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Matt LeMay

Partner at Sudden Compass / Author

Sudden Compass

🎯 Product Strategy (1)⚡ Execution (1)👥 Team & Culture (1)

Key Takeaways

  • 1.Product teams are increasingly being laid off for doing 'work around the work' rather than driving business critical outcomes.
  • 2.The 'Low Impact Death Spiral' occurs when teams prioritize cosmetic features over core value, creating complexity that makes future high-impact work impossible.
  • 3.Team goals should be no more than one mathematical step away from company-level goals.
  • 4.PMs are not just 'mini-CEOs' responsible for decisions; they are responsible for helping the whole team think like a CEO.
  • 5.Following agile best practices or having perfect OKRs does not protect you if the company fails commercially.
  • 6.Constraints (regulations, B2B models, revenue targets) are not blockers; they are the guideposts for product strategy.

Methodologies(3)

🎯 Product Strategy

A dynamic where teams choose low-risk, cosmetic improvements ('rhinestones on a car') over risky core work. This adds technical and product debt ('weight to the hood'), making future high-impact work harder, forcing the team further into trivial work until they are viewed as non-essential.

Core Principles

  • 1.Avoid 'work around the work': Don't mistake process for value.
  • 2.Resist the cosmetic trap: Adding small features is easier than fixing the engine, but fatal long-term.
  • 3.Recognize the bloat: As you add low-impact features, dependency management stifles agility.

"It starts with adding little features here and there, making little cosmetic improvements until the next round of layoffs."

#impact#death#spiral
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⚡ Execution

A three-step process to ensure product work is defensible. It involves setting goals mathematically close to company goals, maintaining that focus through the process, and strictly prioritizing based on that specific unit of measure.

Core Principles

  • 1.One Step Away: Team goals must have a direct mathematical relationship to company goals (e.g., specific conversion impacting revenue).
  • 2.Impact at Every Step: Don't let the goal get lost in strategy decks or Jira tickets.
  • 3.Unit-Consistent Prioritization: Estimate impact using the same metric as the goal (e.g., number of users), not abstract scores (High/Medium/Low).

"Don't let it get cascaded into oblivion."

#impact-first#execution#process
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👥 Team & Culture

A mindset shift where the product manager asks the team to evaluate themselves as an investment asset of the business, encouraging radical acceptance of commercial realities.

Core Principles

  • 1.The Investment Question: 'If you were the CEO, would you fully fund this team?'
  • 2.Radical Acceptance: Acknowledge that you are accountable for things outside your control (market, user behavior).
  • 3.Recommendation over Options: Don't just present options; provide a strong recommendation based on business constraints.

"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."

#funding#heuristic#team
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