PM's Role: Facilitating Team-Wide CEO Thinking

Matt LeMay believes product teams must directly connect their work to business-critical outcomes to survive and thrive, especially in today's economic climate where "work around the work" teams are first to be cut during layoffs.

The core of LeMay's philosophy is that product teams must understand how their work contributes to the company's commercial success. He challenges the common practice where teams focus on "doing things the right way" through elaborate frameworks while losing sight of actual business impact. As he puts it, "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... then the business will continue making that investment."

LeMay identifies what he calls the "low impact PM death spiral" - teams gravitating toward low-risk, cosmetic improvements rather than tackling high-impact work that might affect the commercial engine of the business. This creates a vicious cycle where "low impact work begets low impact work," making it increasingly difficult to do high-impact work until the next round of layoffs.

To break this cycle, LeMay offers three practical steps:

Set team goals no more than one step away from company goals. This means having a direct, clear connection between what your team delivers and what the company needs most. For example, if a company needs to grow revenue by $100M, your team's goal should directly contribute to that number in a measurable way.
Keep impact first at every step of the product development process. Don't let your connection to business outcomes get "cascaded into oblivion" through multiple layers of objectives and initiatives.
Connect every bit of work back to impact using the same unit of measure as your goals. When prioritizing, don't use abstract scoring systems - estimate impact in terms of your actual goal metrics.

For product managers and teams, this approach requires courage to push back on low-impact work, even when requested by executives. Rather than saying yes or no, LeMay suggests presenting options with clear trade-offs and recommendations: "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."

The most revealing question teams can ask themselves is: "If you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund your own team?" If you can't confidently answer yes, that's a sign you need to realign your work with business-critical outcomes.

Interestingly, LeMay found that commercially-minded PMs were often the happiest, not the most stressed. By accepting that business success factors beyond their control will affect them anyway, they gain a certain freedom: "I work for a business and I do the best I can and then I go home."

Working With Business Constraints

Rather than fighting against business constraints like regulation, quarterly targets, or B2B dynamics, LeMay suggests embracing them as guides that shape your work. These constraints actually provide clarity about what matters most to the business and can become competitive advantages when understood properly.

As he puts it: "The things you think you're fighting against are usually the things that are giving your work shape if you let them be."