YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt LeMay

lines on the record: 112
first: 2025-08-14
most recent: 2025-08-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Impact first product teams. You can find it at alltheon. There's an author read audiobook, which I recorded right here in this room with this microphone. I did all the musical interludes myself 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”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so you can find me online at matlamay.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 in to 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like if something has you know 10 years of age on it as paper it's contextualized by its own material existence right But somebody will go like, oh, I wonder what pitchfork thought of this record. They'll see my jerkass review and be like, pitchfork published this jerkass review. Who was the jerkass reviewer who wrote it? And they'll find me and be like, hey, you, you're a jerkass because you wrote this jerkass review. And I'll be like, yes, I did write that jerkass review from the place of being a jerkass, but I like. A person who has lived 22 years of life since then.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can you do if not look back on it and say, like, yeah, I was wrong. Like I was just flat out wrong. And beyond being wrong, I was being a jerk. So there will still periodically be somebody posted this a meme creator on Instagram, posted that review like a couple months ago with a caption like Matt LeMay you will be dealt with and I was like yeah Yeah, like if I read that now, I would probably say something pretty similar. So I think As I said, I'm a conflict diverse 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Fair and I actually had a really nice little Twitter back and forth. This was back when Twitter was still like a place where this kind of thing could happen. And it was nice. To wrap that up in that way. I still. I still don't feel good about it because it was playing into some really toxic and hurtful dimensions of discourse.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I am a villain in certain corners of the internet for an overview I wrote of Liz Fair'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 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That really stuck with me. And 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? You know, there have been a few times, not recently, but a few times like 10 years ago where I dabbled in writing clickbaity 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. And I was like, I don't want to do this. I don't want to. 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 is wasted.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 I am doing, and did this resonate? Is this good? Did this work? And I've definitely worked on things, you know, especially in my musical life where. Amount of effort and love and time and care that went into something. Feel like it showed up in the result of that thing or the way it was received. And I was talking to my mom about this once and she said, you know, 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so you can have like, I have a little speaker. You can also plug direct into the soundboard at a club or for recording.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Can go on tour and have things sound really nice without having to lug like a giant heavy thing. And I love that. It's something for which I am truly grateful.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And you're in this fun realm of kind of hybrid physical and digital and different types of things. And when you ask 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“God, so especially when I'm in kind of worky writey 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 Antique's Roadshow. Just Weaponizing therapy speak to torture people in this bizarre scenario. And I should not love it. I am only a human and a messy bitch who lives for the drama sometimes. So good. I enjoyed that very much”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is that sometimes the harder you try, the worse you make things. And 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 are ultimately intended to achieve. So highly recommend that book. 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 that hit hard. That hit me really, really, really hard.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Radical focus by Christina Woodka is obviously like 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, so inspiring always. Other book. This is a bit of a curveball 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 eff”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We covered it. I just leave people with again this. 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So 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”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? Like what's something, you know, at the end of the year, everything went really well for this team. You run into the CEO in the hallway and you say, I feel awesome because we did this. And you'll sometimes get very different answers from different people on the team. Building on those answers, saying like, 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like, well, I can't like 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look upon each other with envy and disgust, right? 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 with that team's work, that's probably going to be really good for you. So again, I think in a lot of cases, it comes back down to that control thing, right? If we can't”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 that 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”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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,”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People's instinct is just to like, well, I don't know, 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely options and a recommendation is kind of the magic, the magic formula. When I was working with MailChimp, we actually did a workshop with all the product managers at the company where we had people like role play trying to sell in a single option versus multiple options with a recommendation. And it was amazing how when you present a single option”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not saying no, you're not saying yes. You're helping someone who is in a position to make a decision, understand the tradeoffs 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the challenge is to say, like, 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 like, you know, 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, right? 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is where I have the benefit, I suppose, of being a conflict of verse people. So, I've been through this, and I think the thing I am proudest of saying in product management practice is that if you're doing product management really well, you never have to say yes and you never have to say no. You're giving people options and you're helping them understand the trade-offs. 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, this is not easy work, right? Working in prada 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great about so. The way that that third step manifests itself the most frequently, tactically, is are we estimating and measuring impact in the same unit of measure as our goals? Because if we're doing that, then we're keeping ourselves honest and we're saying, does this 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. 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, right? We could make it so that rather than us trying to retroactively shuttle people into multi-product usage, we can understand them right when they join and get them into the right category of user right away. Sounds amazing. What's the most impact that could have? They were like”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And understandably, they were kind of like, oh, you know what? I don't know exactly, let's just work through it. We don't have to be precise, right? 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, like maybe a few hundred. I'm like, okay, cool. So that's maybe a few hundred.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each one. And I was like, What's the score? You're like, oh, you know, 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?”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 singing 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 like, I put this together. Let's walk through it. So when they showed me this, I said, let's start with impact. I was like, okay, well, here's the score.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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'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, you know, should we use ice or rice or Moscow or whatever it is? What's the right way to do prioritization?”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. As you're doing OKRs, like that team I talked about, you know, when you're thinking about your company's 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. You know, that to me is a really good example of how. If you start with this question of like, well, what is expected of this team? What does success look like for us? It'll often lead you Kind of the right kind of 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was worried that 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?”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 work with, I just put this out on a whiteboard. I'm like, all right, 100 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. Like, okay, so We don't ship anything until October, and right now it's March, how much profit do we make until then? I said, about 10 million. Okay, so that means that between October and March, we need to generate 90 million pounds of profits And this team.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 100 million pounds. I'm looking at these and I'm like, okay, so we know that there is an expectation of revenue here, right? There's an expectation that we will drive profitability. But one of these is 20% and the other is 500%. These numbers come from? And the folks who had said 20%, they were like, that feels like a good return, right? What's interesting was when I was telling the story when I was giving some talks recently, people would kind of laugh like, oh, they named the wrong number.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said, that's a lot of goals. I wouldn't be able to make decisions with those goals. Said, oh, wait, wait, wait, no, we also have a muro board because we went through this and we decided the deck was too much. So we also have a muro board. But as Muro boards tend to do, it kind of grew and grew and grew in all directions. So now it's a big muroboard. Now, they had two miro boards because they had tried to do this twice. So we sat down and we 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”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is 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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Its subtracting steps, right? It's making things less complicated. It actually is doing exactly what you describe. It's saying like, 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. And 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 that 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”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? There's a moment of silence. I'm a leader of this team. It's really, really good leader. She stands up and she's like, okay, we're going to do things differently. She steps up to the whiteboard, puts one 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. 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. I think about that all the time.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, do this the right way. We're going to get that middle piece perfect. So they spent a long time working on these okay Rs. Okay, our season ends. They file away the OKR deck not to be seen until the next OKR season. Reconvene and spend a whole day scoring all of the OKRs, right? And there are heated conversations about what's the point six versus 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? Kind of look around. 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 and we thought about the OKRs. And I said, yeah, but the company has a goal.”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had 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 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 have done things differently. They had read a lot of other books. They had printed out a lot of articles, and they said, you know, 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,”
2025-08-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source