也是最快乐的,这完全出乎我的意料。
如你所知,我来自音乐行业。我本以为那些做商业的人会非常焦虑,像是在说”我每天要工作 92 个小时来拼命冲刺,确保我们达标、完成业绩”。但他们的态度是:“是的,我在一家公司工作,我尽力而为,然后回家。在公司的时候,我的工作是帮助企业成功。我通过理解我们的商业模式来实现这一点,通过努力做对企业目标有贡献的工作。为了做到这一点,如果我的目标真正是影响力层级的目标,我就必须了解我们的客户。我就必须做发现(discovery),必须做所有这些我们本该做的事情——不是因为它们是抽象的最佳实践,而是因为这是打造成功产品的方式。”
而且到了一天结束的时候,我不会为了”用正确的方式做产品”而跟自己的公司对抗,如果他们不能用正确的方式做,我就愿意为此死磕到底。他们的心态是:“我在一家公司工作。我不需要做每一个决策。有些事情超出我的控制。我尽力而为,然后我可以释放出一些精力去过我生活的其他部分。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 为了让这件事听起来不那么令人害怕——我希望如此——我很好奇你会怎么回答这个问题:你发现那些迈出这一步、那些敢于回推、试图改变团队思考方式和承担任务方式的人——你是否发现,即使他们失败了,即使影响力没有实现、项目失败了,他们也会被更积极地看待,他们的职业发展最终会更好,即使项目失败了他们也能做得更好?
Matt LeMay: 我希望如此。但我同样,这超出了我的控制。我不能说,如果你做了这些事情,管理你的人就会对你刮目相看,因为我不认识那些人,也许他们反应不好。也许他们并不是……人不总是理性的,这些事情并不总是按照你期望的方式发展。我可以说的是,书里有一个故事,在《Impact First Product Teams》中,讲的是一位在约会应用工作的人,他被分配了一个项目,有非常具体且雄心勃勃的收入目标。到了某个阶段,很清楚他们可能无法实现这个目标,因为他们还需要做其他事情。
于是他们去找财务团队说:“嘿,我们需要把这个目标调低。“财务团队说:“是的,当然需要。这很合理。我们一起调低吧。“如果他们没有主动迈出那一步——说出”根据更广阔的世界和市场、我们的产品正在发生的情况,我们不再相信我们能按计划达成这个目标,但我们希望做出调整,以便整个公司可以做出更好的预测和相应的资源配置”——这场对话还会以同样的方式展开吗?
我不知道。但我认为,同样地,如果你正在拥抱这样一种心态——有些事情超出你的控制,你的工作就是在你所在的位置尽你所能为企业的成功做出贡献——那么我认为,诚实地告诉公司你认为什么是可能的、将会发生什么,比退后一步说”哦,如果我们谈论这件事,我们会惹上麻烦,没有人会相信我们”所做的事情要多得多。仅仅是这种对信息的封锁,本身就会造成一种伤害。所以我不能保证任何结果。我不能说”是的,这在所有情况下都会被以慷慨和善意的方式接受”,但我认为这是正确的事情。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我的感觉是,要么你会受到更高的尊重,因为你实际上在为他人解决问题——你让上级看到了他们本应该看到的东西,你是对的,他们会说”哇,Matt 太厉害了,他看到了所有这些并做出了改变”。要么你会意识到这不是适合我的公司。他们不看重这个。他们只想让我发布这个小功能,这就是他们对我全部的期望。我在别的地方能做更多的事。
Matt LeMay: 嗯,我觉得你触及了一个非常重要的点,那就是当你理解了商业模式,你就理解了你所工作的公司的现实伦理和优先级,对吧?如果你理解公司在优化什么,他们真正在乎什么,他们为了实现那些目标愿意做出什么样的权衡和牺牲——这比公司的使命宣言告诉你的要多得多。使命宣言通常听起来很棒,但如果你跟着钱走,跟着决策走,有时候它呈现的是一幅不同的图景。
而且我认为你越能理解商业模式如何运作,那个价值交换是什么,什么价值在被交付,什么价值在被提取——我认为这会让你处于一个更好的位置来做出决定:如果我帮助这家公司取得成功,我对此感觉良好吗?我觉得这是一家如果实现了目标就能让世界变得更好的公司吗,还是不是?你越理解商业模式,就越有条件在掌握全部可用信息的情况下做出这些判断,我认为。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这一点太重要了。
不论公司如何运作都能采取的行动
好的,那我们转向谈谈具体该怎么做——采取哪些行动。这个概念是你可以采取的行动,不论你的公司如何运作。而第一部分非常重要。我看到你非常强调的一点是,你不让人们有借口不去推动这件事。我们之前也从其他角度谈过这个,但也许你可以多分享一下——不论你的公司如何运作,你都没有借口不去深入思考这件事并尝试做出改变。
Matt LeMay: 现实情况是,大多数产品经理工作的公司并不是大型科技公司。当我与那些公司的产品团队合作时——保险公司、银行、消费品公司,或者之前合作过的一家生产音频设备的公司(对我来说显然很有趣)——他们通常第一句话就是:“我们没法用正确的方式做产品,因为我们是受监管行业,“或者”因为我们是 B2B,“或者”因为我们有这些季度盈利目标必须完成。”
这总是让我有点难过。因为确实,你可以这样看——“如果这五家知名公司在用正确的方式做产品管理,那么任何让我们与这些公司处境不同的因素,就意味着我们在用错误的方式做产品管理。“这种看法令人沮丧、令人不安,而且同样会导致人们陷入那种堂吉诃德式的战斗,比如”我必须把一家银行变成一家搜索引擎”——这不可能发生。
但另一种看待方式是,这些约束恰恰就是你做产品管理的方式。它们指引你做出应该做出的商业决策。如果你受到监管,你的竞争对手也同样受到监管。如果你能真正理解这些约束,找到在其中良好运作的方法,那对你的业务来说就是巨大的商业优势。如果你是 B2B,说实话,在很多情况下我更喜欢与 B2B 公司合作,因为他们能如此直接地接触客户,能够理解客户和用户的整个系统,以及这些要素是如何连接在一起的——以一种非常直接、可操作的方式。
同样,如果你的公司有季度财务目标需要完成,恭喜你,你知道公司真正关心什么了。你不需要再去找别的了。如果你能做出直接服务于公司最关心之事的工作,你不一定需要把它向下层层分解成 45 个 OKRs。
所以,是的,这些东西是约束,但它们是塑造我们工作的约束。如果我们拥抱它们,把它们当作指引而非限制,如果我们说我们在与业务的商业现实协作而非对抗,那我们能做的事情太多了。产品经理、产品负责人、项目经理——每个组织中从事产品工作的每个人——如果我们再次选择与而非对抗我们所服务公司的现实,能做的事情太多了。
三个步骤打造以影响力为先的产品团队
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。我觉得这非常令人振奋。你不是在说”你需要改变你公司构建产品的方式。这取决于你。你是一个 ICPM,这取决于你。没有借口。“你会怎么简单地概括你实际上在说什么?我觉得这会让人们感觉好很多。
Matt LeMay: 我实际上在说的是,你认为自己正在对抗的那些东西,通常恰恰是赋予你工作形状的东西——如果你允许它们的话。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。我们来聊聊——你有三个步骤,三个便捷的步骤,来成为一个更以影响力为先的产品团队。我们逐一谈谈吧。第一步是什么?
第一步:团队目标贴近公司目标
Matt LeMay: 第一步,也是我认为最重要的、我大量工作所围绕的——就是让团队目标贴近公司目标。离公司目标不超过一步之遥。这个理念来自 Christina Wodtke 的书《Radical Focus》。她之前在你的播客上做过一期很棒的节目,我来之前刚刚重温了一遍找灵感。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好手段。
Matt LeMay: 在那本书里,她有一张图,她说大多数公司做 OKR 层层分解时是这样的——最上面是公司目标,然后是部门目标,然后是大团队目标,然后是小团队目标,然后是更小的团队目标。而这恰恰导致了我之前描述的那种局面——你无法把这些小团队目标加回到公司目标上。她用一张图来对比,把公司目标作为引力中心,然后所有其他团队目标围绕它在一个层级上运转。我第一次看到这个的时候大为震撼,因为无论你用的是 OKRs、KPIs 还是北极星指标,无论你表面上使用的是什么框架,如果你用得好,它看起来就是那样。
我之前和一支团队合作过,那是一支金融科技公司里的传统功能团队。他们的角色有点像我在 MailChimp 时合作的那支团队——基本上是被分配新功能去构建,把产品打造成一个多产品平台。业务方说”去建这个”,他们就建,然后庆祝;说”去建那个”,他们就建,然后庆祝。然后业务方说:“好了,我们要换个做法了。现在我们有了一个顶线收入目标,明年要赚这么多钱,我们希望你们告诉我们,你们打算怎么为此做贡献。”
这对这支团队来说是一个非常艰难的对话。因为尽管人们总是抱怨自己是功能工厂,但同样地,那样感觉更安全,对吧?可控性更强。如果有人告诉你建什么,你对”是否把它建出来”有很高的控制力,但对”它是否带来收入”则不然。于是我们开始讨论,该用什么框架?该怎么做?我当时问的问题质量不高。说实话我也在慌。然后我问他们:“好吧,这支团队为什么存在?我们为什么要做这些?为什么公司要投资这么大一支团队来建这些功能?我们是单一产品公司还是多产品平台公司,为什么重要?”
然后一位团队负责人说:“哦,其实,多产品用户的客户终身价值比单产品用户高很多。“我说:“哦,我们知道高多少吗?“他们说:“知道,我们其实有具体数字。“我说:“哇,所以如果我们设定一个目标——把一定数量的单产品用户转化为多产品用户——我们就确切知道有多少收入在里面了。“他们说:“嗯,好像是。“于是我们能够设定一个目标,由此我们讨论了:需要达到什么数字才能让这支团队看起来是一项好的投资?我们得出了一个具体数字——
要让这支团队看起来是一项好的投资。我们得出了一个具体数字,而这个数字指导了这支团队那年余下时间的每一个决策。我们说:“到年底,我们需要转化这么多单产品用户为多产品用户,因为如果我们做到了,就会带来这么多额外收入,而这部分收入对公司顶线收入目标的贡献是这么多。“只差一步。
当他们把这个目标拿去与公司领导层分享时,领导层立刻就懂了。他们不需要说”嗯,这为什么有价值?“不需要说”你们的其他 OKRs 是什么?给我们看看 PPT。“领导层立刻就明白了。这给了他们极大的回旋余地去做出更大胆的决策,更紧密地与其他团队合作,去申请他们需要的资源。而得出那个目标的过程——那个既有影响力又具体明确、与公司最关心之事仅一步之遥的目标——大概是我近来与团队一起度过时间的最有价值的方式。因为一旦你到达那里,你会看到其他一切如何从那里自然流出。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这里的含义是,如果离得太远,人们会不理解”你们到底在做什么来帮助业务?“——这就是你想要避免的问题。
Matt LeMay: 没错。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以一个极端是——我不知道——你的团队和公司定完全相同的目标可能也不太合理。假设你们公司目标是增长到一亿收入,那不太可能就是你团队的目标。所以这个极端的做法更像是问:离那一步之遥的是什么?你对那个公司目标的贡献是什么?
另一个极端则是深挖十层——我们要提升某个随机步骤的转化率,然后这个会拉动那个,那个又会拉动另一个,最后才带动收入。
Matt LeMay: 正是如此。
Lenny Rachitsky: 那么你对以收入为基础的目标作为团队目标,有什么建议?
收入目标是否适合作为团队目标
Matt LeMay: 我觉得,还是那句话,要看情况。我知道人们对”团队应该总是”或”永远不应该”以收入为目标有很强烈的看法。但我不认为这有那么简单。有时候是的——如果你的公司正在追求收入,那么以收入为目标就合理,或者至少能以收入的形式对你团队的工作赋予一定的价值。我也和一些初创公司合作过,他们主动不去追求收入,因为现阶段的核心任务是增长,对吧?他们想展示自己有足够的用户来筹集下一轮融资。我确实合作过一家初创公司,他们的收入在涨,用户数也在涨,我们不得不进行一次非常有意思的讨论:到底哪个指标对我们的投资人更重要。我们最终梳理出了两种情景——高增长情景和低增长情景。
跟产品团队沟通后,很显然他们根本不可能达到高增长情景。所以他们转而聚焦盈利能力,这样可以延长资金跑道,作为一个规模更小但拥有可持续收入基础的业务去筹集下一轮融资。
所以我理解为什么人们不愿意承诺收入目标。确实有些情况下,收入目标过于宽泛,或者不完全是业务所需要的。但归根结底,金钱是衡量大多数团队影响力的方式。如果你无法说清楚为什么你的团队是一项好的投资——无论是从它带来的资金回报角度,还是从对业务同等甚至更重要的其他回报角度——那这感觉就像是一个脆弱而危险的处境。
好目标的实例
Lenny Rachitsky: 为了让大家脑子往正确的方向转一转,能不能举一些好目标的例子?比如你带过的团队设定的那些离公司目标仅一步之遥的具体目标?不提公司名字,随便举几个?
Matt LeMay: 我有一个相关的故事,同时也引出了我们的第二步,那就是在每一步都保持以影响力为先。
我曾经和一家深受许多人喜爱的科技公司的一个增长团队合作。我被请去帮他们制定 OKRs——当时全公司都在做 OKRs,而这个团队要制定自己的增长 OKRs。他们做了大量阅读和研究,学习如何正确地做 OKRs。遗憾的是,他们没有读过《Radical Focus》,否则做法可能会不一样——他们读了很多其他书。他们打印了很多文章,然后说:“我们要确保把这件事做对。我们要做一份 PPT,里面包含五到七个目标,每个目标下有五到七个关键结果,每个关键结果都有一个负责人,我们要确保责任到人。我们要真真正正地做对这件事,把中间那一环做到完美。”
于是他们花了很长时间来制定这些 OKRs。OKRs 季结束了,他们把 OKRs 文件收起来,直到下一个 OKRs 季之前再也不会去看。我们重新碰头,花了一整天来给所有 OKRs 打分。大家激烈争论:这个是 0.6 还是 0.7?这个算 0.9 吗?这个关键结果到底该归谁负责?谁贡献最大?等我们谈完这一切,所有人都筋疲力尽了。然后我说:“我只需要问一个问题。很抱歉要这样做,但这一切加起来,怎么对应到公司层面的增长目标?”
大家面面相觑,说:“嗯,这不是我们做的事啊。我们设定了团队层面的 OKRs,走完了流程,确保一切都按照 OKRs 的方法来,我们认真思考了这些 OKRs——“我说:“对,但公司的目标是——比如说——今年带来一百万新用户。我们是增长团队。我们带来了多少用户?”
一阵沉默。这个团队的负责人非常优秀。她站起来说:“好,我们要换一种方式做事。“她走到白板前,在白板右端写上 100 万,画了一条线,说”这是一年”,在线上画了一个小刻度。“这是我们现在的位置,是一个比一百万小的数字。这是我们最终需要达到的位置。如果我们的对话不是从这里开始的,我不想谈。如果你有 51% 的把握认为另一种方案能让我们更接近 1%,我期望你为那个方案发声。从现在开始,这就是我们做一切事情的方式。”
我经常想起这件事,因为这是在做减法——让事情变得更简单。它实际上做的正是你之前描述的——就是说:“这是公司关心的事。我们是增长团队。我们需要搞清楚我们做的一切如何对它做出贡献。”
这个故事一直留在我心里,因为看起来这应该是显而易见的,对吧?如果你是一家有增长目标的公司的增长团队,这显然应该是你关心的事。但在制定这些中间目标、做策略、做我们日常做的那些事情的日复一日的工作中,太容易把事情搞得比实际需要的更复杂。所以对于这个特定的团队和这个特定的时刻,一个好目标就是看着公司层面的目标说:“如果我们是推动增长的团队,我们就对此负责。我们要站出来,尽一切努力确保公司实现它的目标。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 而且如果你从你之前分享的角度来看,这就非常明显了。如果你是 CEO,你会资助这支团队吗?如果看到我们的目标是一百万用户,这支团队能为我们带来十万用户——假设这对你们来说已经不少了——显然你会希望这支团队表现出色,并给他们所需的资源。他们对这个目标会做出有意义的贡献。你一看就很清楚。关键在于很多人以为自己在做这件事,但其实并没有。也许我在你说话时想到的一个经验法则是:你怎么知道自己做对了?应该有一个非常简单的电子表格公式——这里是公司目标,这里是你的目标——应该有一个简单的公式可以把你的目标换算上去,加总到公司目标。
Matt LeMay: 我通常的思路是:一个 Y 级别的陈述,或者一个数学运算符就够了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 就是这样。
Matt LeMay: 在某些情况下,比如我之前讲的那个 FinTech 公司的故事,就是”升级用户数”。那就是一步,对吧?乘以增加的客户终身价值。在另一些情况下,它是同一个东西的更小单位——就是公司想要实现的收入或增长的一个子集。
Matt LeMay: 我最近和一家公司合作,他们有一个团队正在重建广告技术平台。这家大公司业务繁多,而广告技术平台是所有业务的核心。我被请去做为期一天的工作坊,因为这是一个非常重要的团队,但他们一直搞不清楚成功应该是什么样子。
于是我问:“好的,你们的目标是什么?“他们说:“这是我们目标的 deck。“我说:“目标太多了,靠这些目标我没法做决策。“他们说:“哦等等等等,不,我们还有一个 Miro 看板。我们过了一遍,觉得 deck 内容太多了,所以又做了一个 Miro 看板。“但 Miro 看板嘛,往往会朝各个方向无限膨胀,结果变成了一个巨大的看板。后来发现他们居然有两个 Miro 看板,因为这事儿他们做了两次。
通过减法提炼目标
于是我们坐下来,做了一个非常有意思的减法练习。每个人拿到一张便签,写下自己认为团队最重要的目标。然后两两配对,每次都要把内容缩小、变得更精炼。如果有两件事,就缩减到一件。如果有十个词,就缩减到八个词,每次都让它更小、更精炼。
最后我们得出两个选项。一个是:构建一个出色的、神奇的、美丽的平台,将团队利润提高 20%。说得过去。另一个是:构建一个惊人的、出色的、非凡的平台,在下个财年将团队利润从 2000 万英镑提高到 1 亿英镑。
我看着这两个说:“好吧,所以我们知道这里有对收入的预期,有对推动盈利能力的预期,但一个是 20%,另一个是 500%。这些数字从哪来的?“说 20% 的那些人说:“这感觉是一个不错的回报率。“有意思的是,后来我讲这个故事、做一些分享的时候,人们会笑,觉得”哦,他们说错了数字”。但他们其实非常勇敢,说出 20% 这个数字才真正开启了团队层面的对话,因为房间里有人听到了之后说:“等等,我确实记得有什么关于利润的事。好像有个我们应该达到的目标,但我记得那个数字比这大得多。“他们回去翻了 VP 做的一次全员会议,在那个会议的某张幻灯片里,确实埋着一个目标——下个财年末实现 1 亿英镑的利润目标。
将目标具象化为时间线
所以他们有了这个数字,开始觉得:“天哪,这么多,不过是一整个财年,应该没问题。“我们又一次——灵感来自我之前合作过的那位领导——我在白板上画了出来。我说:“好,下个财年末 1 亿利润,我们现在在这里。时间线上还应该有什么?“有人说:“我们十月份要上线。“于是我把十月写上去。我说:“好,如果我们到十月之前什么都不上线,现在是三月,那到之前能产生多少利润?“他们说:“大约 1000 万。“我说:“好。也就是说,从十月到三月之间,我们需要创造 9000 万英镑的利润。”
我本来担心这个团队会崩溃,或者会说”我们做不到,这不可能”。但他们的反应是:“好,是时候加把劲了。是时候做所有我们需要做的事了。我们需要更早上线,需要做更多验证,需要做更多测试。能不能更早商业化?能不能做更多 discovery 来确保这真的能产生我们需要的影响力?为什么要搞一个大改版?为什么不逐个重建各个部分?如果现在就从漏斗顶部引入更多用户会怎样?能不能先建立用户群,然后再升级这些用户?这样做和直接引入用户的权衡是什么?”
所有这些事情,我认为才是这些最佳实践真正的核心和初衷。它们之所以活了起来,是因为这个团队有了清晰度。他们理解了:“好,我们要对一件足够具体的事情负责,这个具体程度足以驱动真正的紧迫感,而且影响足够大,迫使我们走出去做所有我们应该做的事。”
所以对我来说,这是一个非常好的例子,说明如果你从”这个团队的预期是什么?对我们来说成功是什么样子?“这个问题出发,它通常会引导你走到正确的方向,让你知道应该关注什么样的度量单位,公司层面会怎么看你们——是直接看收入,还是看其他什么。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。这些故事太棒了。基本上,到目前为止,你通过实例展示了正确做法的两个步骤。第一步是设定与公司目标接近的团队目标。第二步是,在产品构建过程的每个阶段都这样做,而不是只在开头做一次。
Matt LeMay: 没错。在做 OKRs 的时候,就像我说的那个团队一样,在思考公司战略的时候,在写 epic 的时候,不管做什么,都要把那个有影响力的目标放在心上。不要让它溜走,不要让它被层层分解到消失不见。
Lenny Rachitsky: 因为正如你所说,在你分享的那些例子中,你觉得”太好了,我们有目标了,出发吧”,然后花了几个月做这件事,然后就忘了——这其实已经和公司目标脱节了。
Matt LeMay: 完全正确。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你辛辛苦苦做的一切,结果就是——没人在乎。
Matt LeMay: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。第三步是什么?
第三步:将每项工作关联到影响力
Matt LeMay: 第三步是将每一项工作都关联到影响力。这就到了优先级排序的部分了。
影响力估算在产品管理的资料中被写得相当好、相当详细,但这件事很容易被跳过。我和很多团队合作过,他们想知道做优先级排序的正确最佳实践——是该用 ICE 还是 RICE 还是 MoSCoW 还是别的什么,做优先级排序的正确方式是什么?答案还是”看情况”,但如果你对影响力是什么没有一个清晰而具体的认识,就无法有效地进行优先级排序。所以在这里,一切又回到了第一步——你设定目标的方式。
我之前说过的那个目标是将单产品用户转化为多产品用户的团队,那个团队的一位产品经理几个月后找到我说:“嘿,Matt,我真的需要你帮我搞清楚怎么做优先级排序。我们应该用 ICE 吗?用 RICE 吗?用 MoSCoW 吗?我做了一个 ICE 矩阵,给影响力打分,给确定性打分,给工作量打分,然后把它们互相相乘,得到了一份我们应该做的事情的清单。”
Matt LeMay: 我说,“这太棒了。“我确实觉得当有人主动说”我做了这个东西,我们一起过一遍”的时候,真的很棒。所以他们把这个拿给我看的时候,我说,“我们先从影响力开始。“他们说,“好的,这里是每项的分数。“我说,“分数是什么意思?“他们说,“哦,是很多不同东西的综合。“我说,“好吧,我们有一个团队目标,是年底前要转化特定数量的用户,所以我们试着把影响力表示为这个目标的函数。与其用一个抽象的分数,不如算算在这些不同场景中,我们最多能转化多少用户?”
可以理解,他们有点为难,说,“呃,说实话我不太确定。“我说,“我们一起来推算一下,不需要精确。这叫影响力估算,不叫影响力得出完美数字。“其中一项,他们说,“嗯,我们可以做一个落地页。“我说,“好的,有多少人会访问这个落地页?“他们说,“不多,可能几百个。“我说,“好,那就是可能几百个。”
但有一项他们非常犹豫。它的工程量分数很高,确定性分数是中等。他们基本上说的是,“你看,如果我们真想做这件事的话,我们可以重新设计整个新手引导体验。我们可以做到——与其事后费力地把用户引导到多产品使用上,不如在他们加入的时候就理解他们,直接把他们归入正确的用户类型。”
我说,“这听起来太棒了。它能产生的最大影响力是什么?“他们说,“如果做得好,它能让我们达成全部目标。但我们需要和其他团队合作,还需要和市场部门配合。依赖太多了,有太多我们无法控制的东西,我们不确定能不能做到。“我说,“没关系。这就是我们作为产品经理需要做的权衡。你会有一些影响力较小、但更容易交付、更确定能完成的工作。但如果这件事能让我们达成全部目标,如果我们看到的所有选项中,它是唯一真正有机会帮助我们达成目标的——记住,我们当初制定这个目标就是为了回答’这个团队需要交付什么,才能成为公司的一笔好投资’这个问题——那么我认为值得去争取。”
“值得去和其他产品团队进行那些对话。值得去和市场部门的人谈。值得稍微逼自己一把,说’这件事做起来会有挑战,但如果我们能做到,我们就能交付一个让我们真正感到骄傲的成果。’”
所以第三步最常见、最具操作性的体现就是:我们是否在用与目标相同的度量单位来估算和衡量影响力?因为如果我们这样做,我们就能保持诚实,问自己”这件事真的有可能产生贡献吗?“反过来,如果我们耍小聪明,搞出一套专有评分系统和所有这些中间步骤,我们可能会觉得自己在做非常了不起的工作,非常非常聪明。但我们同样面临一个风险——我们会失去与最初为什么要做这些工作之间的联系。
影响力应该基于团队目标
Lenny Rachitsky: 这是一个非常重要却常常被忽视的观点。这个观点就是,当你用 RICE 或者 ICE 的某个变体时,影响力应该基于对团队目标的影响力,而团队目标又比公司目标低一层。你说起来感觉理所当然,我希望大多数人都知道这一点,但我觉得大家常常会忘记这一点。就像,影响力是什么?哦,客户会更满意。
Matt LeMay: 再说一次,这并不容易,对吧?做产品管理意味着我们要面对这么多不同的视角,这么多有着截然不同优先级的人。利益相关者管理这件事是持续不断、令人筋疲力尽的,很容易就会把这些东西抛到脑后。这需要付出努力、保持纪律,而且正如你所说,需要勇气才能不断把它拉回来。但我认为,这不仅是正确的做法,而且在一天结束的时候,它能帮助你在工作和你生活中擅长的事情之间,建立更清晰一点的边界。
关于说不和推动回
Lenny Rachitsky: 说到边界,你分享的很多建议都涉及说不、推动回、说服别人他们是错的,这些都非常困难。这对大多数人来说不是一个自然舒适的位置。
Matt LeMay: 确实不是。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你有什么建议?你发现什么方法在推动回、帮助人们看到他们的想法——他们想让你做的东西是不对的方面,效果比较好?
Matt LeMay: 这就是我作为一个回避冲突、取悦他人的人所具有的优势吧。所以我经历过这些,我觉得我在《Product Management in Practice》中最自豪的一句话是:如果你把产品管理做得很好,你永远不需要说好,也永远不需要说不。你是在给人们提供选项,帮助他们理解其中的权衡。
延续这个”有些事情不在你控制范围内”的思路,作为产品经理,你不总是那个做决定的人。会有其他人来找你说”做这个”,或者说”我看不出那个的价值。做这个,做那个。我要这个,我要那个。“如果这些人在组织中拥有正式职权,我从来没成功过直接对他们说不。
而且,我发现自己在某些情况下,他们知道一些我不知道的事情。比如他们正在推进一项收购,所以有些事情我们必须做或者不能做。比如公司正在经历某个严重的财务困难,这正在改变优先级,但他们不能在全公司范围内讨论这件事。那些让你做一些看起来不合理的事情的人,完全有可能掌握着你不知道的信息。而如果你试图说服他们改变主意,你不仅会失败,还会损失一些信任,损害那段可能在将来对你非常重要的关系。所以我认为挑战在于要说,“好吧,你想让我做这个东西?也许可以。让我们看看不同的选项。”
如果你按照这些步骤走,如果你说,“我理解,这是我们团队的目标,这是我们正在优先处理的事项,这是我们认为它们能产生的影响力。如果你给我的东西能产生更大的影响力,那太好了,我很愿意做。听起来很棒。”
但如果它的影响力不明确,或者与这些目标不挂钩,那我们就可能需要调整我们追求的影响力目标。如果这件事突然变得非常重要——就像书中讲的那个故事一样——有时候就是,好吧,我们得做这件事。没问题。这意味着我们的影响力预期需要做相应的调整。
选项与推荐的魔力
Matt LeMay: 你不是在说”不”,也不是在说”是”。你在帮助一个有决策权的人理解这个决策背后的权衡取舍。同样,如果你能做到这一点,一天结束时你会感觉更好。你不会觉得自己输掉了一场战斗,或者被一个不公正的暴君压倒了,而更像,“好吧,我确保了他们拥有如果是我做决策时想要拥有的所有信息。那个决策最终由他们来做,而我会尽我所能。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 说说看你是否不同意。根据我的经验,你也要给出一个推荐路径。因为很多人不希望 PM 只是说,“这里是所有选项。我没有观点,没有任何倾向。你来决定。“我发现人们希望你有自己的立场。
Matt LeMay: 绝对如此。选项加一个推荐,这基本上就是魔法公式。我之前在 MailChimp 工作时,我们实际上为公司所有产品经理做了一个工作坊,让大家角色扮演,尝试推销一个单一方案 versus 多个方案加一个推荐。结果非常惊人——当你只呈现一个方案时,人们的本能反应就是,嗯,我不知道,你会开始挑毛病。不是因为你是个难搞的人,而是因为——
你开始挑毛病,不是因为你是个难搞的人,而是因为你在看一个东西,你会说,“嗯,那这个呢?那个呢?”
所有你自己的焦虑、恐惧,以及你在其中看不到自己关切的东西,还有你担心的,“如果这个发生了怎么办?如果那个发生了怎么办?”
所有这些都会削弱推进的势头。而如果你走进来说,“这里有三个选项,这些是权衡取舍,这是我们推荐的那一个,“那么每一次来回讨论都会让这些选项变得更清晰、更有力。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我觉得人们可能会忽略我们讨论中的那个微妙之处,所以我认为这是非常重要的一点。
三步法回顾
让我回到那三个步骤,给那些心想”太好了,我很兴奋,我很受鼓舞。我要改变我们的运作方式”的人。我快速总结一下。
第一步,设定与公司目标紧密挂钩的团队目标。第二步,在每一个环节都坚持以影响力为先。在全年构建过程中不要忘记这一点。第三步,将每一项工作都关联到影响力上。
Matt LeMay: 对。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我想再次提醒大家,这可能是困难且令人烦恼的,也许现在一切还行。每个人都在告诉你该构建什么,你在构建和发布,看起来一切都还挺好的。
我认为很重要的一点是,如果你相信你所构建的东西不能帮助业务增长和成功,那么——要么有一天他们会让你走人,因为你做的事情无关紧要;要么业务本身会出问题,你也会陷入麻烦。
所以即使你不想做这件事,你也需要认真考虑,即使它真的很难。
Matt LeMay: 是的。
当一切顺利时
Lenny Rachitsky: 不过让我换个角度想想。假设业务发展得很好,一切都很棒。CEO 告诉你所有要构建的东西,销售人员只是说,“来,发布这些功能,一切都很好。”
而且一切都运转正常,业务在增长。你怎么看?是”别折腾了”,还是你认为”大多数情况下这不会持久”,你应该开始磨练这些技能?
Matt LeMay: 有意思的是,与我合作过的团队中,当一切顺利时,他们有时和当一切不顺时一样焦虑,因为他们很难将成功归因于自己正在做的事情。
他们会看看说,“是啊,我们做得很好。但说实话,我觉得这更多归功于市场部门,而不是我们。”
或者,“是啊,我们做得很好,但我们只是在对的时间出现在了对的地方。我们的业务做得很好,我们的行业做得很好。我们只是在跟着大家一起增长。”
而且我认为,和大多数事情一样,如果你带着好奇心去看待它,会学到很多东西。所以如果你看看说,“是的,我们未必能独揽功劳,但市场部门做得太棒了。去跟他们聊聊吧。他们在做什么?为什么这么顺利?他们从中学到了什么,我们可以怎样更紧密地和他们合作?”
如果你的行业确实发展得很好,那就想想,好吧,现在是什么在起作用?未来可能会发生什么变化?我们怎样才能理解这些?”
所以我认为,当一切顺利时的挑战在于保持那种好奇心,不仅仅是庆祝你自己团队在做的事情,而是每个人在做的事情,利用那段你有更多回旋余地、当下压力较小的时光,去建立与组织其他部分的联系,去看看那些真正出色的工作发生在哪里。
保持开放与好奇
有一件事让我很遗憾,就是当团队之间用嫉妒和厌恶的眼光看待彼此的时候——“那个团队做得很好,但他们不用遵守和我们一样的标准,这不公平,而且他们是所有人都喜欢的团队。”
与其这样,不如”去跟他们聊聊,因为你可能能从他们身上学到东西。如果他们是那个获得正面关注、做有意义工作的团队,这背后可能是有原因的。如果你能理解那个原因,并且让你的工作与那个团队的工作对齐,这对你来说可能会非常有好处。”
再次强调,我认为在很多情况下,这归根结底还是那个控制感的问题。如果我们无法感受到”事情进展顺利是因为我们做了这件事”这种控制感,我们就倾向于把自己与顺利的事情割裂开来,说,“嗯,我没法说。去关注它甚至感觉有点危险,因为如果我们什么都没做,但好事情还在发生怎么办。”
我认为,保持那种开放性,保持好奇心,能让你在事情不可避免地开始进入平台期或衰退期时处于一个更好的位置,这是所有事物周期性的本质。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇,说到点子上了。开始收尾我们的对话吧——书里,或者这次对话中,有没有一个问题,是你认为产品负责人、产品团队应该问自己的,能帮助他们发现可能没看到的问题,帮助团队运作得更好?
一个值得问自己的问题
Matt LeMay: 我很喜欢那个问题,“如果你是 CEO,你会资助这个团队吗?“我知道有时候这感觉有点对抗性。所以,一个更温和的方式来提出这个话题是说,“在年底时,你希望能说出一句话,关于这个团队的工作,让你觉得非常棒——那会是什么?说一个。”
年底了,一切都很顺利。你在走廊里遇到 CEO,你说,“我感觉棒极了,因为我们做到了这个。”
你会从团队里不同的人那里得到非常不同的答案。在这些答案的基础上,你说,“好吧,这是你在意的。这是我在意的。这是你担心的。这是你期待的。”
这就是那种魔力时刻——一群人在一个房间里共同构建,或者音乐家在一个房间里写他们的下一首歌。
闪电问答环节
Lenny Rachitsky: 太妙了,又回到了开头。
Matt LeMay: 然后——
Lenny Rachitsky: 我太喜欢这个了。
Matt LeMay: 关键在于把这样的对话公开出来,让人们谈论各自的视角和期望,目标是将这些汇聚在一起,创造出更好的东西。
Lenny Rachitsky: 砰。Matt,在进入非常令人期待的闪电问答之前,你还有什么想聊的,或者想留给听众的吗?
Matt LeMay: 我觉得我们聊得差不多了。我只想再留给大家一个希望——你可以开始把商业的现实和约束看作机会,看作路标,看作塑造和构建你工作的东西,而不是你单枪匹马需要去改变、打破或转型的东西,因为你很可能做不到。这没关系。
Lenny Rachitsky: 很有力量的话。接下来,我们到了非常令人期待的闪电问答环节。准备好了吗?
Matt LeMay: 尽我所能地准备好了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 第一个问题。你会推荐最多的两三本书是什么?
Matt LeMay: 《Radical Focus》,Christina Wodtke 写的,显然我在自己的书里大量引用了它。我认为这是关于 OKRs 最好的书。我喜欢她的写作风格,喜欢她讲故事的方式。我喜欢那种对”专注”本身的专注——这个理念,即你做事的方式不如做事方式所带来的结果重要。这个想法始终让我深受启发。
另一本书有点出人意料,是佛教哲学家 Alan Watts 写的,叫《The Wisdom of Insecurity》。我谈论控制和放弃控制的方式,很大程度上来自这本书。书中还提出了一个概念,开篇就讲,叫做”反向努力定律”——有时候你越努力,事情反而越糟。在设定目标、做 OKRs、做战略的时候,我经常想到这一点——人们有时倾向于把精力花在过度复杂化事物上,而这反过来让这些事物离它们最终要达成的目标更远。所以,强烈推荐这本书。在一些精神上很黑暗的时期,它帮了我很多。
书里有一个观点。他谈到,试图让自己在一个想象中的未来里永远安全,实际上是在扼杀当下的自己。这个说法太扎心了。真的、真的、真的扎到我了。所以,强烈推荐这本书。如果我们今天聊的这些东西,让你在工作中应对它们时感到的焦虑和恐惧,哪怕只有我自己所感到的一小部分,那我也强烈推荐你读一读 Alan Watts 的《The Wisdom of Insecurity》。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我正想问你书名是什么,因为听起来真的很有力量。太棒了,太棒的选择。第二个问题,你最近有没有特别喜欢的电影或电视剧?
推荐书单与影视
Matt LeMay: 天哪。特别是当我处于那种工作写作模式的时候,我的大脑会对所有不是垃圾的东西关门。所以我一直在看很多垃圾节目。我看了《诱惑岛》(Temptation Island),Netflix 上新一季的《诱惑岛》。我爱得不行。主持人是 Mark L. Wahlberg,他也是《鉴宝路演》(Antiques Roadshow)的主持人,在这个离奇的节目场景里,他简直是在把”治疗话术”武器化来折磨人。我不应该这么喜欢它,但我只是个凡人,一个偶尔为抓马而活的 messy bitch,所以……
Lenny Rachitsky: 太赞了。
Matt LeMay: 我知道。我看得非常享受。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我想这是播客里第一次有人提到《诱惑岛》,我太喜欢了。好的,最喜欢的产品……你最近发现的、真的很喜欢的产品?
最喜欢的产品
Matt LeMay: 好的,我很高兴你问了这个问题,因为作为一个音乐人,我生活在一个小众产品的世界里,这非常有趣,因为音乐创作者的规模经济完全不同,对吧?你不需要做一个能拥有十亿用户、创造巨大回报的产品。你可以做一个几百或几千人使用并热爱的东西。你处于一个物理和数字混合的有趣领域,各种不同类型的东西。当你问我这个问题时,我第一个想到的就是这个——它由一位在旧金山湾区以 Milkman Sound 为名的音箱制作师打造。他基本上把 Fender 放大器的电路做成一个可以放进这个方便、紧凑、轻便的外形里的版本。
对我来说,我已经不再是 22 岁了,但偶尔还会跟朋友的乐队巡演,还有腰痛的问题——能够用这个设计精良、外形美观的产品来携带一台真正强大的放大器,感觉是一种纯粹的喜悦。这正是那种真正理解”品质”对它特定用户群体意味着什么的产品。我可以去巡演,声音效果很好,不用拖着巨大的、沉重的东西。我喜欢这一点。对这样一件东西,我真心感激。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这让我莫名其妙想玩音乐了。不过为了让我搞清楚它是怎么工作的,你还是要把那个接到音箱上吗,还是——
Matt LeMay: 对,我有一个小音箱。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。哦,明白了。
Matt LeMay: 你也可以直接接到酒吧的调音台,或者用来录音。它还有一个小耳机孔。所以如果我想在演出前在酒店房间里练习,也可以用它。它能做你需要这种设备做的一切,不多做任何事,而且每样都做得很好。这对我来说太美妙了——
Lenny Rachitsky: 又一个很棒的选择。
Matt LeMay: ——拥有一个产品让我觉得,“这刚好做了我需要的一切,做得那么好,而且是一件令人愉悦的产品。“
人生座右铭
Lenny Rachitsky: 还有两个问题。你有没有一个经常回到的、在工作中或生活中觉得有用的人生座右铭?
Matt LeMay: 我经常想起我妈妈跟我说过的话。我相信你也有过这种感受。当你在世界上创造东西的时候,总有一种倾向去看数字,看”我做得怎么样?这引起共鸣了吗?这好吗?这成功了吗?“我确实经历过,尤其是在我的音乐生涯中,投入了大量的心血、爱、时间和精力去做一些东西,但这些付出似乎并没有体现在结果中,也没有体现在它的反响里。
有一次我和我妈妈聊起这个,她说:“我真的相信,好的工作不会白费。即使你没有马上看到它,当你把好的作品放到世界上,哪怕它只触达了少数几个人,它也绝不会白费。如果你做了你真正相信的工作,它就会对世界产生一些积极的影响。“这番话深深地印在了我心里。我一直带着它,甚至在想怎么写作、说什么的时候,当我开始担心自己是不是该更聪明一些,是不是该在表达方式上更讲究策略,是不是该说一些我自己并不完全相信的话的时候。
有过几次——不是最近,而是十年前——我尝试过写一些标题党式的标题,因为我想,“哦,这样是不是能获得更多关注?“其中有一个,得到了一些我非常尊重的人的非常有思想的批评。
Matt LeMay: 我当时想,“我不想做这种事。我不想把自己不相信的作品放到世界上。“即使它没有达到我期望的效果,我也要抱着一个信念继续前进:好的工作不会白费。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我完全相信这一点。最后一个问题。你这些年来写了大量的乐评。我很好奇,有没有哪一篇引发了很大的争议,或者哪一篇是你特别引以为傲的?
Matt LeMay: 嗯,在互联网的某些角落,我是一个反派——
Lenny Rachitsky: 展开说说。
Matt LeMay: ……因为我给 Liz Phair 同名专辑写的那篇乐评。那是我19岁时写的,当时我的世界观是有毒的,还处于非常初级的阶段。那是一篇非常居高临下、傲慢的乐评,出自一种不配拥有的居高临下和傲慢。
倒不是说居高临下和傲慢就一定需要什么资格,但当时我觉得自己是正义的,这种感觉是危险的,对吧?那种有毒的正义感,让你觉得”我在对抗什么坏东西”。但后来你意识到你对抗的东西其实并不是坏的。你实际上是在往旁边和往下打,但你没有足够的清醒和成熟去认识到,在与人、与文化、与自己的关系中,你并不在你自以为的那个位置上。所以我在2019年为那篇乐评道了歉,Liz Phair 和我实际上还在 Twitter 上有一段非常好的互动交流。
那还是在 Twitter 仍然是一个能让这种事情发生的地方的时候,能以那种方式画上一个句号挺好的。我至今对此仍不感觉良好,因为它在助长一些非常有毒且伤人的话语维度。
但你能怎么办呢,除了回过头去看看它,说一句”是的,我错了。我就是完全错了,而且不仅仅是错了,我还是个混蛋。“几个月前有人把这个发出来了,Instagram 上一个做 meme 的博主,把那篇乐评发了出来,配文是”Matt LeMay,你等着被收拾吧。”
我看到后想,“是的,是的。如果我现在读到那篇乐评,我可能也会说类似的话。“所以正如我所说,我是一个回避冲突、讨好他人的人。我经历了自己的边缘人时期。我不觉得那对我或对任何其他人有任何好处。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇,这比我预期的答案深刻多了。真不敢相信人们还在引用那么久以前的那篇乐评。多少年了?多……
Matt LeMay: 22年?那是2003年写的,所以22年了。那是我人生的一半还多。但疯狂的是,在互联网上,它看起来仍然像新的。
我第一次做演讲,实际上是在伦敦,一个 Red Monk 的活动上,我把我少年时代的日记带去了,想说明一个观点:如果一样东西作为纸质载体已经有十年的历史了,它会被自身的物质存在所语境化,对吧?
但有人会去搜”哦,我想看看 Pitchfork 对这张唱片的评价”,然后看到我那混蛋式的乐评,心想”Pitchfork 发表了这篇混账乐评。写这篇混账乐评的混蛋是谁?”
然后他们会找到我,说”嘿,你是个混蛋,因为你写了这篇混账乐评。“而我会说,“是的,我确实写了那篇混账乐评,因为我当时就是个混蛋。“但我愿意认为,从那以后我已经度过了22年的人生。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你的前额叶皮层从那以后发育得更多了。我觉得它不会停止——
Matt LeMay: 天哪,但愿如此。
Lenny Rachitsky: 直到25、26岁才停止。Matt,这太棒了。我们聊了这么多内容,涉及了我希望聊到的所有话题,甚至更多。两个后续问题。大家在网上哪里可以找到你,谈谈你为公司做的那类工作,以及听众怎样才能帮到你?
Matt LeMay: 好,你可以在网上通过 matlemay.com 找到我,很简单。至于大家如何帮到我,希望我能先帮到他们,无论是通过我的书,还是通过进入你的公司工作,帮助你的团队聚焦。
我发现主持这些对话能带来很大的价值。有时候,在没有外部帮助的情况下,要开展这些对话是很难的。所以再一次,无论是以书的形式还是以我本人的形式,我希望我能对你有用,以一种不那么可怕、更容易上手的方式来进行这些对话,带领你走上做有影响力工作的那条路。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太好了,matlemay.com。然后,书名叫什么?在哪里能找到?
Matt LeMay: 《Impact-First Product Teams》。你可以在所有能找到书的地方找到它,Amazon 上也有。有一个由作者朗读的有声书版本,就是在这个房间里,用这支麦克风录的。里面所有的音乐过场都是我自己做的……
Lenny Rachitsky: 为什么?
Matt LeMay: 因为那是在我不想真正去读那本书的时候,一个绝佳的拖延方式。但我希望你觉得它有趣。
Lenny Rachitsky: Matt,非常感谢你来。
Matt LeMay: 非常感谢,Lenny。这次很棒。
Lenny Rachitsky: 大家再见。
主持人: 非常感谢您的收听。如果您觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或您喜欢的播客应用上订阅节目。同时,也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论,因为这真的能帮助其他听众找到这个播客。您可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目,或了解更多关于本节目的信息。下期再见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| Adrian Joselow | Adrian Joselow(人名,保留原名) |
| Alan Watts | Alan Watts(英国哲学家、佛教思想传播者,保留原名) |
| Antiques Roadshow | 《鉴宝路演》(电视节目) |
| breadcrumb trail | 面包屑轨迹 |
| business critical outcomes | 业务关键成果 |
| Christina Wodtke | Christina Wodtke(人名,产品管理顾问,保留原名) |
| customer lifetime value | 客户终身价值 |
| Dan Corbin | Dan Corbin(人名,保留原名) |
| Daniel Ek | Daniel Ek(Spotify CEO,保留原名) |
| discovery | discovery(产品发现,用户研究活动,首次出现保留原文) |
| Escaping the Build Trap | 《Escaping the Build Trap》(书名,保留原文) |
| feature factory | 功能工厂 |
| feature team | 功能团队 |
| Fender | Fender(知名乐器品牌,保留原名) |
| FinTech | FinTech(金融科技,保留原文) |
| ICPM | ICPM(上下文中指以影响力为核心的产品经理,保留原文) |
| impact first | 以影响力为先 |
| Impact First Product Teams | 《Impact First Product Teams》(书名,保留原文) |
| law of reverse effort | 反向努力定律 |
| Low Impact PM Death Spiral | 低影响力 PM 死亡螺旋 |
| Mark L. Wahlberg | Mark L. Wahlberg(主持人,保留原名) |
| Martin Erickson | Martin Erickson(人名,保留原名) |
| Melissa Perri | Melissa Perri(产品管理顾问、《Escaping the Build Trap》作者,保留原名;原文转录为 Melissa Perry,实为 Melissa Perri) |
| Milkman Sound | Milkman Sound(音箱品牌/制作师名,保留原名) |
| mini CEO | 迷你 CEO |
| north star metric | 北极星指标 |
| OKR season | OKRs 周期(指公司制定和评审 OKRs 的时间段) |
| OKRs | OKRs(目标与关键结果) |
| Pitchfork | Pitchfork(知名音乐评论媒体,保留原名) |
| Product Management in Practice | 《Product Management in Practice》(书名,保留原文) |
| program management | 项目管理(program management,指跨团队的程序/项目管理层级) |
| Radical Focus | 《Radical Focus》(书名,保留原文) |
| runway | 资金跑道 |
| Temptation Island | 《诱惑岛》(电视节目) |
| Teresa Torres | Teresa Torres(人名,保留原名) |
| The Wisdom of Insecurity | 《The Wisdom of Insecurity》(书名,保留原文) |
| top line revenue | 顶线收入 |
| value exchange | 价值交换 |
| Will Chef | Will Chef(人名,保留原名) |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)