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

“Think about it, like what are you know? So there's the rigorous process driven approach, then there's the company that's all about the ad hoc work together, collaborative approach. What's another way that some companies make really good decisions all the time? What comes to mind is a”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so those are like the basics, but still none of that's all that interesting, right? You're like, oh, you're saying you need information to make decisions and it's kind of not very satisfying to do that, right? But then if you think about three companies, let's say think three, we could even play the game together, you know, I'll give you two. You could give me the third one, but like let's say company A buys into the whole idea of an extremely rigorous decision making process. It's very process driven. It's like you do this, you do that, we red team our decisions, we bring in people to like push back, we've got this particular thing. So maybe that's how they achieve it. Company B, maybe they're just all about this kind of mushy, diverse perspectives thing. There's not really, they're not very process driven, but they achieve really good decisions by making sure that there's these like serendipitous connections between people at the right time with the right set of duising. There are highly successful companies that achieve both of those particular things. I don't know, what am I missing? So Lenny, 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
“Now, that's like that high level thing that you, I say that to you, and you're probably like, well, no shit. That's what I would assume to do that. But if you think about like good decisions and stuff, like, what do you need for good decisions, right? You need information, pay stap, diverse perspectives. You need to be able to analyze the data. You probably need chops, some kind of chops in the domain to be able to do it. You usually need a goal in mind, like what are you optimizing for? It's very hard to make a decision just to make a decision, to be able to do 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
“Growing the system that way. And you know what? There's other companies with really successful people that are just badass, strong, dominant, you know, Like to spar, you know, I need people who can spar with me. So that's just one potential example there of like, okay, you meet enough teams and you see that there's many ways to achieve great leadership, even example. Another example would be, and then I'm going to start listing these things off, and then hopefully this makes more sense. You meet lots of great teams, and the better teams make high, better decisions faster.”
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 would just be like, well, I just know even Spencer and I had this thing. I put something on Twitter, and Spencer writes me. He's like, John, is this about amplitude? I'm like, no, man, it's like that Carly Simon song, Spencer. You probably think the song is about you. But it's not. It's just is. You know, it's just like those things. So either you have the very easy to identify anti-patterns or you have the high level principles, you know, like you must trust each other or you must do something like that. But the way that companies achieve those particular high performing things can be vastly, vastly, vastly different. So let's just start with that as a basic thing, which is one reason why it kind of makes me hard to answer the question. So, you know, a great example here is great product leadership. Like we need great product leaders, but you meet a muff product leaders and you see that like some people are like these humble, curious servant product leaders are not really talking a lot and they're just”
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 what he said is it's the reverse of that with product teams that actually the dysfunctional companies are all the same and then the happy companies, or like the higher performing companies can be very, very different. And so that's something that stuck with me because either you have easy to identify anti-patterns. And I'm going to admit like earlier in my career, maybe five or six years ago, I made like my content was about identifying things that people would be like, how did you know that was working in my 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
“First of all, they're top 1%. They're super, super productive. They can levitate like they can do. Yeah, they have no emotion. I'm just kidding to do this. Okay, this is my tack for answering the question. So, first of all, I have this friend, Josh Arnold, and he had this great principle that held true in my experience talking with teams. And he calls it the reverse anacrene inner principle. And so in Annacrine and at Tolstoy, it's basically like the dysfunctional families are all different and the happy families are the same.”
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 kind of messy, you know Love that. So in the spectrum of advice, like every post of mine will say mostly maybe it depends. So, we all have some opportunity to flex into the other direction.”
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 the difference. And back to this thing of complex problems. I think it's the difference between oversimplification and focusing. You can have like a really complex problem and you can oversimplify it and that's not great. But you can have a complex problem and be like, you know what, I need to hold some things constant. Not going to make any progress unless we hold some things constant to do that. So that's like to me the balance I'm playing all the time between like how many variables to hold constant to make sure that people can get some value out of it. I don't know about you, but like that's the tension I have. But you write really actionable stuff and so I really admire that too. I'm jealous.”
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 love the fact that people scan the market and say people want to know about prioritization. And so I'm going to tell the world about prioritization. Like I really like that. In fact, I admire. I'm jealous of people who can produce that kind of content realistically. And interestingly enough, probably in my doodling and posts, I've probably given frameworks to do that. I just don't think too much about it. I just kind of go on these things. So yeah, there's always this balance. And one way that I think about is to get anything done. We need to reduce the world a little bit.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do those things, so like I would say, I'm really, really triggered. People will say, but probably triggered by Jason. He said, why? Bring solutions, not just problems, you know, like that's my krypton. I like the system thinking stuff. I like all that. So, anyway, long story short there, wanted to help people like me. I like the complexity stuff. I like all these weird counterintuitive dynamics. And then I thought that there's a lot of representation for the very deterministic advice that people 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
“Their personal lives and on their teams just like load themselves up with work? Where do they optimizing about? You know, so that would be like one example of countering new stuff. The other stuff is like strategy stuff, you know. Every company has these three pillars, and it seems really smart for the CO to have this really clear three pillars, but then everyone walks away from the meeting and be like, I don't know what we're doing. That's like another example of a counterintuitive thing. So, you know, that was the second thing, the counterintuitive stuff. I love the complex stuff. And then frankly, I think the other thing is I just wanted to help. People who are weird like me.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next thing is that I'm a sucker for weird counterintuitive dynamics in companies. I don't know what it is. Like I absolutely love that. And so like, Maybe I give two examples one I'm obsessed with this idea of high work in progress from a human level and a team level like how even though we know that if you try to do less at once, you'll be more effective. Teams routinely just load themselves up with work. And so, like in the newsletter, I wanted to explore stuff like that, why when a bunch of people know rationally that you should not load yourself up with work, why to really, really smart, capable, intelligent, passionate 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
“I don't know in the US, we're pretty individualistic, so the advice probably lands with people really, really well. And then also it's really actionable. And so, okay, well, what would be my particular angle? So I thought about the angle about wanting to explore three things. I think the first one is this idea we do work in these complex adaptive systems. And so I really went deep in that particular area. So we work in environments, there's lots of things that are interdependent on each other. We don't work in closed systems. I mean, like if you're in the Bay Area, you're in this broader system called the Bay Area that's in this broader system called California, that's in this broader system called United States. You know, your team is like in a team of many, many teams in your company. The systems are nonlinear, so things, the bird flapping its wings in Brazil creates the tornado type of stuff. And so I wanted to make sure that we got dug into that particular stuff in the butamplumest stuff.”
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 the context free advice was obviously I noticed more and more that. People trying to put tools in play out of context sometimes had worse effects than them just not doing it at all to do that. So anyway, I kind of thought about it as a product, like, okay, what's my opportunity here? There's a lot of this great advice. It's very actionable.”
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 the product mindset stuff, which is a little bit like you have it or you don't, or you develop it or you don't. It's like very mysterious. So again, I'm going to go through these things and think about how they inspire me. Part of me was like, okay, there's a lot of that stuff, but maybe not as much stuff kind of unraveling the dynamics that happen behind those things. So the meritocracy stuff and the individualism stuff, you know, it's like basically the people rise to the top, they try the hardest, they work the hardest, the best in companies employ them. There's top tier companies, there's second tier companies. So there's this very like hierarchical view. And as I started to also dig in more into the stuff in amplitude, I was like, wait, there's something right and wrong about this at the same time. There's something true but not true at the same time.”
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 to kind of go through those, like, yeah, tools, skills, mindset, that makes sense, right? Who does not want tools to be better? In fact, you know, a lot of the podcasts I like, we get into that later, like, we're going to give you the tools and tactics that the best people do. So I really like that kind of stuff as well. The second part of that is like this idea of success be mostly about individual skills in chops. So, you know, this idea of like great leaders, high performing teams, 10x people, you know, kind of go on and on.”
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 the first was that to be successful, number one, maybe success is tools, skills, mindset. So that's kind of one group of particular things. The second that in terms of worldviews, we mentioned like international worldviews too, but there was a high percentage of product advice that was kind of grounded where you think it would be grounded. So it was grounded in this idea of a meritocracy, you know, like success is primarily about merit, very highly individualistic. And we don't realize that in the US until you do meetings with other teams, just how individualistic we can be when it comes to how we think about teams should be set up and stuff. And then I think the third thing I realized was that it was very often very context free. And I mean that actually in the nicest way, like it was optimized to make sure that someone, it could be actionable, that someone could take that away. And that's what I really like about the content that you put out there and I like about a lot of the guests on the podcast. They kind of lay it out in 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
“We all have our weird freak things to do these things. And so I, you know, sort of how what does it mean to embrace those things? So it was really timely, I thought that Jason put that out there. And so maybe I'll give like a little background about, you know, the newsletter and what I was looking for for that. And so I think that the first thing that I did was four years ago, I kind of scanned the product advice landscape. And I notice three things. First, there's sort of three perspectives that pervaded. And again, I just want to make a huge caveat. This is not a judgment on any of these particular perspectives. It's more like I noticed a lot of 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
“I was reflecting that the newsletter, it's almost like an emo band. Like the beautiful mess is so angsty. It couldn't have been more. Like if I had a band, I did not have an emo band when I was 16. But if I did, I would have called it the beautiful mess. So it's probably pretty consistent with personality to do those things. I mean, I actually really appreciated Jason pointing that out. In fact, like at the end of this year, I put this post out to people saying, hey, here are things I'm grappling with, like the actionability of the content that I put out there, diversity of product advice is important to me. And then what it's like to just be a weirdo.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lucky me. I mean, Jesus, like Toast is this gem, like, I just was joking with Craig the other day. I was like, I did not know all that stuff was going on in toast.”
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 I think that what I realized over the course of these four years is that I wanted to pivot back to help put most of my energy into helping my own company. They're growing super fast. So the numbers are the hundreds of everything or in the thousands of everything. And they're not just the POS business. They've got these different businesses like guest services and back office stuff and things. So I kind of wanted Amplitude was a super horizontal if you think about it. It's almost like a diagonal. And so it made your head spin. And I kind of wanted to go back to vertical SAS. There's a company here in Santa Barbara called Appolio that I like working at. And I really like had a soft spot for vertical SAS. But I'm thinking put my energy into an internal team for a little bit to pivot back into that. And so I'll be helping enable product teams and sort of doing what I was doing, but within a company as well. So it's going to be an interesting shift.”
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 we're dealing with the ramifications of it. So it's kind of funny. I joke with someone at Amplitude. They're like, we were going through our own shit. And I'm like, yeah, and I've seen how 50 other companies are going to be phone shit where this is you're doing it. So the power of context, the regional differences were so fascinating. You know, you're on with, I was on with a team that was based in India and just the passion and curiosity. There was not one jaded person in the room. Like there was not one person been there, done that, you know. When's the performance review cycle ending or anything like that? It was just like all out passion and hunger for information. So those days were amazing. So yeah, you could talk a lot about it, but it definitely, it feels like a relief in some ways because the amount of tension to do it. And so for my next plan, actually what I'm doing is I'm going to work at Toast in a couple weeks. And I've been in touch with a leader there, Craig Daniel, for a long time, kind of really liked what he did at Drift.”
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 attention from teams, you know, you're meeting leaders who are about to leave five days later, you know, you're meeting people who are trying to save their team from Know the pandemic imploding everything they're doing. So there was, you know, yeah, I joke about the product therapy thing, but I would finish the day at two or three and then have to do another one, you know, wake up at five to do an EMEA workshop, five to seven, be two in workshop, then take a break, then do another two-hour workshop, and then talk to a leader about how everything was going to explode, and then another leader. And then I was still on a team in amplitude, so I might go to my own meeting where we're challenged, you know, working through our own challenges. And then it's like four or five in the afternoon. To be able to do that. And then I think it also left me with like a couple, you know, key lessons we could probably go into later when we're doing it, you know, one you were talking to a bunch of different companies achieving the almost similar results in like very, very different ways. They behave in different ways. The context in the pandemic or the economy, like you would see the pandemic kick in and then you would talk to 50 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
“One day you're with Intercom, then you're with a two person startup, and then you're with Figma. So really, once in a lifetime experience to be able to do that, in fact, if I've been a paid consultant, I never would have been able to do that. Another thing too is that there's this sort of selection bias. Like if you're a consultant, people come to you to work with you. But often I just had to talk to whatever team wanted access expertise and amplitude, not necessarily me. So I didn't get to dictate a lot of times the conversation. It's like, shit, I'm not doing a very good job here. Like this person thinks in a very different way to do that. So yeah, a lot of gratitude. I would say it got really heavy a lot. The sense that my son was born, three months later, I start the job, and then the pandemic kicks in. And every day.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh geez. Well, the immense amount of gratitude definitely mentioned that. Wonderful people, wonderful customers. And just imagine, like, if you're a product nerd, one day you're with Amazon, like one day you're with IKEA, one day you're with Lego.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bulk of research from working directly with customers around retention engagement. Then we had a PM and a great content writer, Archina, zero in and kind of like make it palatable. Then we did ARC for it. So it didn't just magically appear. People think that these artifacts that Amplitude has just magically appeared, but they were just, you know, it's a company filled with passionate experts of these things. And it was like tested, iterated, tested, iterated, expanded, tested, put into motion, put into practice. And that's how you create these kind of franchise cornerstone pieces of content for your company. You don't just snap your fingers one day. So anyway, I wanted to point that out. Huge group effort for all these 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
“People are like, we used, and I made a whole point of saying we did not invent this thing, but people will say we use amplitudes North Star Framework. And I have to always chime in like, no, we did not invent that thing. You should go to Sean or you should go to any of these people who've done it in the past. But yeah, the whole point is that a lot of this stuff was evolved over time. It wasn't just some snap marketing campaign to do it. Same thing are there retention playbooks and engagement playbooks like when I arrived at Amplitude, people would send pictures of those playbooks sitting on their desks. And people thought, oh, it's just this piece of marketing content. How do they pull it together? I did some research in our CS team developed 110-page”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heavy, like, and then, and then there was these just general conference talks and other things that we were doing. I tried to total, I exported all my Google Calendar invites. I tried to categorize all them at some point. But really also you have to think about it is that what we did with the North Star playbook, it was truly a team effort at Amplitude. Like we started to have our, I think it was Sandy who needed to like, we had three days to go in to close a customer and they were looking for us for trusted expertise. And she pulled together this workshop and she came up with these three games of product, which is a really tricky and cool way to describe like how your North Star inputs and North Star should be. And it started this ball rolling. And then they wrote a blog post about it. So if you search North Star, you get to sign your post. It's an amazing post. And then our CSM started to learn how to do it. And then we were like, we should write a playbook for it. And then it got to the point where if you go on LinkedIn, you know.”
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 think I did it recently. This might have been over the four years, maybe 800 one-on-ones. Individual leader one on ones. I'm thinking it was at the peak it was in one year's 150 workshops and that overlapped in the next year that between 200. But most of the average, maybe let's say 300 or 400 workshops, 100 a year.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leads, like, how are we going to work with them? So like it caused like, it was funny having to deal with it, but yeah, in general, this is a unique role. I would definitely consider SaaS companies think about a role like this, but it's really nuanced. We can share some links later as I reflected on what we did right and wrong. But ultimately, I think you shouldn't rely on individual people. You should think of evangelists as almost like concentric circles of your community and some people who just happen to have more expertise. Look, our internal team's amazing, like Ibrahim, Justin, and Abby. And when Sonya was at the company and just like everyone's an advocate, everyone's a potential evangelist. It's just that there's only so many hours in the day. So you could think of your community as just these concentric circles of evangelists and advocates. It's just like how you design it right that does it. So yeah, recommend it. It's a little tricky. But yeah, it was a cool move to do.”
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 know Gibb and other people, you know, they're charging like a good chunk for North Star workshops. And here we were just kind of doing them for free. So ultimately, maybe there was another strategy there, but that we did those generally for free. And sometimes I kind of stuck my foot in it, you know, in the middle of the pandemic at one point. We're like, well, what are we going to do? We can't travel for workshops. And I would put in my newsletter, hey, anyone want a workshop. And then suddenly, you know, our sales team, we'd had to grapple with like, what are we going to do with these 120?”
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, it's funny. I joke with our professional services team. I mean, so if you're a SaaS company, I think sometimes you have a professional services team. At Amplitude, especially the way that we saw that is like companies put money in and that sort of creates skin in the game, they're really paying you less for the professional services and more for the accountability and the access to the expertise. So I would joke with Jenna from that team that like maybe we should have monetized all these workshops.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up level the world with trusted expertise, and in a product like analytics product, there's the product analytics, but then there's whole other ways of working that overlap that. So, yeah, generally that was my role. It's kind of a crazy role, sure.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of soak in whatever problem people were having for the day. And I did meet, you know, with hundreds and hundreds of people and did workshops for thousands and thousands of people and talks for more than that, tens of thousands really in terms of the talks. So it was just a crazy experience doing that. So the technical details is I predominantly reported into marketing and product marketing. And then I did a stint actually where I was on our product team as we're sort of getting our education efforts going. Ultimately, we moved that over to customer success and I went back to marketing. So that's the technical side of it. I reported into marketing. But I do remember the day I arrived in probably a couple weeks later we had our all hands annual kickoff and there was a big presentation about our goal being the trusted expert. And that still resonates with me the whole time I was there that like an evangelist is there to help”
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 don't think that I super fit that role, but that was the title that we had. And basically my job was to wake up every morning and do things that would overlap amplitude the product, but then help uplevel our customers, sort of uplevel the broader product community. I call them like current customers and future customers. That's how I woke up every day, that like I'm either talking to a current customer, I'm talking to a future customer. this product transformation is happening all around the world just means it's a matter of time. Eventually they'll become amplitude customers so I should just try to make them awesome and try to help them with different expertise. But my day-to-day was spent a lot advocating for different ways of working, doing coaching, doing workshops. I wrote the North Star playbook in partnership with Jason who was a co-writer 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
“Yeah, absolutely. So first off, you know, I. I remember almost specifically the day that Sandy from Amplitude reached out and was sort of floated this idea of this role to me. And I'm so grateful for Sandy and Justin, Matt Althuser, Spencer, you know, the whole team, because it was really kind of a weird role from the beginning. They were starting to get more and more customers who were not traditional startups or kind of growth stage startups showing up. They needed to figure out how to convey expertise and convey things to the broader product public in a way that would land with those companies, right? And so, you know, as I kind of, I guess, you know, kudos to them for thinking this weird idea could work. So I'm really, really grateful for that. But yeah, my official title was Product of Managelist.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, yeah, I'm ready. This is exciting. I'm on vacation now between jobs. So this is the highlight of my day. We go all day if 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
“No, but that would be really funny. In fact, the person yesterday who reached out over Twitter said, like, dude, I don't know what you're doing now in your career, but I really like your earlier work. But that would have been pretty cool to be John Culler, the DJ. I wrote songs and played rock music and stuff, not like a house DJ.”
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, John Cuttlefish, there is this, I learned yesterday there's a DJ, a famous DJ called John Cuttler without the H. So I don't know if people are into house music to do that. Yeah, I think usually it just, like most Johns, it like forms into Cutler or JC or something like that. But just John is good, yeah, for now. Or cuttlefish, you could just call him cuttlefish. That'd be fine.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? Really? 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, you can nudge yourself a little bit away from your happy place, 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, 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 I think it starts with self-awareness. And then that's how people form their authentic leadership. And then they flex a little bit, and then they embrace other perspectives.”
2023-01-15 · Lenny's Podcast · What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source