How product teams can align their work to business-critical outcomes

Executive overview

More product teams are being laid off. The reason: teams doing "work around the work" — shipping features that feel productive but don't move the needle on business survival.

The fix is not better OKR hygiene. It's setting goals that are one step away from what the company actually needs to survive.

Matt LeMay's framework — from his book Impact First Product Teams — gives individual teams three steps to take regardless of how their organisation runs product.

The low-impact PM death spiral

• Teams default to low-risk, low-impact work: cosmetic features, small enhancements, rhinestone-on-the-car improvements
• This happens because it invites less scrutiny and can't "break the engine"
• Over time, 10 teams adding rhinestones make the hood so heavy no one can reach the engine anymore
• More complexity → more dependency management → more reorgs → harder to do high-impact work
• Low-impact work begets low-impact work; the cycle continues until the next round of layoffs
• The spiral breaks when individual teams are brave enough to seek out high-impact work themselves

The stress test: would you fund your own team?

• Ask: "If you were CEO, would you fully fund your team?"
• Most people can't answer confidently — that's the signal something needs to change
• If you can't answer it, no one else in the org is better placed to answer it for you
• A gentler variant: "What one sentence would you want to say to the CEO at year-end that would leave you feeling great?"

Why best-practice fixation fails

• Product teams often obsess over the middle layer: OKRs, strategy, initiatives, bets
• Each cascading step adds assumptions; by the time you reach the feature list, the chain back to company impact is lost
• Scoring OKRs at 0.6 or 0.7 won't save your job if the business fails
• The real question is never "did we do product the right way?" — it's "did we contribute to the business succeeding?"

Constraints are guideposts, not excuses

• Regulated industry, B2B, quarterly earnings targets — these feel like blockers but are actually signals
• If you're regulated, your competitors are too: mastering those constraints is a commercial advantage
• If you have quarterly financial targets, you already know what the business cares about most
• Stop fighting the commercial realities of your business; work with them

Step 1: Set team goals no more than one step from company goals

• One goal, with one mathematical operator connecting it to the company-level goal
• Example: fintech team discovered that multi-product users have much higher lifetime value → goal became "convert X single-product users to multi-product" → directly translates to top-line revenue
• When a goal is one step away, leadership gets it immediately — no deck required
• Most teams cascade goals 10 levels deep; by the time you get to feature work, no one can trace it back up

Step 2: Keep impact first at every step

• Don't set the goal once and file it away until next OKR season
• Every decision, every epic, every sprint should be checked against the impact goal
• The growth team example: a team with a company-level goal of one million new users needed to put that number on the whiteboard first — before any OKR conversation
• If the conversation doesn't start with the impact number, don't have the conversation

Step 3: Connect every bit of work back to impact

• Prioritisation frameworks (ICE, RICE, MoSCoW) fail when "impact" is an abstract score
• Express impact in the same unit of measure as your goal
• Ask: how many users would this convert? How much revenue is on the line?
• The high-effort, high-uncertainty option that could get the team all the way to goal is often worth pursuing — it's the only one that actually matters
• If you can't draw a line from a piece of work to the impact metric, cut it or adjust the goal

Pushing back without saying no

• Saying no to executives rarely works and burns relationship capital they may have information you don't
• The alternative: present options with trade-offs and a recommendation
• "Here are three options. Here are the implications for our impact goal. We recommend this one."
• Frame pushback as: "If we take on this request, here's how it changes our impact projection"
• This keeps the PM as a trade-off navigator rather than a gatekeeper

The commercially minded PM is also the happiest

• PMs fixated on impact-level goals don't fight their company to "do product right"
• They do discovery and customer research because that's how you build something that succeeds — not as abstract best-practice compliance
• They're more likely to proactively surface forecast changes (e.g., telling finance "we need to revise this target down") — which builds trust
• Understanding the business model lets you evaluate whether helping the company succeed is something you feel good about