Overall Summary

Matt LeMay's Impact First Product Teams: Define Success. Do Work That Matters. Be Indispensable confronts an uncomfortable truth facing product teams worldwide: doing things "the right way" doesn't matter if your team loses its funding or your company goes out of business. Published in 2025, the book arrives at a critical moment when product teams face unprecedented pressure to demonstrate their value, with layoffs sweeping through the industry as executives question whether their product organizations actually contribute to business success.

LeMay, a veteran product leader and consultant who has worked with companies including Google, Spotify, Mailchimp, and Audible, draws on over a decade of experience to argue that most product teams have fundamentally misunderstood their purpose. They've become experts at "doing product" according to best practices while losing sight of why they exist: to contribute to a successful business. The book's subtitle captures its three-part thesis: teams must define what success actually means for their business, do work that genuinely matters to that success, and become indispensable by demonstrating clear impact.

The book diagnoses a pervasive pattern LeMay calls the "low-impact death spiral," where teams gravitate toward safe, low-risk work that invites less scrutiny but creates little value. This work accumulates complexity over time, making high-impact work increasingly difficult until the next round of layoffs eliminates teams that couldn't justify their existence. LeMay observes that Spotify's CEO captured this dynamic when explaining layoffs: too many employees were "doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact."

LeMay's solution is deceptively simple: keep team goals as close as possible to company goals. He advocates for goals that are "one step away" from company-level metrics, meaning there's just one mathematical operation or one "why" statement between what the team does and what the business needs. This contrasts sharply with the common practice of cascading OKRs through multiple organizational layers until team goals become disconnected from business outcomes.

The book provides three concrete steps any team can take regardless of organizational structure: first, set team goals close to company goals; second, keep impact first at every step of the process; third, connect every bit of work back to impact through transparent prioritization. Throughout, LeMay acknowledges the emotional difficulty of being accountable for outcomes outside your direct control while arguing that this discomfort is preferable to the alternative: building a beautiful product that nobody needs while your company collapses around you.

Rather than prescribing universal frameworks, LeMay emphasizes that teams must define success for their particular business. What works at Spotify won't necessarily work at a fintech startup or a healthcare company. The book includes case studies showing how diverse organizations have applied impact-first thinking, from Mailchimp's domain-focused restructuring to the NHS COVID app's transformation under product leader Randeep Sidhu, whose team saved an estimated 10,000 lives by orienting every decision around one clear metric: reducing virus transmission.

High-Level Overview: Key Arguments and Goals

The Business Is Your Business: Product teams exist to contribute to successful businesses, not to execute perfect product practices. No amount of well-crafted OKRs, elegant roadmaps, or user research will save a team that can't demonstrate business impact.

The Low-Impact Death Spiral: Teams naturally gravitate toward low-risk, low-impact work because it invites less scrutiny. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where complexity accumulates, high-impact work becomes harder, stakeholders lose confidence, and eventually teams get eliminated.

One Step Away: Team goals should be no more than one step removed from company goals. There should be just one mathematical operation or one "why" between team work and business outcomes. Don't let goals cascade into abstraction.

Process Theater vs. Business Value: Teams often focus on executing frameworks perfectly (OKRs, bets, KPI trees) while losing sight of actual value creation. Best practices that don't produce business results are worthless.

Impact Is Team Responsibility: Business impact isn't solely the product manager's job. Engineers, designers, and everyone else must orient their work toward company goals and hold the team accountable.

The CEO Test: Ask yourself: "If you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund this team?" If you can't answer confidently, you have a problem.

Constraints as Guides: Regulatory requirements, B2B dynamics, and quarterly targets aren't obstacles to good product management. They're the scaffolding that defines what success looks like in your context.

The Problem: Why Product Teams Struggle

The Uncomfortable Truth About Layoffs

LeMay opens with a stark observation: when companies reduce product headcount, this often doesn't lead to proportional drops in revenue or output. What does this say about the value product teams were actually creating? The book argues that many teams have been doing "work around the work" rather than contributing to real outcomes.

This isn't because product people are incompetent or lazy. It's because organizational structures, incentive systems, and professional cultures have evolved to reward the appearance of productivity over actual impact. Teams perfect their processes while losing connection to why those processes matter.

The Low-Impact Death Spiral

LeMay identifies a destructive pattern that afflicts virtually every medium to large company. It begins innocuously: teams take on low-impact work because it's easier and safer. Adding small features, making cosmetic improvements, and "bedazzling the car with rhinestones rather than fine-tuning its engine" feels productive without risking failure.

But this low-impact work accumulates. Each small feature adds complexity. Each superficial improvement makes the codebase harder to change. Over time, the product becomes so tangled that high-impact work becomes nearly impossible. When leadership finally demands results, teams discover they've built themselves a prison.

The spiral accelerates as stakeholders lose confidence. Teams respond by doing more visible work, more status updates, more demonstrations of activity. But activity without impact just deepens the hole. Eventually, leadership concludes the team isn't essential, and layoffs follow.

Why Teams Avoid High-Impact Work

LeMay acknowledges a fundamental human truth: it feels bad to be accountable for things outside your control. If your team commits to growing revenue by a specific amount, you're exposed. What if a competitor launches something better? What if the market shifts? What if there's another pandemic?

Low-impact work offers psychological safety. No one gets fired for adding a small feature that customers requested. But this safety is illusory. Teams that consistently avoid high-impact work eventually discover that their safety came at the cost of their relevance.

The "Eye of Sauron" Effect

High-impact work attracts executive attention, which teams often experience as threatening rather than supportive. When you're working on something that matters, leadership wants updates. Stakeholders have opinions. The pressure intensifies.

Teams respond by hiding in low-impact work where nobody's watching. This is rational in the short term but catastrophic over time. The teams that survive and thrive are those that learn to operate under scrutiny while delivering results.

Step One: Set Team Goals Close to Company Goals

The One-Step-Away Principle

The most important step toward becoming an impact-first team is setting goals that are no more than one step removed from company goals. LeMay borrows from Christina Wodtke's Radical Focus to describe this as a "center of gravity" model: company goals sit at the center with team goals orbiting one level out.

The key insight is that there should be just one mathematical operation between your team's goal and the company's goal. If your company's goal is to increase revenue by $10 million, your team might own converting single-product users to multi-product users, which you've estimated will generate $2 million of that target. One step.

Contrast this with how many organizations actually work: company goals cascade through divisions, departments, and teams until individual team goals are three or four steps removed from business outcomes. By the time goals reach the team level, they've been translated, interpreted, and transformed until their connection to business success is theoretical at best.

The CEO Test

LeMay proposes a provocative question: "If you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund this team?" Most product managers can't answer confidently, which reveals a dangerous disconnect between what teams do and what businesses need.

This isn't about being able to justify your team's existence in a layoff scenario (though that's certainly useful). It's about having clarity on how your work contributes to business success. If you can't articulate that contribution clearly, you probably don't understand it yourself.

What Success Means for Your Business

Different businesses measure success differently. A venture-funded startup might prioritize growth above all else. A mature enterprise might focus on profitability. A public health organization might measure lives saved or outcomes improved.

LeMay emphasizes that teams must understand what success means for their particular business rather than importing generic metrics. The viability question isn't "Is this a good product?" but "Does this create impact for our business model?" Teams that can't answer the second question are building on sand.

Example: Fintech Team Alignment

LeMay shares an example of a fintech team that transformed its focus. Initially, the team was accountable for "building features" in their product area. After applying the one-step-away principle, they became accountable for converting single-product users to multi-product users, with a specific revenue target attached.

This shift changed everything. Every decision about what to build, who to coordinate with, and what to deprioritize could now be measured against one clear goal. Leadership could understand the team's contribution instantly. The team gained autonomy to make bold bets because their bets were clearly connected to outcomes that mattered.

Step Two: Keep Impact First at Every Step

Don't Let Impact Slip Away

Setting good goals isn't enough. Teams must maintain focus on those goals through every subsequent step: writing OKRs, creating epics, planning sprints, making daily decisions. The danger is that impact becomes a distant memory as teams get absorbed in execution details.

LeMay observes that many teams start with clear, impactful goals but gradually lose the thread. Six weeks into a project, nobody remembers what business outcome they were pursuing. The original goal has been "cascaded into oblivion," replaced by feature lists and technical requirements.

Avoiding Process Theater

Process theater occurs when teams execute frameworks perfectly while producing no business value. The OKRs are beautifully written. The roadmaps are color-coded. The retrospectives follow the textbook format. But none of it connects to outcomes that matter.

LeMay doesn't dismiss processes and frameworks; he dismisses treating them as ends rather than means. A messy process that produces business impact is better than a polished process that produces nothing. Teams should adopt practices because they help achieve goals, not because "that's how product is done."

The Mailchimp Example

LeMay highlights Mailchimp under Natalia Williams' product leadership as an example of maintaining impact focus at scale. As Mailchimp grew from email tool to marketing platform, Williams led a domain-focused restructuring designed to keep commercial fundamentals visible.

Rather than allowing teams to pursue disconnected goals, Williams set stark, ambitious objectives tied to tangible commercial outcomes. One key metric was the rate at which users could send their first email. This wasn't just a usability metric; it connected directly to conversion and revenue. Every team's work could be traced back to outcomes that mattered.

Survival Metrics vs. Success Metrics

LeMay endorses Adam Thomas's concept of "survival metrics" for teams navigating uncertain times. Success metrics describe where you want to go. Survival metrics describe what must be true for the business to still exist.

In challenging economic environments, teams should prioritize survival over growth. This isn't pessimism; it's pragmatism. A team that helps the company survive a downturn has earned the right to pursue ambitious goals when conditions improve. A team that pursues ambitious goals while the company collapses has no future at all.

Step Three: Connect Every Bit of Work Back to Impact

Impact Estimation Done Right

The final step is connecting every piece of work to impact through transparent prioritization. This means doing impact estimation, which LeMay notes is "something that's easy to not do."

Many teams skip estimation entirely or use abstract scoring systems (ICE, RICE, t-shirt sizes) that feel rigorous but obscure rather than clarify. LeMay argues that impact estimation should use the same unit of measure as your team's goals. If your goal is revenue, estimate impact in dollars. If your goal is conversion rate, estimate impact in percentage points.

This approach makes prioritization decisions transparent and arguable. When someone proposes a project, they must estimate how many dollars (or users, or percentage points) it will generate. If the estimate seems high, you can discuss assumptions. If it seems low, you can question whether the project is worth pursuing.

Prioritization as Trade-Off Conversation

Effective prioritization isn't about finding the "right" formula. It's about having honest conversations about trade-offs. What are we choosing to do? What are we choosing not to do? Why?

LeMay emphasizes that these conversations should happen openly, with clear reasoning visible to everyone. When teams hide their prioritization logic, stakeholders can't engage constructively. When prioritization is transparent, disagreements become productive debates about assumptions rather than political battles.

Handling Stakeholder Requests

Impact-first thinking transforms how teams handle requests from stakeholders. Instead of treating requests as orders or dismissing them as distractions, teams use them as opportunities to understand changing circumstances.

When a stakeholder makes an urgent request, the impact-first response isn't "We'll add it to the backlog" or "That's not on our roadmap." It's "Help us understand how this connects to our shared goals. What's changed? What do you know that we don't?" This framing creates alignment rather than conflict.

The NHS COVID App: Impact-First in Action

The book's most powerful case study comes from Randeep Sidhu, the product leader who salvaged the UK's NHS COVID contact tracing app after its initial launch was, by all accounts, "a disaster."

Sidhu faced an impossible situation: diverse stakeholders with competing priorities, immense time pressure, and the weight of public health outcomes. His solution was radically simple: announce one metric that matters. The team would measure success by one thing only: reducing the transmissibility of the virus.

Not app downloads. Not user engagement. Not satisfaction scores. Just one question guiding every decision: "How does this help reduce the transmissibility of the virus?"

Sidhu created a process where anyone could propose features, but they had to publicly argue how their proposal would reduce transmission. This constraint transformed discussions. Technical debates about notification architecture gave way to substantive conversations about epidemiological impact. Medical experts helped engineers understand what actually mattered.

The result: a study published in Nature found the NHS COVID app likely saved approximately 10,000 lives. Ten thousand families who didn't lose loved ones because a product team understood that impact comes first.

Cross-Team Collaboration and Organizational Dynamics

Platform Teams and Amplified Impact

Not every team works directly on customer-facing products. Platform teams, internal tools teams, and infrastructure teams often struggle to articulate their impact because their work enables other teams rather than directly driving outcomes.

LeMay argues that these teams should align their work with the most impact-critical teams they support. If Platform Team A supports Customer Team B and Customer Team C, and Team B is working on the company's most important growth initiative, Platform Team A should prioritize Team B's needs accordingly.

This doesn't mean platform teams become servants to feature teams. It means platform teams understand which dependencies matter most and sequence their work accordingly. Their impact is amplified impact: enabling other teams to achieve their goals.

Dealing with Goal Conflicts

In any organization of sufficient size, team goals will sometimes conflict. Team A's goal might require resources that Team B needs. Team A's approach might create problems for Team C.

LeMay advocates proactive conversations about these conflicts rather than pretending they don't exist. When teams share how their goals connect to company goals, conflicts become visible and discussable. Leadership can make informed decisions about trade-offs rather than discovering conflicts after they've caused damage.

Culture Change from the Ground Up

One team can influence broader organizational culture. When a team demonstrates that impact-first thinking produces results, other teams notice. When leadership sees one team clearly articulating their contribution to business success, they start asking other teams the same questions.

LeMay acknowledges that not every organization will embrace impact-first thinking. Some cultures resist clarity because clarity creates accountability. But teams can choose to operate with impact focus regardless of organizational dysfunction. At minimum, they'll build better products. At best, they'll spark change that spreads.

The Emotional Reality of Impact-First Work

Holding Space for Uncertainty

LeMay doesn't pretend that impact-first thinking feels comfortable. It's against human nature to be accountable for things outside your control. Teams resist being on the hook for business outcomes they can't guarantee.

Much of the book addresses how to hold this tension productively. How do you commit to outcomes while acknowledging uncertainty? How do you estimate impact honestly without being paralyzed by imprecision? How do you stay motivated when results depend on factors beyond your influence?

The answer isn't to eliminate uncertainty but to embrace it openly. Estimates are estimates, not guarantees. Goals are ambitious targets, not blood oaths. The discipline is maintaining focus on impact even when you can't control outcomes.

The Ego Trap

Product work attracts people who want to build great things. This ambition is valuable but dangerous. LeMay describes an "ego trap" where product people become more invested in doing things the "right" way according to frameworks they've read than in producing results their business needs.

The impact-first mindset requires humility. Your elegant process doesn't matter if it doesn't produce outcomes. Your beautiful roadmap doesn't matter if it leads nowhere important. Your extensive user research doesn't matter if it doesn't inform decisions that create value.

Why This Matters Beyond Business

At its best, impact-first thinking connects daily work to meaningful outcomes. The NHS COVID app team didn't just build software; they saved lives. Teams at companies pursuing sustainability goals can connect their work to environmental outcomes. Teams at healthcare companies can connect their work to patient outcomes.

Even in purely commercial contexts, impact-first thinking creates meaning. When you understand how your work contributes to business success, you understand why your work matters. When your work matters, showing up every day feels different.

Practical Application

Questions for Team Discussion

LeMay provides discussion questions that teams can use to begin their impact-first journey:

If you were in charge of the company, would you fully fund this team? Why or why not?

What does success mean for our particular business? How do we define viability for our product?

How many steps separate our team goal from company goals? Can we get to one step?

What is the most impact we could reasonably expect from our current work? Is that enough?

If we're uncertain about impact, what signals can we look for or experiments can we run?

How have we adopted ways of working? Are we copying other companies (like the Spotify model), or have we built practices specifically suited to our goals?

The One Page / One Hour Pledge

LeMay created the One Page / One Hour Pledge, adopted by teams at Amazon, Walmart, Adobe, Disney, and over 100 other organizations. The pledge commits to minimizing busywork and maximizing collaboration by limiting meetings to one hour and documents to one page unless there's clear justification for more.

This pledge reflects impact-first thinking in microcosm. Time spent in long meetings and creating elaborate documents is time not spent on work that matters. Forcing brevity forces clarity. If you can't explain your point in one page, you probably don't understand it yet.

BAU vs. Innovation

Teams need clarity on expectations for maintenance work ("business as usual") versus innovation. When these expectations are unclear, teams either neglect maintenance until systems break or spend all their time maintaining and never innovate.

LeMay advocates explicit conversations about how teams should balance these responsibilities. What percentage of capacity should go to keeping things running? What percentage to building new things? Making these trade-offs explicit prevents drift and disappointment.

Conclusion: The Path Forward

Impact First Product Teams ultimately argues for a fundamental shift in how product teams think about their purpose. The goal isn't to execute perfect product processes. The goal is to contribute to business success.

This shift requires courage. It means committing to outcomes you can't fully control. It means accepting accountability for results rather than activities. It means having honest conversations about what matters rather than hiding in busy work.

But this shift also creates meaning. When teams understand their impact, they understand why they exist. When every decision connects to outcomes that matter, work becomes purposeful rather than mechanical. When teams demonstrate their contribution clearly, they earn trust, autonomy, and survival.

LeMay acknowledges that not every organization will embrace this approach. Some will continue rewarding process theater over results. Some will continue cascading goals until impact disappears. Some will continue eliminating teams without understanding what those teams contributed.

But individual teams can choose differently. They can set goals one step from company goals. They can maintain impact focus through every decision. They can connect every piece of work to outcomes that matter. They can ask hard questions early and answer them honestly.

The teams that do this won't just survive the next round of layoffs. They'll build products that matter, for businesses that succeed, creating value that's unmistakable. That's what it means to be an impact-first product team.