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April 2, 2025 12 mins

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In part two, the gloves come off. Kevin and Roman dive into the chaos of defining impact across diverse teams with Matt LeMay. From freemium metrics to ROI confusion, Matt exposes why so many organizations fail to align on what "impact" actually means. This episode is your backstage pass to better collaboration and smarter goal setting.

Detailed Analysis: Episode 38 tackles the messy business of misaligned metrics. Matt shares how product teams often assume they understand impact—only to find marketing, customer success, and sales have completely different definitions. The result? Disjointed strategies and missed opportunities.

Matt calls for radical alignment: teams should set goals no more than one step removed from company-level objectives. This not only surfaces tension between teams (think lifetime value vs. new users) but creates a dialogue for harmonizing objectives. Collaboration isn't optional; it's the secret weapon.

The episode also zooms out, showing that Matt's framework applies far beyond product. Marketing, customer success, even sales can use the same approach to rethink how they measure success. This isn't just a methodology. It's a mindset shift. If your goals live in the middle zone of vagueness, it's time to bridge the gap between strategy and execution.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kevin Metzger (00:05):
Customer success.
Hello and welcome back to theCustomer Success Playbook
podcast.
I'm Kevin Metzker Here againwith my co-host Roman Trevon.
We're continuing ourconversation with Matt Lame, the
author of Impact First ProductTeams.
Roman, you think we should, uh,start with the, uh, with the

(00:26):
hard questions for Matt today?
Yeah,

Roman Trebon (00:29):
yeah.
But definitely before we diveinto our, our big one, big
question.
You know, we'd like to do thesequick icebreakers so we get, uh,
so our audience gets to know ourguests a little bit better.
So Matt, I hope you're buckledup and, uh, our first question
is, you ready?
I'm ready.
All.
So Matt, you, you live inLondon, so if do Kevin and I, we

(00:49):
get on a Delta flight fromAtlanta.
We head over to see you inLondon.
What, what's the one touristattraction we have to go see?
And, and is there a place wegotta eat if we're over there?

Matt LeMay (00:59):
Gosh, I, I'm not big on tourist attractions.
I'm from York originally.
So that cynicism is kind.
Give us the

Roman Trebon (01:04):
off the beaten path that answer that.
Give us the, uh, I would take

Matt LeMay (01:07):
you to a greasy spoon to get a full English
breakfast, like a proper fry up,and then we would walk.
It's a great walking city.
Take.
Yana would walk up the RegentsCanal, explore different parts
of London.
Part of why I wound up here isthat London is such an
incredible walking city.
You see every different era ofthis city.
You know, from, uh, a medievalcity to an industrial city, to a

(01:30):
modern city, all layered on topof each other in surprising and
interesting ways.
It's just a great place to havea big breakfast, walk around and
enjoy the city.
I.

Kevin Metzger (01:39):
If you had one book to recommend other than
your own business or pleasure,what would you recommend?

Matt LeMay (01:45):
Uh, I'm, I'm in a business state of mind right
now, so I'm gonna recommend, uh,radical Focus by Christina Wad
Key, which I cite extensively inthis book.
And I recommend it not just forthe ideas in it, but for the
storytelling as well.
Um, just a phenomenal book, agreat example of what a business
book can be.
Outside of work, what's a hobbyor interest that keeps you busy

(02:05):
and entertained, uh, makingmusic?
I'm, I'm recording, uh, theaudiobook version of Impact
First Product Teams now, and Ihave been procrastinating by
recording some musicalinterludes, which are quite
silly and fun, and I'm excitedto, uh, to share those.
But I've been a, I was aprofessional musician before.
I was a professional productperson.

(02:26):
Oh wow.
That's cool.
Get a chance to play with peoplesometimes.
I've got some show posters andrecords I've worked on behind
me.
Um, a guitar behind the stack ofbooks.
Is that the main

Roman Trebon (02:36):
instrument, Matt?
You playing guitar, is that whatyou're playing or do you go
beyond the guitar?

Matt LeMay (02:40):
Yeah, I, I, I, I mainly play guitar.
I, I also play drums and I, Ifumble my way through bass and
keyboards.
One I must, but guitar and drumsare, are probably my two main
instruments though.
Living in an apartment inLondon, guitar is certainly an
easier thing to reach for.

Kevin Metzger (02:56):
Let's get into the heart of today's episode, or
one big question.
Yeah.
How should product teams defineand communicate impact given
that each organization's fundingmodel, product, stage, and
outside factors can vary sowidely?

Matt LeMay (03:11):
That's, I mean, that is the question, right?
Part of the reason I wrote thisbook the way I did is that
there's been an an interestingdebate playing out in the
product world at large.
Over whether product teamsshould be able to calculate and
articulate the ROI of the teamitself.
And there are some guidelinesout there.
I've heard that every teamshould assume a six x return is

(03:33):
what the business looks for fromhowever that much they're
spending on the company.
You know that you can assume aproduct team costs$1 million a
year.
But as you said, Kevin, itdepends a lot on the company and
on the stage of the company andthe business model and the
funding model.
It also depends on what teamyou're on.
I've worked with some innovationteams, for example, that are
explicitly tasked with notoptimizing the existing business

(03:57):
model, but rather exploring andvalidating new business models.
So I think the real challengeis.
To understand first and foremostwhat your business is looking to
achieve in order for thebusiness itself to be
successful.
And if you're a startup, thatmight be raising the next round
of funding.
If it's a publicly tradedcompany, it might be meeting a

(04:20):
profit or revenue projection forthe next quarter.
That information usually existssomewhere, but it, it's funny to
me how easily it gets lost inthe day-to-day of product work.
You know, I've worked withproduct teams where they wind up
just.
Googling public documents abouttheir company to get a better
sense of what the company caresabout.

(04:40):
And again, I, I think thatspeaks to the fact that it is
very easy, especially at largerorganizations, for us to become
quite far removed from thebusiness level impact of our
work.
I think it's smallerorganizations.
We can also become disconnectedfrom it because nobody's talking
about it.
We're kind of stuck in startup.
You know, fantasy land whereeverything we do is amazing and

(05:02):
awesome and perfect until we allrun outta money and nobody has a
job anymore, which is somethingthat many people I know have
been through.
So again, I think the key isreally to understand what is the
company looking towards tomeasure its own success?
And then what is the companylooking to from your team to
consider your team a successfulpart of that business?

(05:27):
That's gonna vary from companyto company.
It's gonna vary from team toteam.
But if you can't answer thosetwo basic questions, you're
probably not in a terriblystrong position to do work that
is meaningful to the business.

Roman Trebon (05:39):
And I liked in the book, Matt, you, you had a
couple really, really goodexamples throughout, but a
couple of like even theassumption that teams know what
the impact is, right?
Like Yeah.
Is it, it's like, Hey, we needto get new users.
And then another team within thesame organization says, no, no,
no.
We need to turn our freemiumcustomers into paying customers
and like even within the sameteam, they have different

(06:01):
definitions of what success looklike.
Can you, I'm assuming thishappens at, at frequently and,
and and it it happens all thetime.

Matt LeMay (06:08):
All the time.
Yeah.
Well, well, and again, I thinkit's, I.
It's that very assumption thatenables this to happen, right?
I think people easily assumethat more users is good, more
money is good, these are allgood things, and we want to make
good numbers go up.
But there's tension betweenthese things, right?
I've seen this in a lot oforganizations where I.

(06:29):
There are some teams who areresponsible for bringing on lots
of new users and other teamsthat are responsible for, for
example, increasing the lifetimevalue of users.
Well, those two things can be inconflict with each other, right?
If we're bringing on lots of lowvalue new users to increase the
number of new users we have,then the customer lifetime value

(06:50):
across our entire user base isprobably not going to go up.
So the question then becomes,can we look across teams and not
perfectly resolve this tension,but understand and navigate it,
which is again, why, as I saidbefore, I always recommend that
teams set their goals, no morethan one step away from those
critical company goals.
Because then you can look acrossteams and say for example, okay,

(07:12):
well we have one team that'sresponsible for.
Increasing the customer lifetimevalue per user.
We have another team that'sresponsible for bringing on a
certain number of new users.
How do those things relate toeach other?
How are they in harmony witheach other?
How are they intention with eachother?
Should we be measuring lifetimevalue for a certain subset?
Customers.
Should this team be focused on asubset of customers?

(07:33):
How do they work together?
Again, the goal here is toidentify ways that teams can
work collaboratively to maximizetheir impact for the business,
not to cascade and atomizegoals, to the point where each
team's goals are completelyseparate from each other, which
can be a, a fun, intellectualexercise, but usually does more

(07:53):
harm than good in terms of realworld impact.

Kevin Metzger (07:56):
I think it's interesting to listen to you
talk about goals and goalsetting.
Um, and I, I know it's comingkind of from a product side, but
really this isn't, this isrelevant to pretty much any,
it's relevant to customersuccess teams.
It's relevant to pretty much anyteam in a company as far as how
you do goal setting.

(08:18):
Is there something specific toproduct that you would say
that's different or

Matt LeMay (08:24):
I, I mean, I don't think so.
Product just happens to be whereI work.
It's, it's funny you mention,you know, customer success
teams.
There have been so manyconversations I've had with
product teams where they say,well, we can't measure that.
We can't measure how happy ourcustomers are.
We can't measure if this isworking.
And I usually tell them, go talkto your customer success teams.
They know this stuff.
Have ways of measuring this.

(08:45):
They know how many tickets arecoming in.
They know how challenging thesethings are to resolve.
They know how much it's costingthe business to try to address
these issues.
So.
I think when product teams say,well, we can't quantify the
impact of this, we can'tunderstand how important issue X
versus issue Y is.
Customer success teams areusually the the first place I

(09:06):
send them because they have asense of how much time and
resources are going into theseissues of how much this might be
affecting.
You know, usually they have apretty good sense, even if it's
an estimate of like how many.
Customers do you think we'relosing to this on a, on a given
basis?
These are questions that thereare usually people within

(09:27):
organizations who can at leasthave a really good educated
guess around.
But again, the challenge is alot of product teams don't
usually have much of anincentive to talk to those
people.
And talking to people indifferent departments opens up
various cans of worms.
But those are the cans of wormsthat we must open if we want to
deliver really meaningful thingsfor the business at large.

Kevin Metzger (09:50):
One of the things I find very interesting, so
every time we, we get theopportunity to talk to a product
person, and what I've found froma career perspective is the
alignment between teams isactually much closer, and it
should, and anybody who's paidattention worked and, and is
good at doing these thingsalways is like, yeah.

(10:11):
Collaboration helps here.
This is where, this is where yougain benefit and it goes both
ways, right?
I mean, the collaboration fromthe customer success side with
product is product can getmeasurements on information that
they're looking for.
The collaboration on thecustomer success side is, Hey,
we've got these pain points,we're seeing that we can really

(10:31):
provide some feedback ontoproduct and, and it.
It does.
Those cans of worms are, arethe, they're the worms where the
value are.
I mean, that's exactly, that'sthe bait that you need to, to
hook.

Matt LeMay (10:44):
There you go.
And you know, it's funny, I,there's a story in the book
about working with a productteam that committed to one of
these high impact, highspecificity goals.
And somebody pulled me asideafterwards and said, but we'd
have to work with marketing toachieve that goal.
It's like, okay, yeah, yeah,yeah.
You, you, you would and youwill.
And that's, that's, that's okay.

Roman Trebon (11:05):
And Kev, you asked about, you know, the, the, is
this specific to product?
One thing I, I like Matt, aboutthe book is you could just take
product out of the book andinsert customer success in input
marketing, right?
And, and you talk a lot abouthaving impact level goals and
then the day-to-day work.
And then there's this big middlewhere we all like, and I'm like,
wait a second.
That's, that's a, that's sorelatable to the customer

(11:25):
success teams or marketingteams, or even with there's
alignment, right?
Doesn't mean this is like allrainbows and unicorns.
If you're aligned on the,there's still hard questions and
hard conversations.
We need to have still.
Which is again, happens allacross the business.

Matt LeMay (11:41):
Yep.
That's the thing is I think welook to the middle, as you said,
to try to make things easierthan they will ever be.
We try to break things apartinto these little digestible
pieces and say, well, if eachteam goes about its individual
business, surely that will addup to a successful business.
But that's not something we canassume we need to do.

(12:01):
That coordination workconstantly and it is challenging
work.

Roman Trebon (12:04):
So Matt, you are going to come back.
We didn't scare you away.
You're coming back on Friday,right?

Matt LeMay (12:09):
Not yet, no.
I'm still

Roman Trebon (12:10):
Okay.
Perfect.
I haven't scared me away yet.
Perfect, perfect.
Alright, uh, well thanks forMatt, that, that deep dive,
Matt, we really appreciate it.
You are coming back on Friday.
We're gonna talk about the, uh,impact.
Of how artificial inteintelligence can have an impact
on all that we're talking aboutand on setting impact level
goals and product teams, etcetera.
For our audience, thanks forlistening.

(12:31):
As always, make sure tosubscribe to our show, like it,
share it with your colleaguesand friends.
Don't forget to give us a ratingthat helps us expand our
audience.
As always, Kevin, keep onplaying.
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