The Customer Success Playbook

Customer Success Playbook S3 3E8 - Matt LeMay - Defining Impact When Everyone Disagrees

• Kevin Metzger • Season 2 • Episode 38

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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.

Now you can interact with us directly by leaving a voice message at https://www.speakpipe.com/CustomerSuccessPlaybook

Check out https://funnelstory.ai/ for more details about Funnelstory. You can also check out our full video review of the product on YouTube at https://youtu.be/4jChYZBVz2Y.

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Kevin Metzger:

Customer success. Hello and welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook podcast. I'm Kevin Metzker Here again with my co-host Roman Trevon. We're continuing our conversation with Matt Lame, the author of Impact First Product Teams. Roman, you think we should, uh, start with the, uh, with the hard questions for Matt today? Yeah,

Roman Trebon:

yeah. But definitely before we dive into our, our big one, big question. You know, we'd like to do these quick icebreakers so we get, uh, so our audience gets to know our guests a little bit better. So Matt, I hope you're buckled up and, uh, our first question is, you ready? I'm ready. All. So Matt, you, you live in London, so if do Kevin and I, we get on a Delta flight from Atlanta. We head over to see you in London. What, what's the one tourist attraction we have to go see? And, and is there a place we gotta eat if we're over there?

Matt LeMay:

Gosh, I, I'm not big on tourist attractions. I'm from York originally. So that cynicism is kind. Give us the

Roman Trebon:

off the beaten path that answer that. Give us the, uh, I would take

Matt LeMay:

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 Regents Canal, explore different parts of London. Part of why I wound up here is that London is such an incredible walking city. You see every different era of this city. You know, from, uh, a medieval city to an industrial city, to a modern city, all layered on top of each other in surprising and interesting ways. It's just a great place to have a big breakfast, walk around and enjoy the city. I.

Kevin Metzger:

If you had one book to recommend other than your own business or pleasure, what would you recommend?

Matt LeMay:

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 in this book. And I recommend it not just for the ideas in it, but for the storytelling as well. Um, just a phenomenal book, a great example of what a business book can be. Outside of work, what's a hobby or interest that keeps you busy and entertained, uh, making music? I'm, I'm recording, uh, the audiobook version of Impact First Product Teams now, and I have been procrastinating by recording some musical interludes, which are quite silly and fun, and I'm excited to, uh, to share those. But I've been a, I was a professional musician before. I was a professional product person. Oh wow. That's cool. Get a chance to play with people sometimes. I've got some show posters and records I've worked on behind me. Um, a guitar behind the stack of books. Is that the main

Roman Trebon:

instrument, Matt? You playing guitar, is that what you're playing or do you go beyond the guitar?

Matt LeMay:

Yeah, I, I, I, I mainly play guitar. I, I also play drums and I, I fumble my way through bass and keyboards. One I must, but guitar and drums are, are probably my two main instruments though. Living in an apartment in London, guitar is certainly an easier thing to reach for.

Kevin Metzger:

Let's get into the heart of today's episode, or one big question. Yeah. How should product teams define and communicate impact given that each organization's funding model, product, stage, and outside factors can vary so widely?

Matt LeMay:

That's, I mean, that is the question, right? Part of the reason I wrote this book the way I did is that there's been an an interesting debate playing out in the product world at large. Over whether product teams should be able to calculate and articulate the ROI of the team itself. And there are some guidelines out there. I've heard that every team should assume a six x return is what the business looks for from however that much they're spending on the company. You know that you can assume a product team costs$1 million a year. But as you said, Kevin, it depends a lot on the company and on the stage of the company and the business model and the funding model. It also depends on what team you're on. I've worked with some innovation teams, for example, that are explicitly tasked with not optimizing the existing business model, but rather exploring and validating new business models. So I think the real challenge is. To understand first and foremost what your business is looking to achieve in order for the business itself to be successful. And if you're a startup, that might be raising the next round of funding. If it's a publicly traded company, it might be meeting a profit or revenue projection for the next quarter. That information usually exists somewhere, but it, it's funny to me how easily it gets lost in the day-to-day of product work. You know, I've worked with product teams where they wind up just. Googling public documents about their company to get a better sense of what the company cares about. And again, I, I think that speaks to the fact that it is very easy, especially at larger organizations, for us to become quite far removed from the business level impact of our work. I think it's smaller organizations. We can also become disconnected from it because nobody's talking about it. We're kind of stuck in startup. You know, fantasy land where everything we do is amazing and awesome and perfect until we all run outta money and nobody has a job anymore, which is something that many people I know have been through. So again, I think the key is really to understand what is the company looking towards to measure its own success? And then what is the company looking to from your team to consider your team a successful part of that business? That's gonna vary from company to company. It's gonna vary from team to team. But if you can't answer those two basic questions, you're probably not in a terribly strong position to do work that is meaningful to the business.

Roman Trebon:

And I liked in the book, Matt, you, you had a couple really, really good examples throughout, but a couple of like even the assumption that teams know what the impact is, right? Like Yeah. Is it, it's like, Hey, we need to get new users. And then another team within the same organization says, no, no, no. We need to turn our freemium customers into paying customers and like even within the same team, they have different definitions of what success look like. Can you, I'm assuming this happens at, at frequently and, and and it it happens all the time.

Matt LeMay:

All the time. Yeah. Well, well, and again, I think it's, I. It's that very assumption that enables this to happen, right? I think people easily assume that more users is good, more money is good, these are all good things, and we want to make good numbers go up. But there's tension between these things, right? I've seen this in a lot of organizations where I. There are some teams who are responsible for bringing on lots of new users and other teams that are responsible for, for example, increasing the lifetime value of users. Well, those two things can be in conflict with each other, right? If we're bringing on lots of low value new users to increase the number of new users we have, then the customer lifetime value across our entire user base is probably 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 said before, I always recommend that teams set their goals, no more than one step away from those critical company goals. Because then you can look across teams and say for example, okay, well we have one team that's responsible for. Increasing the customer lifetime value per user. We have another team that's responsible for bringing on a certain number of new users. How do those things relate to each other? How are they in harmony with each other? How are they intention with each other? Should we be measuring lifetime value for a certain subset? Customers. Should this team be focused on a subset of customers? How do they work together? Again, the goal here is to identify ways that teams can work collaboratively to maximize their impact for the business, not to cascade and atomize goals, to the point where each team's goals are completely separate from each other, which can be a, a fun, intellectual exercise, but usually does more harm than good in terms of real world impact.

Kevin Metzger:

I think it's interesting to listen to you talk about goals and goal setting. Um, and I, I know it's coming kind of from a product side, but really this isn't, this is relevant to pretty much any, it's relevant to customer success teams. It's relevant to pretty much any team in a company as far as how you do goal setting. Is there something specific to product that you would say that's different or

Matt LeMay:

I, I mean, I don't think so. Product just happens to be where I work. It's, it's funny you mention, you know, customer success teams. There have been so many conversations I've had with product teams where they say, well, we can't measure that. We can't measure how happy our customers are. We can't measure if this is working. And I usually tell them, go talk to your customer success teams. They know this stuff. Have ways of measuring this. They know how many tickets are coming in. They know how challenging these things are to resolve. They know how much it's costing the 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't understand how important issue X versus issue Y is. Customer success teams are usually the the first place I send them because they have a sense of how much time and resources are going into these issues of how much this might be affecting. You know, usually they have a pretty good sense, even if it's an estimate of like how many. Customers do you think we're losing to this on a, on a given basis? These are questions that there are usually people within organizations who can at least have a really good educated guess around. But again, the challenge is a lot of product teams don't usually have much of an incentive to talk to those people. And talking to people in different departments opens up various cans of worms. But those are the cans of worms that we must open if we want to deliver really meaningful things for the business at large.

Kevin Metzger:

One of the things I find very interesting, so every time we, we get the opportunity to talk to a product person, and what I've found from a career perspective is the alignment between teams is actually much closer, and it should, and anybody who's paid attention worked and, and is good at doing these things always is like, yeah. Collaboration helps here. This is where, this is where you gain benefit and it goes both ways, right? I mean, the collaboration from the customer success side with product is product can get measurements on information that they're looking for. The collaboration on the customer success side is, Hey, we've got these pain points, we're seeing that we can really provide some feedback onto product and, and it. It does. Those cans of worms are, are the, they're the worms where the value are. I mean, that's exactly, that's the bait that you need to, to hook.

Matt LeMay:

There you go. And you know, it's funny, I, there's a story in the book about working with a product team that committed to one of these high impact, high specificity goals. And somebody pulled me aside afterwards and said, but we'd have to work with marketing to achieve that goal. It's like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you, you would and you will. And that's, that's, that's okay.

Roman Trebon:

And Kev, you asked about, you know, the, the, is this specific to product? One thing I, I like Matt, about the book is you could just take product out of the book and insert customer success in input marketing, right? And, and you talk a lot about having impact level goals and then the day-to-day work. And then there's this big middle where we all like, and I'm like, wait a second. That's, that's a, that's so relatable to the customer success teams or marketing teams, or even with there's alignment, right? Doesn't mean this is like all rainbows 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 all across the business.

Matt LeMay:

Yep. That's the thing is I think we look to the middle, as you said, to try to make things easier than they will ever be. We try to break things apart into these little digestible pieces and say, well, if each team goes about its individual business, surely that will add up to a successful business. But that's not something we can assume we need to do. That coordination work constantly and it is challenging work.

Roman Trebon:

So Matt, you are going to come back. We didn't scare you away. You're coming back on Friday, right?

Matt LeMay:

Not yet, no. I'm still

Roman Trebon:

Okay. Perfect. I haven't scared me away yet. Perfect, perfect. Alright, uh, well thanks for Matt, 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 inte intelligence can have an impact on all that we're talking about and on setting impact level goals and product teams, et cetera. For our audience, thanks for listening. As always, make sure to subscribe to our show, like it, share it with your colleagues and friends. Don't forget to give us a rating that helps us expand our audience. As always, Kevin, keep on playing.

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Kevin Metzger

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Roman Trebon

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Matt LeMay

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