YouSaid · the spoken record

John Cutler

lines on the record: 141
first: 2023-01-15
most recent: 2023-01-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's pretty amazing. And I was thinking to myself the joke as I saw you put this thing about Andrew Huberman about who gives these sort of like life hacks thing. It's like, there is absolutely a place for this type of content. Like, I just want someone to summarize what the hell I should do when I wake up in the morning. Can I be healthier?”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think kind of going back to the reps thing, I think that there's this fire hose of amazing information that's out there. And I contributed to it and you contribute to it. And there's just, I mean, think like what a time to be alive. Like you can literally just get these podcasts going. You can listen to anyone you want.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like that. And I'm going to list maybe I'll follow up with a couple more lists of people. Who can do that? And then I do think there's the people like Teresa Torres and others that have come up with a technique that is universal. Like you can teach an element of product thinking. With her techniques or this opportunity solution tree, or this continuous discovery thing that like. Everyone can find accessible no matter how where your company is at. And I have a lot of respect for those types of techniques because they're more universal versus like some very arcane niche activity.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you an example of one guy, and his name is John Smart, and he wrote this book called Better Singer, Safer, Happier. And he, I think he was at Barclays bank. I think that's how you say it, in England. And what he led this transformation, and then I think he's gone on to as a consultancy now for doing things. And the guy is just awesome to talk to. He's really, really humble about what the thing the book is really interesting. And the thing that I noticed when talking to John is like the order of magnitude of complexity of problems that he has unraveled and what he had to put in motion to take like an old school bank and at least try to get some part of some kind of transformation working in that particular company. I think there's a whole realm of people.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a couple people, but I feel like I should go back and like just generate this full list for people. Maybe it would be interesting. Maybe I'll take that as an action item to like. A couple of these people.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's like they do refrigeration, use AI to refrigerate industrial facilities. And Carrie, who's the leader there at that company is like one of the best leaders I know. And Jesse, who's like one of the Founders is a Harvard PhD student who understands AI in doing these things. And I actually would encourage a lot of PMs to think about, like, look, especially in this economy, what are these unsexy businesses that... Are like kicking butt and small here, it's in sunny Santa Barbara. So, I don't know. I think that there's a lot more diversity than just the high performing, low performing spectrum. There's just a whole universe of fun companies out there.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies. They're printing money. And they're just like embracing this particular thing. Then compare that to like, I did a big North Star session or more of a coaching session at New Bank in Brazil when there was just 15 people in a room. And now they're massive. So I think that we tend to paint, there's like the, we tend to paint things as a form of like modern product adoption. There's like the high performing companies and the low performing companies. When in fact there's just a whole plethora and diversity of different companies riding different waves, adopting different things at different times and many of them doing really wholesome, humble, good work just dealing with their circumstances at the particular time. So I think everyone should absolutely know how Figma works, for example. And then we need to try to boost the stories of like Angela and her team or, you know, some of these companies that you'd never even expect. There's a company here in Santa Barbara.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's literally one of the biggest B2B companies in the world. And you know what? Anna Hazar Bush, it's like, what? We're going to distribute beer because it's pandemic. And so we're going to have, and I think actually they started to become more even used for logistics. Like you're a bodega in one of those countries. You can order beer for doing it. So I think that we tend to kind of paint this world of like, there's the big smoke companies and then there's like the fast nimble companies, but there's everything in between. Another example is like a lot of tech companies started 2000 to 2008, kind of are on their third or fourth act at the moment, like second or third or fourth act. Bought a lot of companies. They're trying to absorb them. They might be trying like a product-led growth motion by spanning all the different acquisitions they had. You know what? They are on top of their game. This is not like a slouch company, but it's really hard for them to do that. Or at amplitude, we'd have a lot of not old fintech, but not newest fintech.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I do think that there's opportunities. I think there's another thing, too, that there's a vast spectrum of companies. Like we paint some of these large enterprises on one end of the spectrum and then these other product companies. But I brought up that plumbing company in Australia. Like, you meet these companies. You know what their revenue is literally like 50 startups. They are not doing bad. They are not doing bad. And you know what? They're actually doing interesting things. One of Amplitude's customers, Anheuser-Busch, has this thing called bees. And bees is basically like a liquor distribution app.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But maybe it can. And I talk about this a lot, this sort of I do believe there's sort of this fundamental attribution bias at play Where people in these high performing don't acknowledge the amount that luck and inertia has been a part of what they're doing, and that the people in the big companies, or these not, these companies that believe that's not the way that they can do that actually overestimate the kind of like systemic drag in their organization and underestimate what can be possible. And you think about that. We do that a lot in just our lives in general. You know, we see someone being really successful and we'll say, well, but my situation is this. And when things are working for us, we're like, I'm a genius, you know, like I'm a genius for doing this particular thing. When things work, we're competent. When things don't, it's like the system and everyone else is incompetent to be able to do it.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a thing that a lot of the big rideshare and food delivery conglomerates are figuring out. They're like, oh. This is a lot harder than we thought. Like when you're dealing with moving people around and logistics and things like. An order of magnitude more complex to do that. So I don't know if that helps kind of explain my perspective on that, but I think that it's like you have to adapt the advice and you also need to acknowledge that for some of these companies, there are these sort of just structural areas of inertia that they're trying to work through and that a lot of them maybe need to adapt this advice on the small instead of thinking they're just going to like install all the frameworks or install everything they're doing.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But part of the thing is that those companies will reinvent the things they're using when things aren't working out. So I think that like that, that's another thing maybe some of those companies could benefit from doing. We're getting kind of more into the kind of digital transformation or the big company space. But I think back to that particular question, I think you need to view a lot of advice coming from Silicon Valley just contextually. It's startup. There's a tradition of how these companies work. Many of them are just optimized very much for that first big arc of growth. They've never really been disrupted. Like the only disruption has come from scale, not from being like a legacy, you know, a huge global brand or huge global business and then being disrupted by new things. Like the only problems, not the only, because it's really hard, but the problems have been primarily scaling. So they're kind of optimized for wrapping their head around that. And then many of them are just pure digital product companies.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that the other thing that comes up with that is that Most of those companies need to think of frameworks appropriately. Like they'll read about these particular frameworks or what particular companies do or don't do. And I think that for a lot of those companies, they see adopting the frameworks. The end goal, you know, they kind of look there, you know, and sometimes like maybe even you write a post is like, well, how does Figma work? And they're like, we use these frameworks. And so this company's like, well, we've got to use these frameworks. And I think that the way that I tend to think about frameworks is that they're more like a job aide. They're more like a learning tool that the team kind of uses to keep themselves on track.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean Shipping and learning, like going through the full loop, you know, can they go through the full loop of what they're doing?”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One like reps matter in those particular situations. So in many of those companies, they should focus on creating these sort of areas or pods where a company, a team can get in the reps, that they're trying to be able to do. So it's sort of like a little miniature version of that. And there's a whole problem with innovation labs. There's a whole problem with that kind of idea. But the idea that you can create these little bastions where a team can get in the reps.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Industrial complex that they're sort of trying to transform into doing these things. So, anyway, my point is that they, so many of these companies just have structural things that make it very difficult to just immediately convert that particular advice as they're doing that. So I think The first thing that comes to mind with that is how to adapt that advice maybe for some of those larger kind of transforming companies. And I think that a couple things that I sort of remark on is that”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of the game to do that. So, you know, like they'll be in situations where maybe none of the executives have shipped product before. They also assume that there's only one way to do things. Like certainly in a lot of high-performing companies, I have friends who go and work at those companies are like, oh, no, no one changes the rules here. We just do it this way at Amazon or we just do it whatever. So this similar thing happens in these particular companies. Like there's only one way to do things. They've got these like crazy annual budgeting cycles and planning cycles or maybe there's like a big IT.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So putting myself in the shoes of those particular companies, like I said, I think some of my most rewarding interactions have been with these. Non Silicon Valley companies. I certainly learn a lot when I talk to companies in the Bay Area and in the United States to do those particular things. I think that the first The first thing to keep in mind is that those let's just take these like Bigger companies for a second, like big enterprise companies, part of the thing is just realizing how much inertia they're up against when you're chatting them. So, you know, I do believe that there's some structural things that probably they could avoid, but then there's also just structural things that are just. Part of”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then some countries tend to that being like it's still a tall company, but it's very much like you, manager, you own this. Like you do this. So it's not like rules are flowing from the top down. It's more just like a pretty big board chart. So those are some of the things that come to mind as we're going through it.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's like highly individualistic, and it might work in that particular environment. In fact, it might be optimized for environments where you're burning through people every like 18 months or 24 months or because you just want to put another cog into the particular machine so that you can grow and so you can do stuff. And that's an extreme example, but then you compare that to other parts of the world. It's like much more consensus driven. The team perceives itself as a team, having a team goal. They have like a team objective. And certainly even in the Bay Area, there's companies that are more like the collectivist vibe and more. So to say that it's just about the world is not really just right. So I think that, yeah, the collectivist individualistic thing is important. I do think that certain cultures are much more sort of hierarchically oriented. There's much more deference to the hierarchy in the particular where people are sitting and the information flows in a certain way. And some companies tend to that being more bureaucratic.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you'll find this situation where you've got this one engineering manager and they are like brokering the projects with every single engineer on their team and everyone wants the promotion and there's this whole Instead of the PM like working with the team, it's like the PM brokering stuff with an engineering manager to give everyone their premier project. No one's really working together. There's no pair programming. There's nothing like that. That's a whole other debate, but like,”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and again, I'm not an expert in this, and I think Aaron Meyer wrote that, or Meyer, I'm not sure how to pronounce her name, wrote that book, The Culture Map. And so you should just find what those people wrote because they're much smarter than I am about this. But here's like the individual things that I notice is definitely like the individualist and what I would call most like communitarian vibe, you know, the idea of like individualism versus the idea of the team being sort of a community of people together. So that's one and you pick up about that a lot when you go to different places. I mean, in the United States.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of these larger companies might take a decade to really work themselves through. And so I don't know. When you ask that question, I thought more about individual moments where I spent time with teams or like that team I mentioned to you in India where it's like everyone's super humble and whatever so. I'm not going to give a lot of names, but just shout out Angela. She's doing an awesome job.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This business is like transforming. They've got one of the biggest, most iconic brands in the whole world at their hands, you know, and I'm like sitting and I'm just going to single out her. Like, yeah, there's a situation here. It's not easy. It's not great. It's not like high performing by any, you know, like, you know, you take a tiny Silicon Valley company. Like, yeah, it's hard to be at Lego with thousands of people trying to build this and trying to take an iconic brand and turn it into something having to do with digital stuff. But I just want to give a shout out to her. That's the question. I think a bit more of these moments where I'm like, wow, this shit's hard. It's not ideal. And that people are coming to work every day and there's a group of people in this room who are extremely well-meaning. And you know what? The impact of their work might not even be seen in their tenure at that company.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I will get, I know, I will mention some companies. But I'm not going to mention what people think in doing this. I'm just going to mention moments where I was like, this thing is really clicking. And not because it wasn't easy or like there is a leader at Lego. Her name is Angela. When I'm talking to her, I'm just like this person just has it dialed in. You know, like this is really hard.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not saying much, saying that you believe in ownership without the addition of what we would do successfully in Spencer and other people to successfully is talk about the behaviors that represented that level of ownership, then that tells you something about what the culture is. So maybe when I was answering that, I kind of took that for granted. But yeah, there's a set of beliefs and values that sit underneath all those things, I bet.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like this idea of ownership and a growth mindset to do these things. Ownership defined in an individualistic culture is going to look very, very different than ownership defined in a collectivist culture. So what I find with companies is that like, and certainly we struggled to communicate this too, and I think we were pretty good at communicating where we sat on this particular thing. But like a lot of times people write up these cultural documents and they're just like, well, this is our culture. We're into ownership”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's kind of the fabric that creates those other things. You know, it's the fabric that creates coherence, like coherent around what if culture is what we're doing, is what we're acting. And the way we act is sort of a function of some of the belief systems and the culture and the value systems that we have, I sort of, maybe I just almost take it for granted that that's like sitting underneath those particular things. But here's an example where sometimes, you know, nuances matter. I'll just use amplitude. We had some values and we had hog, you know, humility.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are great. There are people that have an outsized effect in particular companies. A great example there is people forget that, for example, leaders or CEOs also have a lot of formal structural power at their disposal to be able to change things. And so, you know, like, well, there's that great man leader or his genius. They do have more knobs to move. And even then, they're not the boss. You know what? There's a board. There's investors. Like if you talk to any CEO, they'll be like, you think I am. I've got people bossing me around too. So it's kind of, yeah, it's always a mix. That's the way I see it.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really. And not just what do I believe in that you think the whole rest of the world, like not like I think the rules of the world are that blank happens. It's like, what do you believe in and what do the people around you believe in? And how can you be a coherent leader? And you know what? You can't nudge yourself a little bit away from your happy plate, but you're not going to go super far. You're not going to go from like a process-driven, meritocratic XYZ person all the way to like, I'm going to start a collectivist company where everything is sort of a consensus decision to do that. You're not going to do that. But like, I think it starts with self-awareness and then that's like, that's how people form their authentic leadership.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's sort of a thing. You know, like a lot of people base history on doing that. And I think that, again, just the other perspective here is that things are a lot messier. And you can't just trace everything to these sort of like single heroes men in many cases that make it happen. So I'm just presenting both sides of it as we kind of dig into it. I think though, let's say you're a founder and you're trying to decide should I invest more on processes or should I invest more in people? The first thing is introspection. What do you believe in”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And set the in motion, the couple of strategic imperatives that we're going to let the things going. Now imagine Microsoft didn't have all the wealth of talent that it had or all the wealth of structures or like the good parts of the tradition. Or let's say the bad parts served them well for a long time, but maybe they started to become a little bit outdated and then they were putting them in a competitively bad situation. It's even that situation you can like idolize that particular leader for doing it, but there's many things that could happen to be able to do that. And so there's this idea of like great man theory. And this is something I talk about a lot where in great man theory, you know, success is the result of these highly influential, highly effective men in a lot of cases. And you can explain history through these heroic men.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the latter, and I think that's why I called the damn thing the beautiful mess. I think that everyone, we all have confirmation bias, we'll point to that company and say, I mean, just use an example. Satin Adella and Microsoft, you could argue, you know, you've obviously have someone who's this very humble, very capable leader in that particular thing. But I imagine that at some point in the future there'll be books written about that. And they'll say, hey, it was kind of that, but you know what he did? He's basically like, he got rid of some bad people and created the air cover.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and give it a shot, and then can you create a coherent environment where maybe that could happen? And frankly, maybe getting this later, there's a lot of companies that were flying high and are not flying high anymore. So high performance is not this state you achieve. It's actually a continuum that you're always, we have this in our personal lives too. We're flying high and we think we do everything and then we get to that point and then we go back down into feeling we don't know anything again. And we feel those lows. So that's kind of how I think about that particular thing.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This sort of like humanist bent to what I'm doing, and so I very much want to believe like. I'm always the person that's like, oh, we should give them the seventh chance. I know myself, right? To do that. And I would suggest that there's people on the other end of the spectrum who could benefit from shifting a little bit to embrace some other ideas too. So they're the people who are like, well, it's 100% their skill. We will hire complete A plus players all a particular time. Everything will work out as expected and or they trace everything back to leadership anyway. So when anything's wrong, they're like, well, this happened under this person's watch. Therefore, they are a failure. But how many SaaS will hire a string of highly qualified people into particular department and then fail each particular time? So I don't know. I don't have the answer for you on that one, but I think that everyone can benefit from like challenging their...”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a lot of companies that are known to be higher performing, they were one of two categories either everyone in the company is this extremely vetted like genius at what they're doing, or they have a culture where people stay for three, four, five, six years. They build their career or seven, eight, nine years. There is a concentration of people who are very skilled, but they have a knack for bringing people up. Like they have a knack for taking someone who has some of the raw materials to be able to do it and making them really good at their job. to be able to do it. So I don't, I'm not going to throw out a percentage point into it. I'm just going to note that I think that the biggest challenges that we all need to challenge our biases. I do too. So four or five years ago, I would have said, well, personal skills, nothing. It's all the environment. There's people on Twitter who do this all the time. They're like, bad management kills everything. You know, skills aren't important. You should just be able to do anything with anyone. And I used to be one of those particular people. And I also have...”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, who had passion for doing something? Now, they made a lot of mistakes. Now, granted, people would say, now after three failures, I'm going to tell you what we need to do to succeed. So maybe they have to like fail a couple times to do that. So with the right things in motion, you can do that. I would also, let's, another data point.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pie chart. That's the problem. I mean, that is the like the trillion dollar question. So I don't really have any answers. I have a couple thoughts on it. What do we know? We know that you can have a bunch of geniuses in the room and if there's not coherent leadership and there's not coherent structure in what you're doing, they'll fail. Okay, so we know there's a limit on one side of this particular problem, right? And we know on the other side of the problem is if no one's done this before, who knows? Because how many startups were started by people who hadn't done it before”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting close to customers, just being in service to the customers, not just like gold plating every technical decision you did. They bought in early to the ideas of like test-driven development, pair programming because they believe that the quality, you know, you should never be worried about the quality. They just believe that quality wasn't something you sacrifice as the norm. It's just got to work. And they believe that was possible. And when you think about it, those things are always debated like oh, should we get technical debt or not? Or like, how much customer contact is not? And like, these two founders basically are like. That's it. We don't sacrifice on those things. And they've done really well with that.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just calling it barragers. Yeah, that stumbler. You know, I'll use the example of a company, I mentioned this company Appfolio here in Santa Barbara, but. Haus and John founded that company. It's just a gem of a company. It's an amazing vertical B2B SaaS company. But I think, you know, in the story that they tell is like, When they started at Polio, they're like, we want to find a place where the money flows and we want to be really close to customers and we just want to, where they believed in customer, they were engineers who had seen the light around customer development”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And isn't that kind of like these things that seem so common sense are actually hard with what they're doing? So I don't know if you've noticed that, but it's like a lot of the advices common sense. That doesn't mean it's easy to put motion.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They know how to build software, things don't break, they can experiment without risks. I don't know, they have positive habits. I could go on and on. Hopefully, this is a helpful just hearing my thought process to go through these things. But I think that the TLDR of this whole thing is. Top ones I mentioned seem like common sense and it's like how do you put it in motion in your company? I was just reading that like working backwards book about Amazon and they're in this chapter about basically their bar raisers thing and I share it with my partner who's the head of HR at a company She's like yeah this is sort of like common sense hiring They're just talking about debiasing the hiring and having standards and having those LinkedIn to the jobs and just not rushing it”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not very, very coherent to do these particular things. So, you know, I think that that's one, like the coherent things. And so, okay, so you've got those high-level ones. I think you can definitely add skills and experiencing those definitely matter. I think one thing that happens a lot is how the company views its skills. So here's like a challenge we had in Amplitude, just sharing this is like you could view amplitude as just another B2B SaaS company or maybe just an analytics company. But one of the challenges we had when it was like how to build our team is to think about where do you draw the line between someone who's just done B2B SaaS for the last 10 years as a pro at what they're doing and then how someone could embrace this kind of weird problem, this sort of bottom-up motion, top-down motion, it's in product, it's a messy space. You need to be more strategic to do that. So the skills need to be like mediated, obviously, between like the environment to do those things. And then like all the”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so when you think about it that way, it makes more sense like the company that's like, oh, well, we want to empower our teams and do whatever. And we believe in our customers and their actions don't match those particular things.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just not. And I just noticed that pattern over and over that there was just a slightly irrational belief in the power of what it would take to have like, you know, a nine craft level product versus a seven craft level product or six craft level product. So I think that that's like another component. I have a couple more in-depth like that. Like definitely the leadership is coherent. So that's like, you know, walking the walk, talking the talk. And I think this is one of the most fascinating ones because It's very much about. Being who you are and not being embarrassed about that thing. So there are companies probably all know that outspoken domineering Believe that the company just should be run a certain way. And they set this vibe, this kind of this coherent, their actions and words match.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Success of today was set in motion three years ago that product is a layer cake And that you are layering on decisions like the success you're having now is like a layer cake of decisions from the last bunch of years that you're doing it. You could rationalize that all you want, but at the end of the day, it's often because either the founders or other people involved have seen how that can work because there is a leap of faith. And there's a leap of faith that no amount of data or no amount of A-B testing or no amount of rationalizing or no amount of spreadsheet math to figure out the ROI of what you're doing will ever help you.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is there is this balance of believing in certain things, believing maybe in the power of products or the power of connecting with customers or maybe key strategic things that they need to do or even believing that this is a done deal and you just need to move faster than everyone else in the space or even the belief that you need to just go straight to commodity pricing like Amazon with whatever you're doing. There is just a stubborn, strongly held belief that is then balanced where their ability to have the loosely health thing. So I would have just observed this in meeting after meeting with these like teams that seem to be having a bout of being more high performing, you know, they would be stubborn about some things that they were doing even when it didn't make sense in the short term, right? And then they would do that. So I think that that's like another thing. I think related to that when it comes to the product world is just like a core belief in the power of products. The Jeff Bezos thing that like.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're just struggling with a strategy structure mismatch, and no amount of let's empower people or no amount of doing whatever is going to knock them out of that. And so what do you need? You need a strategy, then you need to align the structure around it. So this is different than saying you're asking me, like, what do I observe when they're doing really well? Now, the tactics to achieve this might be different depending on the company, but you could get that. I think the second thing, if I admit it, is like the strong opinions loosely held.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is like a structural thing. I think when there's startups, things are very fluid in the strategies and flux. And so they have a fluid structure, but then as companies grow, there's sort of a physics to the problem that starts to catch up to them to particular things. So their funding approach, their incentives, the org structure, the architecture, even their technical architecture supports their strategy back and forth. And the reason why I mentioned this one is you can have brilliant teams. You meet these brilliant teams where they've just hired in the quote unquote best of the best.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And so this is the thing I'm sitting there and the very idealistic product managers are like, you got to have empowered teams. You got to push decision-making down to the bottom. And I'm like, huh, well, that company is doing pretty well. And the CEO just tells everyone what to do. And in fact, they attracted people who just don't mind that and like their vision, but do it, right? And you find people who really like the process-driven approach and you find people who do those things. So like that's like one principle done a different way. But then I'll just take like a couple principles. So I just wanted to get that out of the way that like every one of these I mentioned could be achieved in a couple different ways. So the first thing you notice are the companies that are very high performing have coherence between the structure of their company and their current strategy.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source