Review

Most product managers believe they're focused on impact, but Matt demonstrates there's actually a spectrum, and you're probably not obsessing enough over your team's true impact. This book identifies common pitfalls many organisations fall into and provides tangible questions to help extract yourself when you're stuck. A good read for Product aficionados.

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The Right It

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

Product teams often operate disconnected from their organisation's strategic goals, overly focused on processes and best practices rather than the true business impact of their work. In today's volatile and resource-constrained environment, this approach is no longer sustainable. Truly successful product teams align their day-to-day activities directly with clearly defined, measurable business outcomes.

Low-impact product teams inadvertently prioritise minor tasks and trivial improvements, creating complex, fragmented products that generate conflicts and interdependencies across the organisation. This cycle, which is known as the "low-impact death spiral," reduces the team's willingness to pursue meaningful goals due to the scrutiny and accountability those goals entail.

In contrast, high-impact teams actively pursue challenging objectives that directly contribute to the broader business success, even when those goals extend beyond their immediate control. They consistently embed ambitious goals into their daily decision-making, clearly articulating the value they bring to their organisation. Such teams view processes as flexible tools to achieve strategic outcomes, continuously justifying their existence through measurable contributions. A critical reflection point for teams to assess their impact is asking: "If you ran the company, would you fully fund this team?" This question encourages proactive adjustments and honest evaluations of a team's real value to the business.

A key shift toward high-impact work involves explicitly placing business impact at the heart of product development. Teams must thoroughly understand their organisation's business model and precisely define what constitutes meaningful business viability, whether revenue growth, profitability, or key investment milestones. Without clear insight into these measurable conditions, teams risk pursuing superficial metrics disconnected from real strategic objectives. Understanding how revenue is generated doesn't oppose customer-centricity; it informs better decisions, allowing teams to create products that deliver clear value both to customers and the business.

Impact-first teams deliberately integrate outputs (what they build), outcomes (user behaviours influenced), and impact (ultimate business value) in a unified approach. They avoid the common pitfall of narrowly focusing on user-related outcomes such as retention without connecting these to broader impacts like revenue growth. By maintaining clear visibility into business-critical objectives, these teams stay strategically aligned, adapting their outputs and outcomes as necessary to ensure meaningful business impact. Proactively defining their own understanding of business success enables them to navigate ambiguity effectively and contribute strategically across the organisation. Transparent discussions around business-level impacts also encourage open consideration of ethical trade-offs.

Setting clear, impactful goals at the team level is crucial for delivering tangible business contributions. Effective team goals possess two essential characteristics: they are high-impact, directly linked to critical business objectives, and highly specific, with measurable targets and clear timelines. Rather than cascading goals into overly granular tasks, high-impact teams maintain their objectives within one logical step of the organisation's primary business goals. By exploring different magnitudes of potential impact, teams can quickly determine realistic yet ambitious targets that drive meaningful action. Operational or support teams, whose impacts are often indirect, should actively collaborate with user-facing teams to clarify their strategic contributions, enhancing overall business results.

Maintaining clarity around business impact throughout product strategy and discovery phases helps teams break through abstract debates over methodology or process. Rather than debating strategy in the abstract, teams explicitly link their day-to-day activities to measurable business goals. Impact-driven objectives clearly outline the conditions necessary for success, prioritising discovery activities that answer critical user-centred questions. This approach highlights opportunities that might otherwise remain overlooked, including new user segments, streamlined operational processes, small yet impactful messaging adjustments, or removing unnecessary features. By explicitly defining which user actions drive the desired business outcomes, teams effectively prioritise their efforts and facilitate productive cross-team collaboration.

Keeping impact visible during daily execution is crucial. Effective teams regularly estimate the potential business impact of their planned work, continuously assessing priorities and guiding decisions. Practical impact estimation involves asking critical questions such as: How many users will this reach? What actions must they take, and what's the value of those actions? How confident are we they'll act? Using frameworks like ICE (Impact, Confidence, Effort), teams clarify trade-offs between competing tasks, identifying high-potential opportunities while avoiding low-impact distractions. Though estimation inherently involves uncertainty, even rough approximations using industry research and user insights provide valuable guidance. Engaging stakeholders early in these quantified trade-offs fosters strategic alignment, reinforcing the team's value to the broader business.

Product teams must regularly revisit long-term goals and maintain flexibility in their strategic plans. High-impact goals inevitably shift with changing conditions, assumptions, or unexpected challenges. Establishing regular checkpoints and explicitly defining shorter-term milestones ensures ongoing alignment with long-term objectives. Regular reviews at quarterly or monthly intervals enable teams to proactively question their progress, identify necessary adjustments, and clearly signal if plans remain viable. Essential guiding questions include assessing confidence levels in current plans, checking for changes in critical milestones, and evaluating the ongoing relevance of current activities in achieving strategic goals.

When facing setbacks, impact-first teams openly address lessons learned from unmet targets rather than assigning blame, adjusting strategies to achieve future success. Conversely, success can sometimes breed anxiety around attribution. Effective teams collaborate closely across departments, celebrating collective accomplishments and openly discussing contributions. Avoiding ambiguous project statuses ("yellow lights" or "in progress") helps maintain honest, continuous assessments of actual business impact. Urgent requests or unexpected changes should prompt open, inquisitive discussions rather than automatic acceptance or rejection, ensuring actions remain aligned with strategic goals.

The journey toward becoming an impact-first team involves proactive conversations and structured reflection on business goals, user needs, and strategic priorities. Teams must openly confront challenging questions about their genuine value to the business, defining measurable conditions critical for organisational success. Clear, explicit team goals linked directly to business outcomes provide clarity and direction. Regular impact estimation, continuous user-focused discovery, and periodic strategic adjustments ensure consistent alignment with broader business objectives. These structured conversations embed impact-focused practices sustainably into the team's culture and operations.

Ultimately, adopting an impact-first mindset clarifies the role of product teams within their broader organisational context. Rather than fighting unnecessary battles over methodologies or ideals, product teams that embrace their core responsibility, contributing meaningfully to their business's success, achieve greater alignment and satisfaction. Clearer conversations, improved decision-making, and a healthier workplace environment result from openly discussing and aligning around measurable business impact. While inherently uncertain, this strategic approach ensures teams remain relevant, focused, and genuinely impactful in supporting their organisation's long-term success.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Author's Foreword

The product teams that were most closely connected to the overall goals and objectives of the business were the most efficient, effective, aligned, and happy product teams I encountered.

These impact-first product teams are able to prioritise their work more effectively because they understand what they are prioritising their work against.

There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all. Peter Drucker

Introduction

For years, product teams have operated as if business goals were someone else's responsibility, focusing instead on processes and "best practices." But this hands-off approach is increasingly untenable in today’s volatile business environment.

Teams must now understand their business impact clearly, ensuring their daily efforts align directly with high-level organisational goals.

It's time to stop chasing one-size-fits-all ideals from Silicon Valley darlings and start addressing the specific needs of your business.

Being "impact-first" means recognising that your ultimate responsibility is to contribute meaningfully to your business's success. Impact-first teams actively align their daily decisions with high-level business outcomes, rather than getting lost in process debates or theoretical frameworks.

Real-world impact happens at the team level. Our team’s must maintain a clear line of sight between daily work and strategic business goals.

Chapter 1: The High Cost of Low-Impact Teams

Early recognition of being a low-impact team is critical to transitioning toward impactful work. High-impact teams stay consistently focused on significant goals, even when those goals exceed their direct control, recognising their accountability for the broader success of the business.

Low-impact teams fall into a dangerous cycle, the "low-impact death spiral": low-impact work leads to more complicated products, increasing conflicts and dependencies, further discouraging high-impact efforts. Such teams prioritise minor improvements or features that avoid critical scrutiny, inadvertently making it harder to address core business needs.

To escape the death spiral, teams must actively step away from trivial tasks and realign around impactful objectives. Adding layers of process or management oversight to manage low-impact symptoms can worsen the underlying problem, reinforcing low-impact work.

Key distinctions between high and low-impact teams include:

• Importance of Work: High-impact teams choose tasks vital to the business despite challenges and increased scrutiny. Low-impact teams avoid complex, scrutiny-heavy work, sticking to safe, inconsequential projects.
• Goals and Ambition: High-impact teams set ambitious goals, often beyond their full control, driving real business outcomes. Low-impact teams prefer small, safe, easily achievable goals that rarely move the needle.
• Continuous Goal Awareness: High-impact teams embed goals into everyday decisions. Low-impact teams treat goals as occasional exercises, disconnected from daily operations.
• Process as Means, Not Ends: High-impact teams treat product development processes flexibly, adapting them to achieve business goals. Low-impact teams rigidly adhere to processes, prioritising the method over meaningful outcomes.
• Recognising Business Costs: High-impact teams are aware of their cost to the business and continuously strive to justify their existence through measurable impact. Low-impact teams see their existence as inherently justified and avoid discussions about their tangible business contributions.

An effective strategy to prompt reflection is the powerful question: "If you were in charge of the company, would you fully fund this team?" This shifts perspective and forces teams to confront the real business value they deliver, potentially reshaping or even dissolving low-impact teams proactively.

Conversations around impact create clarity around goals, risks, and expectations, pushing teams towards genuinely valuable contributions. Teams must actively participate in defining their accountability, accepting that while the overall product success involves many uncontrollable factors, they will inevitably share the consequences of that success or failure.

Ultimately, consistently aligning actions with high-impact outcomes ensures team relevance, improves product coherence, and contributes meaningfully to business success.

Chapter 2: Putting Impact First

High-impact product teams must deeply understand the specific needs and viability criteria of their own businesses. Viability isn't just profitability but aligning product strategy with clear business-level goals, which differ significantly based on the company's context whether seeking growth, profitability, or funding milestones.

To prioritise business impact, product teams must first clearly define what success looks like. Teams frequently struggle because metrics show success at a surface level, but there's confusion about how these metrics directly translate to tangible business objectives. Clarity comes from answering questions like: "What are the measurable conditions that must be met for our business to be successful at a specific point in the future?" For instance, having explicit targets such as “We must have at least 10,000 monthly active content creators by year-end to raise significant growth capital."

Placing the business model at the heart of decision-making doesn't undermine customer-centricity; rather, it enhances it. Understanding how the company generates revenue clarifies the commercial relationship with customers, guiding teams to build solutions that benefit both customers and the business.

If you don't really understand how the company makes money, you've got a problem.

Impact-first teams view their responsibility differently. Traditionally, teams manage outputs (what they build) and outcomes (user behaviours these outputs influence), leaving impact (ultimate business value) to executives. However, this siloed view often disconnects team efforts from actual business success. Impact-first teams instead integrate impact, outcomes, and outputs, always ready to adjust outputs and outcomes to ensure meaningful business impact.

A common pitfall occurs when teams focus narrowly on outcomes like user retention without connecting to higher-level impacts, such as revenue growth. This limits strategic flexibility. Impact-first teams avoid this trap by maintaining clarity around business-critical objectives and adjusting their strategies accordingly.

Teams sometimes wait passively for executives to define success clearly, but effective product teams proactively form their own understanding. This proactive stance helps navigate ambiguity, align work meaningfully, and advocate strategically within the organisation.

Ethical considerations and transparency naturally emerge when teams openly discuss business-level impacts. Explicit impact goals allow teams to address ethical trade-offs constructively, avoiding secretive or deceptive practices.

Aligning product strategy with clearly defined, impact-oriented goals empowers teams to contribute strategically to business success, delivering solutions valuable to both the organisation and its customers.

If you don’t really understand how the company makes money, you’ve got a problem.

Chapter 3: Defining Impact for Your Team

High-impact product teams clearly define how their specific work contributes directly to overall business goals. Even with clear organisational targets, teams often find it challenging to align their efforts precisely. Effective goal-setting at the team level begins by asking: "What measurable contributions will this team make to be considered successful at a specific future point?" Teams that proactively answer this question create clarity and alignment, positioning themselves strongly within their organisation.

The most effective team goals share two critical characteristics: they are high-impact and highly specific. High-impact means goals directly affect crucial business metrics, while high-specificity means they clearly state measurable targets and timelines. For example, converting 10,000 single-product users to multi-product users by year's end contributes tangibly to broader revenue objectives.

A common pitfall is cascading goals too far, creating overly granular targets disconnected from overall business success. Instead, effective teams maintain goals just one logical step removed from primary business objectives. Quantitatively, team goals should require at most one simple calculation to link them directly to organisational targets. Qualitatively, goals should answer a straightforward "why" clearly connected to broader company success.

Setting specific, measurable targets can initially seem daunting, but using orders of magnitude (e.g., 10 vs. 100 vs. 1,000 users) simplifies decision-making. This approach enables teams to choose a realistic and impactful number to drive meaningful action.

Operational and support teams often struggle with setting clear impact goals, as their contributions are realized through other teams. To address this, they should engage in early, strategic conversations with user-facing teams about how their support can significantly amplify overall business impact, shifting interactions from transactional to partnership-oriented.

When team goals seem misaligned with broader business targets, proactive, explicit conversations with leadership can clarify expectations and realign efforts effectively. Teams should always understand and articulate precisely why their goals might differ from primary business objectives to avoid confusion and maintain strategic clarity.

Ultimately, staying closely aligned—just one step away—from business-level goals, exploring different orders of magnitude, and committing to "good enough" specificity allows teams to effectively contribute to overall business success, making informed, impactful decisions.

Chapter 4: Impact in the Middle

To be truly effective, product teams must continuously keep business impact central to their day-to-day decisions, particularly through the stages of strategy and discovery, often known as "the middle" of product development. Many organisations struggle here, getting lost in abstract debates about processes or the "right amount" of discovery. Keeping clear, impact-driven goals helps break through such impasses.

Effective strategies explicitly connect team actions to high-level business goals. Rather than getting lost in debates about strategy's abstract "goodness," teams benefit from focusing directly on overcoming obstacles to achieving measurable business impacts. Clearly defined, high-impact objectives clarify strategy by highlighting what truly matters to company success.

Discovery becomes significantly more effective and urgent when driven by high-impact, time-bound goals. Rather than debating how much discovery is "enough," teams with specific targets prioritise research questions that directly address key uncertainties in their customer relationships and business model. This clarity often uncovers impactful solutions not previously considered, including new customer segments, streamlined operational changes, minor messaging improvements, or even subtraction of unnecessary features.

Impact-level goals clarify precisely who must take action (customers, users, stakeholders) to achieve success and why they would do it. By focusing on the necessary user behaviours that drive business outcomes, teams identify clearer pathways to success and can meaningfully prioritise discovery activities around these critical questions.

Emphasising impact helps teams navigate cross-functional tensions by grounding discussions in shared business objectives rather than individual team agendas. High-impact goals inherently require coordination across multiple teams, shifting conversations earlier in the process to resolve conflicts constructively around what's best for the business, ultimately benefiting customers and improving overall product coherence.

In summary, maintaining a clear focus on business impact throughout strategy and discovery enhances decision-making, prioritisation, and team alignment, ensuring that day-to-day work consistently contributes meaningfully to overall business success.

Chapter 5

Impact-level goals provide critical clarity but can quickly lose relevance as teams move into day-to-day execution. Effective teams maintain sight of these goals by continually estimating the potential impact of their proposed work, guiding decision-making and prioritisation.

To practically prioritise based on impact, teams should evaluate potential work against clear criteria:

1. How many users will this reach?
2. What action must these users take?
3. What is the value of that action?
4. What is our confidence that users will take this action?

These questions allow teams to quickly gauge whether the maximum potential impact justifies investing resources into a given solution.

A helpful prioritisation method is the ICE framework:

• Impact: How much could this work contribute to overall business goals?
• Confidence: How likely is the impact?
• Effort: How much time and resources are required?

This structured approach clarifies trade-offs between competing projects, helping teams focus on meaningful work and avoid low-impact distractions.

Impact estimation inevitably involves uncertainty, but even rough approximations using industry research and user data provide critical insights. Teams shouldn't strive for perfect predictions, but rather good enough estimates to facilitate informed decision-making.

Effective impact estimation helps teams:

• Quickly identify high-potential opportunities.
• Avoid wasting time on initiatives unlikely to deliver meaningful results.
• Clarify complex decisions and facilitate productive cross-team discussions.

Engaging stakeholders early in impact-focused conversations can attract valuable executive interest, highlighting the significance of the team's work. Clear, quantified trade-offs provide a common language for stakeholders and teams, aligning strategic objectives and daily activities.

By consistently estimating potential impact, teams maintain alignment with strategic goals, enhance prioritisation clarity, and ensure their daily efforts meaningfully contribute to broader business success.

Chapter 6: Adjusting for Impact

Impact-focused goals allow product teams flexibility to adjust their strategies as conditions and assumptions inevitably change. However, without regular attention, long-term impact goals can fade from view during short-term execution cycles.

To stay aligned, product teams must regularly revisit their longer-term objectives and question their short-term progress:

One Powerful Question:

What specific shorter-term signals should we see if we are on track to achieving our impact-level goals?

Teams should map out clear milestones that lead up to their ultimate impact goal. By identifying intermediate signals—like converting half of a total user upgrade goal by mid-year—teams can more easily detect if adjustments are needed along the way.

Flexibility isn't achieved by avoiding long-term planning but by regularly revisiting and adjusting plans. Teams benefit from quarterly or even monthly check-ins to ask critical questions, including:

• Have our critical milestones changed?
• Do our team goals still reflect the best way to achieve our desired impact?
• How confident are we that our current path will achieve our goals?
• Is there any work we're doing that isn't contributing to our desired impact?
• How have external market conditions changed, and what do these changes mean for our users?

This regular reflection helps ensure teams remain responsive and aligned with their ultimate goals.

• When It's Not Going Well: Instead of finger-pointing, teams should use unmet goals as signals for improvement. Impact-first teams openly discuss what they've learned from missed targets and proactively adjust their plans.
• When It's Going Well: Even success can create anxiety about attributing impact. Effective teams celebrate success collectively and collaborate across departments to understand how each team's contributions align with overall business success.
• When It's Complicated: Avoid ambiguous status indicators like "yellow lights" or "in progress" labels. Maintain regular, honest assessments of whether work is genuinely contributing to desired impact. If necessary, deliberately allocate a small portion of work as intentionally untracked, limiting it to avoid drift.
• When Facing Urgent Requests: Treat urgent or politically charged requests as opportunities for conversation rather than automatically rejecting or accepting them. Ask questions to better understand the broader context and potential impact, aligning short-term actions with long-term business goals.

By maintaining a regular cadence for review and openly addressing uncertainty, product teams can consistently keep business impact at the forefront of their day-to-day work, ensuring meaningful and flexible responses to both challenges and opportunities.

What specific shorter-term signals should we see if we are on track to achieving our impact-level goals?

Chapter 7: The Journey of Impact-First Teams

Becoming an impact-first team is more art than science, requiring thoughtful conversations rather than rigid processes. Each team's journey will differ based on unique goals, experiences, and constraints.

The key steps teams can follow include:

1. Bringing Impact into the Open. Ask tough questions about your team's value and impact on the business.
2. Understanding Business-Level Impact. Identify measurable conditions essential for the company's success.
3. Setting Impactful Team Goals. Clearly articulate goals with specific measures and timelines.
4. Impact Through Discovery. Clarify who your users are and what they must do to achieve your goals. Engage closely with user research.
5. Estimating Impact. Evaluate the potential impact of planned work realistically. Use "back-of-napkin" estimates and leverage external data.
6. Adjusting for Impact. Regularly assess if shorter-term milestones align with long-term goals. Plan explicit cadences for reviewing and adjusting course.

Conclusion: Letting Your Job Be Your Job

The hardest part of product work often involves managing business expectations. An impact-first approach provides clarity, alignment, and a common language across functions.

Focusing on business impact reduces unnecessary battles over methods or ideals. Recognising that your primary role is to help your business succeed can be deeply liberating and rewarding.

Ultimately, embracing an impact-first mindset leads to clearer conversations, better decision-making, and a healthier, more productive work environment.