A Recipe for Team Agility: One Page, One Hour

Today my conversation partner is Matt LeMay! Matt is an internationally recognized product leader, author, and consultant. He is the author of Agile for Everybody (O’Reilly Media, 2018) and Product Management in Practice (Second Edition O'Reilly Media, 2022), and has helped build and scale product management practices at companies ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 enterprises.

Matt and I met at UX Lisbon last year where he gave a talk that included him describing his extremely actionable recipe for team agility: the One Page / One Hour Pledge, a powerful commitment to minimize busywork and maximize collaboration that has been adopted by individuals and teams at Amazon, Walmart, CNN, and more.

I was excited to bring Matt into a conversation about this pledge, because I know how easy it is to get caught in a rabbit-hole of perfectionism before sharing my work with others. Teams can work more fluidly if we reduce the cycle time between solo work and team work.

Matt is an advocate for the power of focus, subtraction and feedback loops over perfection - I mean, would you rather ride a bike you can only aim once or one that you get to steer continuously?

I never dreamed I’d get to have a podcast conversation that includes references to Alan Watts and the power of Ego Death to accelerate your team’s success and ultimately, one’s own success…but glad that we are!

Matt and I unpack how TIMEBOXING (ie, Tight-and-almost-thoughtless constraints ) helps shift the relationship between thought and action in teams and organizations…and can help move the conversation forward.

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Links, Quotes, Notes, and Resources

Matt's website

Product Management in Practice

https://www.onepageonehour.com/

Matt’s talk at UX Brighton on “You Don’t Get anyone to do Anything”

“When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us” Alan Watts

Alan Watts “The wisdom of Insecurity

Summary

6:22 Matt and Daniel discuss the power of constraints, focus, and subtraction in product development

18:06 Coaching teams to use the one page, 1 hour pledge and how it shifted his perspective on what is considered impressive documentation

35:21 The role of product leaders in applying constraints, bringing focus, encouraging subtraction, and managing complexity

37:45 Matt emphasizes the importance of celebrating subtraction and user-centricity in product development

40:26 The value of continuous discovery and learning from customers regularly

44:11 Matt suggests finding a half hour every week for research with executives and focusing on tactics rather than philosophy

51:45 Matt LeMay shares a story about understanding why a decision was made, even if it's not the answer you hoped for, and the importance of asking questions to get a better understanding of the decision-making criteria
57:36 Matt emphasizes the importance of ego death in good product work and cross-functional collaboration, and the need to focus on team success rather than personal rewards or recognition

Key Quotes

Minute 10

Matt LeMay:

I used to work with a company that did these really long retrospectives after workshops. They were brutal. These were three hours. Everybody would say what they felt they had done well and what they could have done better. Everybody would go around and tell them what they had done wrong or what they could have done better. Sometimes the retrospectives would last longer than the workshops themselves. And I love retrospectives, but this was just excruciating.

Daniel Stillman:

That sounds like a ratio is off there.

Matt LeMay:

Yes. So I said, "How about we timebox this to an hour?" [inaudible 00:10:15] said, "Yeah, sure, whatever." So everyone starts going around and talking. I'm sitting there quietly. I don't say anything. And everybody talks, an hour goes off. And I say, "All right, it's been great." And they say, "Wait, no, well, we haven't finished yet." I say, "Well, clock says we're finished. We time blocked this for an hour." Everybody got really uncomfortable. But in order to change the way you think, I think you need something to force you into a state of reflection. You need something which will shake up that system between thought and action in a way that compels you to look at it and say, okay, what is the relationship between thought and action? What is driving this behavior? What is the reward I'm getting? What is compelling me to spend this time talking in this way? What is the value I'm getting out of this? Which is part of why I am such a big believer in really tight and almost thoughtless constraints.

Minute 24

Matt LeMay:

So many of these things all come back to user centricity, customer centricity. I saw Matt Cutts who had been at Google for a long time, and was working for the US government, talk a couple years ago. And somebody asked him, "How do you break through the bureaucracy of an organization as complex as the US government?" And he said, "Oh, that's a really easy one. Bring decision-makers closer to customers." No hesitation about that. And I feel like when I've seen product leaders and product managers effectively navigate that complexity, part of how you do so is by demonstrating that... I talk about this a little bit in Agile for Everybody, but there are dependencies which are felt by the customer and dependencies that are not felt by the customer. And if a dependency is felt by the customer, it should probably be felt by the organization as well.

In other words, if you have siloed folks into a bunch of teams, but a user's journey is jumping around through the thing built by those teams, then those teams should feel some pain too. If they don't, they're never actually going to make things better. Because they're going to sit within their silo and they're going to say, "Look, I'm working on my future. I'm making this area better. That's my job. There's no reason for me to talk to these other people and deal with getting outside of my comfort zone, deal with situations where what's important to me might not be important to somebody else. Deal with situations where the thing I've been working so hard on might come under a different scrutiny, or might be revealed as actually not being that valuable to the sum total user experience."

Minute 35

Matt LeMay:

So if you're trying to get a room full of people to make a decision, see how each person in the room is going to make the decision, and then figure out what they're basing that information on. Then you'll probably figure out what information you need to consolidate or answer or resolve in order for the room to make a decision. But I rarely ever now spend much time thinking or talking in the abstract before asking participants in a room, how would you make this decision right now? If you have these three options, which one would you choose and why? Because that will help me understand what decision-making criteria are necessary, and it'll help me understand if I'm thinking about options the right way.

More About Matt

Matt LeMay is an internationally recognized product leader, author, and consultant. He is the author of Agile for Everybody (O’Reilly Media, 2018) and Product Management in Practice (Second Edition O'Reilly Media, 2022), and has helped build and scale product management practices at companies ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Matt is the creator of the One Page / One Hour Pledge, a commitment to minimize busywork and maximize collaboration that has been adopted by over 100 individuals and teams at Amazon, Walmart, CNN, BBVA, and more.

Matt is co-founder and partner at Sudden Compass, a consultancy that has helped organizations like Spotify, Google, Clorox, and Procter & Gamble put customer centricity into practice. In his work as a technology communicator, Matt has developed and led digital transformation and data strategy workshops for companies like Audible, GE, American Express, Pfizer, McCann, and Johnson & Johnson.

Previously, Matt worked as Senior Product Manager at music startup Songza (acquired by Google), and Head of Consumer Product at Bitly. Matt is also amusician,recording engineer, and the author of a book about singer-songwriter Elliott Smith. He lives in London, England.

Full Transcript

Daniel Stillman:

Okay, Matt, thank you for making me time for being...

Matt LeMay:

Thank you for having me.

Daniel Stillman:

I want to start at the beginning of me knowing you. Just, actually, I think sitting down to dinner in someplace in Lisbon.

Matt LeMay:

I believe it was.

Daniel Stillman:

I really enjoyed your talk at UX Lisbon, and partly because it is about constraints, and partly because your talk is funny. And also because while I think I seem to recall... I was looking for my notes, I couldn't find my original sketch notes from your talk. Because I was feverishly sketching during your talk. Was that like, oh, my slides aren't fancy, but your talk is funny. You are a very entertaining speaker. You entertain while you educate, and I really appreciate that.

Matt LeMay:

Thank you. I do not have the skillset to make my slides fancy. So funny is about the best I can do.

Daniel Stillman:

I want to start with the one page, one hour pledge, because I think it is a blockbuster talking about constraints and the art of focus. It is so easy to let a communication or document just bloat.

Matt LeMay:

Yes.

Daniel Stillman:

I wonder when the seed first took root in you.

Matt LeMay:

Yeah. I have always been a verbose person, and I have been the nightmare friend or colleague or romantic partner who will send you the 20-page email with all of my thoughts meticulously composed. And then say, "Well, I've done my part." But there's no way anyone could misconstrue my position, I've made it abundantly clear. And then gotten bitter and resentful when it turns out not everybody wants to read my 20-page treatise on whatever it happens to be. I am as guilty of over long, overstuffed documentation as anyone, if not more so. And I found myself working as a consultant with an organization. And frankly, just that my approach wasn't working. I was both creating a lot of big heavy documents and facilitating the creation of many big heavy documents. People weren't reading them, people were busy. I had a unshakeable sense that I was wasting people's time in order to gratify my own sense of a job well done or having done something well.

I remember the conversation very clearly. I was working with a product manager who said... Another product manager just came to me and said that they want to see what my team is working on right now. "I don't have anything." "Can you help me put together a deck?" And I said, "Well look, why don't you try just spending one page and one hour on it, and we'll see how that works out." This product manager said, "Wow, it's kind of catchy. One page, one hour." One page, one hour. A week later I said, "Well, how did that go?" This product manager said, "It was really interesting, I gave product manager who asked for it this really rough one pager and I said, 'Look, don't think less of me for this. This is a really rough document. It's just a brain dump of what my team's doing.' And they wound up coming back to me and saying, 'Gosh, that one pager was so useful. It was just exactly what I needed and nothing else. So I'm going to try making one that captures what my team's working on.'"

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Matt LeMay:

I said, "Oh, there seems to be something here." So I started coaching more teams I've worked with, try this one page, one hour thing. And then I was in a conversation with my business partners in the States. I live in London now, which is why I qualify that we're in the States. And I told them about this work I was doing, one page, one hour, and they both smirked at me. I said, "What's so funny about this?" They said, "We love you, but when you work with us, you give us the most comprehensive documentation." I said, "Well, yeah, but you two are geniuses and I want to impress you and I want you to think I'm smart."

And they said, "Yeah, why do you think everyone else isn't doing one pagers? They feel the same way." Oh. So it started to shift. I had seen the utility of this in terms of applying a constraint to documentation, but I hadn't seen the utility of it until that moment, and shifting incentives. I told my business partner, "Okay, look, I'm going to write up a little pledge. I'm going to pledge to you that I will spend no more than one page in one hour on anything before I share it with you. And if I break this pledge, I want you to hold me accountable. I want you to say, Matt, you may be turning in something which is very intrinsically impressive, but in the context of our working agreement, you have actually done something bad. You have actually not excelled at this. You have broken a commitment you made."

And it was really interesting having that in place because I did break that commitment several times. Either because I thought, oh, we have enough shared context, I'll just finish the document. Or because I was having a rough day and wanted that dopamine hit of having turned in something impressive. But in all those cases it didn't work. Either we realized that there were enough assumptions baked into my document that it would require rework, or my business partner said, "This is a lot, and we feel excluded by the fact that you sought to finish this thing without our input."

Daniel Stillman:

It's so interesting.

Matt LeMay:

To me, the most interesting part of the one page, one hour pledge is not so much the constraint itself, but the idea that you can explicitly shift the goalposts for what is considered a successful or impressive document. Because I'm pretty convinced at this point that if you don't shift them explicitly, they won't shift.

Daniel Stillman:

Right. And so it doesn't really matter if it's one page or two page, or if it's three slides or-

Matt LeMay:

Exactly.

Daniel Stillman:

It's really about having the conversation. And I guess I'm wondering... These are the things I'm wondering. I'm going to share one. There are several things I'm wondering and I'd like you to respond to any and all of those things.

Matt LeMay:

Absolutely.

Daniel Stillman:

One, I know you wrote a book called Agile for Everybody. And I was also reading about your perspective that there is no product mindset, there are product action sets. And so the idea that doing things differently is more important than thinking differently is a really interesting one. There's a third point, I apologize for my bloviation.

Matt LeMay:

No, it's all good.

Daniel Stillman:

There's a balance always between... There's a concept called triple loop learning, where doing the right things can get us the right actions, thinking things differently can help us notice when we're not getting the right things done to get what we want. It's impossible to shift what we're doing unless we shift how we're thinking. And it's very hard to shift our thinking unless there's a shift at the level of being. Our goal, our aspirations. And so I feel like on one hand the actions are clearly the most juicy. Like oh, we can start doing things differently, but it requires a shift of I do not need to feel impressive. I will not feel ashamed of incomplete work. I will show incomplete work. I feel like we have to work at both ends in order to have a transformation.

Matt LeMay:

Absolutely. For me, a lot of this comes from my experiences in cognitive behavioral therapy, which was really helpful for me. I remember the first time I went to see a cognitive behavioral therapist in New York, I had been in a lot of talk therapy previously. And I showed up ready to, it all started with my family. And my therapist said, "Look, that's great, but what are you doing? You have anxiety issues." And I said, "Well, I'm drinking coffee all day, and I'm never exercising. And I sit around and scroll." And she said, "Okay, well, work on those things. If you can't start modifying some behavior, I don't think we're going to have a starting point where changing your thinking is going to stick. We need to basically just create an inroad before we can start reflecting and becoming more aware of the way that you think."

And I hated this. I was so mad. I was like, oh, this is my special feelings time. How dare you ask me to change my behavior and do things differently in my life? But I found that in some cases, I think behavior and what you do is the most accessible lever. And I think that sometimes when you change what people do, especially when you apply constraints, it forces some openness. It forces people out of their comfort zone. I remember the first time... I used to work with a company that did these really long retrospectives after workshops. They were brutal. These were three hours. Everybody would say what they felt they had done well and what they could have done better. Everybody would go around and tell them what they had done wrong or what they could have done better. Sometimes the retrospectives would last longer than the workshops themselves. And I love retrospectives, but this was just excruciating.

Daniel Stillman:

That sounds like a ratio is off there.

Matt LeMay:

Daniel Stillman:

Like the one page, one hour is a thoughtless constraint.

Matt LeMay:

When you talk about 5, 10, 20 sketch storming, the idea of having five minutes to draw a diagram of something on a sheet of paper. I love that. And I've used that approach in some of the roadmap mapping exercises that I do, what I call generative road mapping. Which is, rather than trying to figure out what's the right framework for roadmapping? Just sketch what you think captures visually the story you're trying to tell about the thing you're building. I worked with an organization a while ago where we did 10 minutes of prototyping a strategy document. What would a one pager of our strategy look like? Everybody took 10 minutes, then we synthesized it. And a five hour session of talking and walking through decks and asking a lot of really important sounding, but ultimately not that immediately relevant questions wound up getting wrapped up pretty definitively when we looked at these prototypes and said, "Oh, everyone's actually thinking about the same thing, more or less."

There's a clear enough through line through this that we can subtract, we can converge, we can make this happen. I think that the last example I'll share, I've worked with a lot of teams that are really interested in this notion of psychological safety. Who say, "We don't have psychological safety, we don't have trust. This is a low trust team. What should our decision rights be?" And the first question I usually ask them now is, "When somebody on your team emails you, how quickly do they expect a response?" And they often say, "I don't know, an hour a day. Not at all." In so many cases, these things that feel like big emotional issues for a team, like a lack of trust or a lack of psychological safety, come down to very simple, straightforward, tactical misalignments.

The first step I take with any team I work with now is to create a comms manual that just says, how quickly do you expect a response over these channels? What are working hours? How do you communicate urgency? How do you involve stakeholders from outside the team? These things that might seem fairly quotidian and not big product mindset, thought experiment-y. But it's been really interesting to me how often these bigger issues are ascribed things which are really just a matter of, we have not taken the time to explicitly discuss how we communicate with each other. And some of those really simple behavioral levers have had more of an immediate and meaningful effect on how teams communicate with each other than multi here transformation initiatives, et cetera.

Daniel Stillman:

I would call that conversation design. Literally designing an email is the beginning of a conversation.

Matt LeMay:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:14:21].

Daniel Stillman:

It's weird. When we're talking in person, 200 milliseconds is about what I would expect any person to respond to me before I start to feel like there's too much silence. Or they're overthinking things. And that's just in the cultural air. For whatever reason, if you wait too long when we're talking in person, it feels like dead air. And we presumably both feel some anxiety, right? I start to be like, wow, did my question not land? Does Matt hate me? He's thinking really hard about this. And so it is not surprising that an email conversation, when I'm not getting an immediate response, would create an equal amount of anxiety, A, in the sender. And B, we all know that feeling of an email sitting in our inbox [inaudible 00:15:16] glaring at us. The analogy I always use, and nobody ever gets it, but I still use it anyway, is from Pee-wee's Great Adventure. I don't know if you-

Matt LeMay:

Oh, yes.

Daniel Stillman:

There's a scene where Pee-wee is rescuing all these animals from this pet shop that's on fire. And every time he goes into the pet shop... Well, the first thing he does is he rescues the monkeys, and the monkeys help him rescue all the other animals. Leverage. This is genius. But he looks at the snakes every time and he's like, "Ugh, snakes. Not going to rescue the snakes." And finally he rescues the snakes last. And it's like, ah, the snakes, he's got handfuls of snakes. I feel like we all have those feelings about, ugh, this email. If I could just say to somebody, I haven't responded to this email because I feel anxiety about this email, or I don't know how to respond, or I feel like I have to have a perfect response. I wish there was a comms manual for that of, hey, this email is, it's been in my inbox for a month and I don't know what to do about it. Can we have a two-minute conversation?

Matt LeMay:

Well, my business partners and I had a email subject style guide that we use for internal communications, where every email had to say, in brackets in the email subject, response required by date/time, response requested by date/time or FYI. And that was really good. Because you could look at that and if it said FYI, then you could just let it sit there. And if it said response required by date/time, you'd prioritize it. And if it said response requested by date/time, then it falls to a second tier priority because you knew you weren't in a block around something. Again, I think some of these fairly routinized, structured approaches to team communication, especially asynchronous communication. Which, as you said, if you're in a person face-to-face conversation with somebody and they start to get anxious, you see them start to get anxious and you kind of, oh, [inaudible 00:17:06] this natural dance we do. Whereas if people are sitting at their desks just stressing out about an email, they never see that and they often wind up making assumptions about the other person.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes. Well, [inaudible 00:17:19] there's a whole narrative we tell.

Matt LeMay:

Exactly. I think having those agreements in place explicitly is so important.

Daniel Stillman:

This also speaks to the point that a conversation, where the conversation happens affects the conversation. Email is not designed for this.

Matt LeMay:

No.

Daniel Stillman:

Slack is not designed for this. I wouldn't want everyone to just have all of their conversations in a sauna, but that's kind of what you're saying here. It's like, this can be embedded in every communication if we're putting it in a place that has that information as part of the communication.

Matt LeMay:

Yeah. It was really interesting, when we wrote the comms manual, my business partners and I for the first time, we started with cadence and then we went into a channel. So it was like, for I want a response ASAP, let's use WhatsApp. For, I want a response by end of workday, let's use Slack. And for, hey, 24 to 48 hours, or 72 hours max, use email. And within two weeks we had stopped using Slack. Not because Slack is a bad tool by any means, I love Slack. But because there were just very few communications that fit that cadence. It was very much either like, oh, I need an answer to this right now, or take your time. It was interesting to see what happens when you actually think through the purpose of a communication channel before you retrofit the channel itself. Because I've certainly worked with a lot of teams that go from email to Slack or from email to Teams and recreate all the same communication problems, except now they have two or three or five different channels to recreate those problems, and everything just gets exponentially worse very quickly.

Daniel Stillman:

That gives me hives. I feel like I want to talk about the evolution of product at a company. Because I feel like every company is a product company, depending on how you like to look at things. My friends who are service designers may say, but everything, every product is really a service. And that may be true, but I would say a service is a product because you buy it. And almost every product or every service is digitally mediated. At some point everybody is going to say to themselves, God, we need to get better at product. And I'm wondering, in the evolution of a company... It's like, when does a bill become a law? Or how does a caterpillar become a butterfly? I imagine in your mind there are some set points where from zero to one, from not having a product to the minimum viable or the minimum lovable, or the whatever the fastest time to value product, they don't need necessarily a fractional product leader or a head of product because everyone's the head of product, or the CEO's the head of product.

At some point it sounds like there's a moment of reorganization, focus, subtraction, and constraints forming that is hard to do on your own. Because whatever reason, because behaviors or patterns have become entrained, and there is some value in bringing someone else in. And maybe that's on a temporary basis or on an ongoing basis. And then there's another set point where they're like, we need a chief product officer or a head of product.

Matt LeMay:

Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

What do you find that people are doing? What do you wish people knew about how to manage those transitions?

Matt LeMay:

What I wish people understood is that you bring in those roles to, as you said, apply constraints, bring focus, encourage subtraction, and manage complexity. I think the challenge I see when I've interviewed for those roles, in a lot of cases they've been seen as very additive roles. We need you to hire more people, we need you to add more people. We need to expand. And honestly, nine times out of 10, that is not the biggest problem that a growing company is facing. We can't scale and grow and hire fast enough is a real problem for some organizations. But I think as you see these wild accordion shaped expansions and contractions of companies over the last year, it's not the biggest problem.

The biggest problem is, are we focused on the right thing? Are we actually connecting all of these pieces in a way that creates a compelling experience? Are we actually focusing on the right customers right now? Are we managing our bets in such a way that if we invest in something and it fails, we can acknowledge that it is a failure, learn from it, and move on? In a lot of cases, what a product leader is empowered to do is to look at that, look across the organization, and make those calls and facilitate those decisions. And establish the criteria for making those decisions in a way that individual product managers wouldn't be able to or comfortable doing.

That is such critically important work, but it's not the work that people usually ask me about when I'm applying for an interview for these roles. Which I think is really too bad, because I've worked with a lot of companies in my day. And the challenges, the great product leaders-

Daniel Stillman:

Your day isn't over, Matt. I don't know if you're allowed to use... I'm still a young [inaudible 00:23:15] man, everyone.

Matt LeMay:

But the best product leaders I've worked with are the ones who can get a complex team to make subtractive steps. Like Natalia William, who I worked with at Mailchimp, who was their chief product officer [inaudible 00:23:30] Hootsuite, really was able to get in there and say, "What if we take a step out of this thing? What if we streamline these things? What if a way to increase conversions is not to add features, but to remove steps?" That's how I think great product leaders think. And you can tell immediately how challenging that is, because somebody built those steps. Somebody's job is to maintain those features that are going to be deprecated, and those people are going to feel a certain way about it. And of course they are. Most companies celebrate the launch of new features. They celebrate, look, we did a thing, we built a thing, we shipped a thing. And celebrating subtraction and celebrating...

But when you see a user struggling, when you feel that sense of, oh, the complexity I'm adding is bad complexity, the dependencies we've created are harmful dependencies that are felt by the user. It's a very different thing. Again, I think a lot of where I've seen really great product leadership... And I love Teresa Torres's book, Continuous Discovery Habits, is always the first book I recommend to people. And of all the things she talks about, my very favorite thing Teresa Torres has added to the discourse is the idea that continuous discovery is the team learns from customers once a week. And I love it because it's so simple. It's the most straightforward thing. It's like, you don't have to use this framework or do this complicated thing. It's like, are you just connected in that way?

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. That is the best way to get the "product mindset" in the company, is to talk to customers more regularly. How high up should that go? And what can that look like? What is the light... If there's somebody in the C-suite who's like, that's not my job, right?

Matt LeMay:

Yeah. This is an interesting one, because this is one of the conversations that I thoroughly see both sides of. Because I have been in situations where the CEO of a company overhears something, one customer reaches out, and then suddenly that's the only thing that matters. The whole team is scrambling because-

Daniel Stillman:

He's super customer-centric now, which is great.

Matt LeMay:

Exactly. Exactly. On the other hand, I've seen situations where C-suite is super removed from customer. And every time I'd work with companies, it was like, uh-oh, executive's going off to a conference in Silicon Valley and they'd come back and be like, "What's our augmented reality strategy? I saw a talk about it." And it's like, "We're a bank. We don't have an augmented reality strategy. We have a, let's be good at being a bank strategy." But I think in a lot of ways, part of why I think Teresa Torres's definition is so valuable is that it speaks to cadence, it speaks to regularity. If you're doing this on a regular basis, then the odds of any one thing being cataclysmic actually get smaller. I think one of the big challenges, and I've talked to a lot of folks I know in user research about this, is that it is very hard to get to a place where customer research is happening well, without it happening poorly along the way.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Matt LeMay:

If your goal is to avoid a situation where an executive overreacts the customer feedback, if your goal is to avoid a situation where product managers ask leading questions and do the things that product managers aren't supposed to do, you're never going to get there. You have to be ready to manage those situations and navigate them, and have those conversations. And say, yeah, here's what's happening. We're on a path. Let's manage our expectations. Let's look at this. Let's let this happen and manage it, rather than trying to over-engineer a situation where no bad research ever happens. In which case, design or UX or whatever, whoever is managing research will remain a gatekeeper forever, and you will never get in that position where the entire organization is actually participating in a healthy, unproductive way. I think you need to hit some [inaudible 00:29:22] along the way if you're ever going to get anywhere meaningful that-

Daniel Stillman:

I agree. I definitely could see resistance to a weekly cadence as you "go up in an organization". What would you tell a C-suite that says we can't do it once a week? And maybe being on the other side of the glass, once a quarter is something we can do.

Matt LeMay:

Oftentimes, I've sat down and said, "Craig, mind if we look at your calendar and see if we can find a half hour every week?"

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Matt LeMay:

Just a half hour. This is, again, where I find that getting down to the level of tactics can be so valuable here. Because I understand philosophically, I understand emotionally that reaction. Look, I'm so busy. I'm like, okay, let's find one half hour a week.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. This is great, because now we're getting towards two other things that we haven't talked about that we should talk about. And one is, we should go back to how do you facilitate large groups of people to come to a decision? But the other piece of that is, you can't get anyone to do anything.

Matt LeMay:

Yes.

Daniel Stillman:

So this comes to, I love the word... This is just, again, I'm a chef who looks at everything like food. When I think about conversations, I think about invitation. An invitation is what insights or initiates a conversation. And cadence is the pace of the conversation, the rate of return of the conversation. And these are two things that are so critical. You cannot force anyone to have a real... You can't force somebody to fall in love. You can put somebody in the context where maybe they'll be open to it. You can't get anyone to do anything. What you were just doing with the CEO is saying, we can do it for 30 minutes on a Friday, or here's another option. You're giving them options instead of saying, hey, it's really important. Because that's resisting resistance.

Matt LeMay:

Yeah. And that fails every time, especially when you're working executives. Yeah. It's interesting, because some of the you can't get anyone to do anything talk started at that conference in Lisbon. Where during the workshop I did so many of the questions I got, well, how do we get product managers to value research? How do we get them [inaudible 00:31:48] work we do? And I felt like I was a dog chasing my own tail trying to answer that, I just couldn't get to an answer. And then I spoke at a conference remotely, unfortunately, in Athens, Greece.

Daniel Stillman:

Because it would've been great to be in Athens, I presume.

Matt LeMay:

A while ago. And it was about this Agile conference, and the first question I got was, how do we get executives to be agile? And it just came to me. I just said, "You don't get anyone to do anything." And the reaction I got was just resentful silence. Just, the room went dead. No follow up questions. That was it. And I said to myself, interesting. There's something there. I've touched a nerve. I wrote a talk that I gave at UX Brighton last year called, You Don't Get Anyone To Do Anything. And I prefaced it with my whole take on Alan Watson, Zen Buddhism, and the idea of you can't capture flowing water in a paper bag. And all that great, it goes through a lot of wisdom tradition stuff across different cultures and different religious traditions. But when I came to, you can't get anyone to do anything. Again, I got this resentful silence.

I was like, no, no, no, no. Okay, we're going to walk through this together, because this is actually the path to freedom. When you convince yourself that you can control other people and get them to do something, or that your success and your "influence" hinges on somebody else doing something, you are setting yourself up for a life of disappointment and misery. You can't get anyone to do anything. That's the path to freedom. You can state your case and try to help people make the best decisions they can. But there's been this great thread running through product management discourse in the last couple months. Michelle Cutler's talked about this, my friend [inaudible 00:33:49] talked about this a lot. That really you're creating the conditions for good decision-making when you're a product lead. You're not making the decision and you're not getting anyone to make a decision.

You're trying to just really align the criteria for decision-making and give people options, and then you help them understand the trade-offs. And if there's a disagreement, then that's in that case constructive. Because you can say, all right, are the options wrong? Are the decision-making criteria wrong? I think one of the things I learned, I remember so clearly being in a workshop about product strategy, the team I was coaching. We were two hours into this and everybody was debating, well, what should be a product strategy? And people were going up whiteboarding things, and having all these very intense academic theoretical conversations. And I said, "All right, can I try something real quick? What are 10 things this team is thinking about building?" And they listed them. I said, "All right, everybody just prioritized them yourself in two minutes, one to 10." Two very different orders emerged.

There were two very clear clusters. And I said, "All right, break into your cluster, spend five minutes preparing your verbal argument. Why is this the right order?" So everyone goes, they're getting excited. The first team goes, "Look, this team is really focused on acquiring new users. So we..." Somebody on the other team goes, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I thought we were focused on retaining existing users." And there you have it. It wasn't that there was something in page 1,000 of how to write a product strategy that was missing, but was something really simple and really straightforward. We didn't know who we were building for. And in a lot of cases, again, things like product strategy, any of these things that are designed to help us make decisions I find are better to reverse engineer from the decision you are actually trying to make than to try to generate in the abstract.

Daniel Stillman:

It almost seems like prototyping the decision, right?

Matt LeMay:

Yeah. I think that's a great way of putting it.

Daniel Stillman:

You can over facilitate or design a "perfect" agenda for how to architect a decision. Or you can get some people in a room and say, how would we know if this was a good decision? And what are some things you're thinking about would be a good decision for this? And just to mock it up.

Matt LeMay:

Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

And then in a way, it's iterating.

Matt LeMay:

Exactly.

Daniel Stillman:

Is this a good decision? How do we know? What would make it better? Oh, we're not aligned on it. Okay, well great. So how can we all get aligned on it? And then you can address each component of it one by one.

Matt LeMay:

And sometimes you'll ask people, and everybody just has the same answer immediately. And then whatever the free hours you would've spent on a strategy session might have been a waste of time. Like there are times-

Daniel Stillman:

Well, there's another issue there of, is everyone aligned? Is that good or...

Matt LeMay:

Right. And one of the other things I've learned also, I'll tell another story from a workshop. I was doing the workshop with a bunch of product managers, and I talk about how part of your job is to understand why a decision was made. If your team is given something to do, it's really important for you to understand why. And not to just storm off and say, well, fine, we'll do it. We're like, no, we won't do it. Understand why. And somebody made a noise. And I'm like, huh. "Oh, hello, you made a noise." She goes, "Yeah, I don't agree on it." "Great. Tell me why. Is there a particular experience?" She said, "Yeah, I was told to build something. I kept asking and I kept asking, and I kept asking. And eventually I was told, look, somebody promised this to the board, so you just have to build it. Okay? So now I don't bother asking anymore."

And I said, "Oh, congratulations/I'm sorry you did your job. You got the answer. And getting an answer doesn't mean getting an answer you like." And that's one of the hardest things to accept in life and in product management, is that there will be times where you go and you get an answer, and it's not a good answer. It's not the answer you hoped for. It's not the answer that leaves you feeling awesome, and let you understand exactly why something was done. But if that's the real answer, there are times in real world organizations where you say, okay, great. What exactly was promised? What exactly is the wiggle room in this? [inaudible 00:39:03]-

Daniel Stillman:

Well, why does the board want what it wants is not an unreasonable question. Somebody would say, oh, well... See, this goes back to cognitive behavioral therapy, and our own relationship to power, authority, and optionality. That person heard that and said, well, there's just no point in me asking anymore. And there was somebody who would say, oh, why does the board want that? Why do they think it's important for the organization to be doing this? What is their vision for this organization as opposed to the C-Suite's view for what this needs? Why is the chief of product officer and the board not aligned on this?

Matt LeMay:

Yeah. And I do think there comes a certain point where you might just need to throw your hands up and say, I've asked as much as I can.

Daniel Stillman:

Fair. No, no, totally.

Matt LeMay:

As an IC product manager, I'm probably not going to be able to get much time with the board. But if I know that this is at a certain altitude, and I have a sense... I deal with this a lot with companies that say, "We're a marketing driven organization. Marketing told us to build this thing." Well, then I go to marketing and I say, "What'd you tell them?" "No, this is the story we need to be able to tell, but I don't care what they build. I don't care where the pixels are." And I go back to product and I'm like, "Well, what do you think they meant by this?" "Well, I don't know. They told us to build this."

I'm like, "Yeah, when marketing tells you we're going to build a portal or a platform or whatever, there's so much wiggle room within that." There's so much opportunity to say, all right, not only to ask what does that mean, but to say, okay, when you work in that collaborative, iterative way, it breaks down a lot of the silos naturally. And again, I feel like simple time constraints are such a massive enabling factor.

Daniel Stillman:

Well, and we have a time constraint that sadly we're coming up against. I usually ask, is there anything I haven't asked you that I should ask you? And I do want to ask that question. This thing you're just talking about, I know someone who has this challenge where, I know you said there's no such thing as a product mindset. But if sales are the people who have the most contact with the customer in a particular venture backed startup that shall remain nameless, how might we help them frame conversations so that they are promising stories and not features?

Matt LeMay:

Yeah, here's the thing.

Daniel Stillman:

Is that a-

Matt LeMay:

I think that's a great question. And I think the first thing to acknowledge is that if you work at a sales-driven organization, show some respect to the sales team. I'm a bad salesperson. I'm terrible at sales. And I have so much respect for people who are good at sales. I often say that you can reframe a, how do I get question as a, how do I help question. If the question is, how do I get sales to stop selling things that we have to build? You're going to lose. How do I help sales sell more? How do I help them be more successful?

Daniel Stillman:

Oh, my God, did I do that? How can I get... After all that we just talked about, that you still use a how do I get?

Matt LeMay:

No, no, no, you didn't. You didn't. I'm paraphrasing. I'm conveniently paraphrasing. But I think that at the heart of most questions coming from one function about the behavior or intentions of another function or another person, is this idea that I know how they should be behaving or what they should be doing.

Daniel Stillman:

Oh, God.

Matt LeMay:

And they're not doing it the way I would want.

Daniel Stillman:

My God, you have read too much Alan Watts. This is [inaudible 00:42:32].

Matt LeMay:

I wish I had Alan Watt’s voice. [inaudible 00:42:35]-

Daniel Stillman:

This is the game of black and white. This is the game of black and white versus this is a both and, this is a curiosity mindset.

Matt LeMay:

Yeah. If I go to sales and I'm like, "Hey, I want you to sell more. I want you to make more money. I want to understand how you sell. What can product do to help you make more money for this company?" That's a very different conversation. And-

Daniel Stillman:

Then stop selling features that we have to build.

Matt LeMay:

Right. Because, I'm sure sales is frustrated too that they have to... [inaudible 00:43:08]-

Daniel Stillman:

Why haven't you built this yet already?

Matt LeMay:

Exactly. It can be a win-win when you go in trying to understand what somebody wants to achieve and help them achieve it. And the good news is, in most organizations if you zoom up to a high enough altitude, you do want the same thing. You want the company to make money. Make a lot of money. You want to be successful. Once you get out of your own silo and your own sense of... One of the things I tell product managers all the time is that the things you do to seek personal rewards and recognition will almost always be harmful to your team. The things you do that you feel that are increasing your personal status, your personal visibility, are intrinsically antithetical to how product work plays out. Which is to say, that the group efforts, the team efforts are always the most impactful things. I think once you can really accept that your team's success is your success, your company's success is your success, there's a degree of ego death that goes into good product work. And I think good cross-functional work in general.

Daniel Stillman:

Which is why everyone should be in some therapy so that they can work on preparing for that ego death, which was Socrates' whole perspective. With zero minutes left. I feel like they do always do this on NPR. So with the last 30 seconds, Senator, would you please... If you had a billboard, what would we put on it? We're going to put this, you can see this from space, everyone can read this. What's Matt LeMay's message to all people, especially the C-Suite of developing product organizations?

Matt LeMay:

Yeah. I would say for that audience, I would say focus is a bigger risk than scale. Not having focus is actually a much bigger material risk to your organization than not having scale. And to everyone else I'd say, you don't get anyone to do anything. And I'd tell them to go read The Wisdom Insecurity by Alan Watson.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes, it's a good one. Aside from reading your books, Agile For Everybody, and Product Management And Practice. And going to your website at mattlemay.com. Where else would you like people on the internet to go to learn more about all things Matt LeMay and to stay in connection with you?

Matt LeMay:

I'm more active on LinkedIn than I am on Twitter these days, so you can find me there.

Daniel Stillman:

I saw your conflict about Twitter.

Matt LeMay:

Yeah. It remains a profound conflict in speaking with... And keeping with the idea of decision-making happens, I'm creating the conditions for good decision-making. Yeah. And mattlemay.com. I'd say the second edition of Product Management And Practice came out this year. I'm very proud of it. Or last year. It's a new year, I keep forgetting that.

Daniel Stillman:

Happy New Year.

Matt LeMay:

Real proud of that one. And otherwise, yeah, I think that just about covers it.

Daniel Stillman:

Matt, thank you for making the time for this conversation. This is really great stuff.

Matt LeMay:

Thank you. Yeah, this was really fun. Appreciate it.

Daniel Stillman:

Yay. We'll call scene.