Impact-First Product Teams (2025)

Useful lessons and stories about creating a team that aligns its goals with those of the business.

Notes

The key points are captured in a series of questions in chapter 7 “The journey of impact-first teams”:

Would you fund the team? Does it earn its place in the organisation?
How would you know if the business has succeeded in the future?
How would you know if the team has succeeded in the future?
Who needs to do what for us to achieve our goals? Why would they do that?
What is the most impact we could get from this work? What’s the most optimistic scenario?
What short-term signals will tell us if we’re going to hit our impact-level goals?

Introduction “The Business is Your Business”:

In the current economic climate, teams cannot work on things that don’t impact the business.
It’s hard to know what does have an impact, but lots of teams work on stuff which is definitely zero impact.
We over-focus on the “middle” between our day-to-day work and the business impact; cargo culting processes from different organisations rather than considering what our business needs.
We need to ensure we’re working to impact the business.

Chapter 1 “The high cost of low-impact teams”:

Teams can get stuck in a low-impact death spiral (page 12):

Low-impact work creates more complicated products which, in turn, lead to more dependencies and conflicts to manage. Those dependencies and conflicts discourage teams from taking on work that touches on the product’s commercial core. Which, in turn, encourages more low-impact work.
Many low-impact teams ask why they’re being held accountable for things outside their control; this is the reality of product work. The success of a product is outside our control.
A powerful question: “if you were in charge of the company, would you fully fund this team?” This causes people to think about the true cost of their team, and not just focus on the small wins with no consideration for the overall balance.
It’s easy to be a low-impact team:
- Take on projects of bounded scope
- Limit executive oversight
- Minimal cross-team discussion
When these teams enter a low-impact death spiral, they become dispensible to the business, because they’re not worth the cost.
The first step to fixing this is recognising when you’re a low-impact team.

Chapter 2 “Putting impact first”:

Teams want to be successful, but you need to understand what success means to the organisation. Growth? Revenue? Specific targets? Without this understanding, it’s easy to do work that succeeds by the wrong metric, and doesn’t help the organisation.
If you want to be “user first” and dislike the idea of focusing on commercial aspects, think of it as putting the customer commercial relationship first. If the business isn’t sustainable, there won’t be any customers soon!

Chapter 3 “Defining impact for your team”:

Team goals should be aligned with the organisation, but it’s easy to get out of sync.
There are often multiple layers of abstraction which obfuscate the connection between team and organisation goals. Ideally, a team’s goals should only be one step removed from those of the organisation.
Vague or non-specific organisation goals are unhelpful, and can lead teams astray.

Chapter 4 “Impact in the middle”:

Lots of discussion of strategy focuses on the “middle” – process and procedure.
This often leads to asking the wrong questions (like the percentage of discovery vs focus areas), or breaking up goals to minimise inter-team dependencies – but then you choose the wrong goals.
Consider impact first, and embrace cross-team working to improve the overall product.

Chapter 5 “Estimating impact”:

It can often be difficult to get a precise number for impact, but it can be easier to look at the min/max impact on customers.
Easy wins often appear so because they don’t affect anybody; there are no cross-team dependencies because it’s a feature nobody is using or working on.

Chapter 6 “Adjusting for impact”:

What specific short-term effects should you see if you’re meeting your overall goal?
It can be difficult to think about org-level impact in your day-to-day work. Look for ways to connect output to impact.
Look for small-scale indicators that you’re on target, or that you need to change course.
Build big changes into your plan, so you’re ready and it’s an expected part of the process. Otherwise, it’s tempting to resist change because it’s not in your existing plan.

Case studies:

Developing a COVID-19 tracking app for the NHS. They did open prioritisation around a single goal: reduce the transmissibility (r0) of the virus. All decisions were measured against this benchmark, which made it harder for bad ideas to ride on the coattails of somebody important.
Airport lounges. There were many competing metrics, so it was often “survival of the loudest”. Improvement came from identifying a single aligned goal (“optimise the number of lounge visits”).
B2B company wants to reduce their support load. When they thought about impact, they realised a simple FAQ would do better than their previously imagined “learning centre”.
Challenger bank that made individual product teams responsible for P+L. One team look at why people were abandoning premium accounts, which was a cross-functional effort that had more impact than just reducing the cost of creating a premium account.
A dating app with an ambitious 4× revenue target. They set intermediate goals and understood the levers they could pull, so they weren’t surprised at the last minute.