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 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 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 Vibe and then they Flex a little bit and then they Embrace other perspectives welcome to Lenny's podcast I'm Lenny and
my goal here is to help you get better the craft of building and growing products and every world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experience as building and scaling today's most successful companies today my guest is John Cutler John is one of the most prolific beloved and long time writers and shares of product wisdom online and as you'll hear at the start of this episode thanks to
his really unique role at amplitude he's worked with a large percentage of product teams and product managers around the world I've learned a lot from John's writings over the years and share his stuff often and so it was a real honor to chat in depth with John I anticipated this would happen and it happened this ended up being the longest episode I've done yet and honestly we could have kept going for a lot longer
we chat about what differentiates the highest performing product teams from less well-performing product teams what it takes to create real change within a company why you should be skeptical of Frameworks and tools that you read about online why all underperforming teams fail in similar ways but High performing teams succeed in many different ways and so much more I am confident you will love this episode and I cannot wait for
you to hear it with that I bring you John Cutler after a short word from our wonderful sponsors this episode is brought to you by merge every product manager knows the pain of slowing product velocity when developers struggle to build and maintain Integrations with other platforms merges unified API can remove this blocker from your roadmap with one API your team can add over 150 HR ATS accounting ticketing and CRM Integrations right into your
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by device by country and by user stage EPO does all that and more delivering results quickly avoiding annoying prolonged analytic cycles and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discovered epileptico Beyond basic click-through metrics and instead you turn Northstar metrics like activation retention subscriptions and payments nfo supports tests on the front end the back end email marketing and
even machine learning clients check out EPO at getepo.com get eppo.com and 10x your experiment velocity John Cutler welcome to the podcast yeah thanks for having me Lenny I kind of know you as John Cutler I feel weird to call you just John do you find that to be true and also do people call you John cuttlefish because your Twitter handle yeah John cuttlefish there is this I learned yesterday there's a DJ uh famous
DJ called John Cutler without the H so I don't know if people are into house music how to do that yeah I think usually it's just like most John's like forms into like Cutler or JC or something like that so but just John is
good yeah for now or cuttlefish you could just call him cuttlefish that'd be fine you said they actually we were talking before this you said you do some music so um is that DJ actually you 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 like your earlier work but that would have been pretty cool to be John Cutler the DJ I wrote songs and you know played you know rock music and stuff not not like a house DJ so okay this could be the next phase of your career which we'll talk a bit about let me just say that I'm so incredibly
excited for this conversation I've been hoping to do this for a long time and now that you're between gigs we finally found an opportunity to do this and I just have a feeling this is going to be one of the longest episodes we've done because there's so much I want to ask you and there's so much interesting stuff that you've had access to and that I think that you can share so I hope you're ready for potentially a marathon
of an episode sure yeah I'm ready this is exciting I'm on vacation now between jobs so like this is this is the highlight of my day we go all day if you want all right eight hours let's do it so I was thinking that we start with a
little bit about this unique role that you had at amplitude which you just left after about four years and what's most interesting about it is they give you access to an incredible number of product teams and product managers
unlike anything else I've seen or any other role I've seen before so could you just talk a little bit about this role that you had at amplitude and what it was like to work with so many product teams and so many product managers yeah absolutely so first off you know I I remember almost specifically the day that Sandia from amplitude reached out and was sort of floated this idea of this role to me and I'm so grateful for
Sandia and Justin Matt alt Hauser Spencer you know the whole team because it was really it was really kind of a weird role from the beginning you know they were starting to get more and more customers who were not traditional startups or kind of growth you know stage startups showing up and 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 evangelist I don't think that I super fit that role but that was the 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 up level our customers sort of
uplevel the broader product community I 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 and you know the this product transformation is happening all around the world just means it's a matter of time like 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 uh in partnership with Jason who like was a co-writer with that we did a lot of one-to-one coaching sessions I I had these things called Product therapy sessions when I would just wake up in the morning and just kind of soak in whatever problem people
were having for the day and I 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 you know tens of thousands really in terms of the talks so it was just a yeah crazy experience doing that so it 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 uh going ultimately we moved that over to customer success and I went back to marketing so though that's the you know the the technical side of it I reported into marketing but I do remember you know the day I arrived in probably a couple weeks later we had our all hands you know annual kickoff and there was big presentation about our goal being The Trusted expert and that still resonates with me the
whole time I was there like an evangelist is there to help up level the world with trusted expertise and in 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 is a crazy role sure that is wild you're basically a like a free product coach for product team you just come in help them up level the way they build product
and then amplitude becomes like you know you need to figure out how to work with data amplitude can help you be more data informed I imagine that's kind of the general idea yeah it's funny I joke with our Professional Services team I mean so if you're a SAS 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 uh from that team that like maybe we should have monetized all these workshops you know like I know Gibb and other people you know they're charging like a good chunk for Northstar 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 What are we gonna 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 had to Grapple with like what are we gonna do these 120 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 SAS 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 is 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 Sanyo is 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's a was a cool move to do that sounds like a future post how to do this in a different way yeah where they don't have a John Cutler in place uh you said you worked with hundreds of teams maybe just give us some numbers roughly like how many companies have you worked with how many product managers do you think you've spoken to in this career oh geez this phase of your career so I
think I did it recently there's might have been over the four years maybe eight 500 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 then overlapped in the next year the McQueen 200 so but mostly the average maybe let's say three or four hundred workshops 100 a year it's heavy like and then and then there was these just general like conference talks and other things that we're doing
um I tried to Total I exported all my Google Calendar invites I tried to categorize all them at some point but um but 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 our I think it was Sandia who needed to like we had three days to go in to cause 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 you know inputs and Northstar should be and it started this ball rolling and then they wrote a blog post about it so if you search Northstar 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're like we should
write a playbook for it and then it got to the point where if you go on LinkedIn you know 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 Northstar 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 a 110 page bulk of research from working directly
with customers around retention and engagement then we had a PM and a great content writer archana 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 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 like Cornerstone pieces of content for your company you don't just snap your fingers one day you know so anyway I wanted to point that out huge group effort for all these things how does it feel to have left amplitude at this point imagine you're going through some roller coaster with motions oh geez um well the immense amount of gratitude
definitely mentioned that uh wonderful people wonderful customers and just imagine like if you're a product nerd you know one day you're with Amazon like one day you're with Ikea one day you're with Lego one day you're with intercom then you're with a two-person startup and then you're with like figma and so so really like 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 to expertise and amplitude not necessarily me so I didn't get to dictate a lot of times the conversation it's like 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 in the sense that my son was born three months later I start the job and then the pandemic kicks in and every day you're like absorbing just potential 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 you know the pandemic imploding everything they're doing so there was
you know you yeah I'm joke about the product therapy thing but it 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 emir 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's gonna 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 oh my God I'm done uh 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're talking to a bunch of different companies and 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 that were 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 and I'm like yeah and I've I've seen help 50 other companies are going people where this is you're doing it so the power of context the regional
differences were so fascinating you know you're you're on with I I was on with a team that was based in India and the just the passion and curiosity there was not one jaded person in the room like there was not one person like 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 talk a lot about it but it
definitely um 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 gonna work at toast I'm 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 but I think that what I realized over the course these four years is that I wanted to Pivot back to like help put
most of my energy into helping my own company they're growing super fast so the numbers are you know 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 like uh amplitude is a super horizontal if you think about 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 uh Santa Barbara called app folio that I liked 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 uh to Pivot back into that and so I'll be helping like 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
you touched on so many topics that I want to dig further into and you also talked about where you're heading next which I was going to ask so that's great thank you for covering all that by the way I was just gonna also say uh lucky toast wow to get John Cutler go them oh lucky me I mean jeez like toast business like gem like I just was joking with Craig the other day I was like I did not know all that stuff was going on his toes awesome okay
so before we dig into some of the stuff that you brought up like cultural differences between companies what the best teams are doing differently things like that I actually and you noticed I asked on Twitter what I should ask you you have a lot of fans on Twitter and there's a ton of questions and one actually got pretty spicy and I want to touch touch on it briefly there's a guy Jason Cohen pointed out that a lot of
the stuff you share online in your newsletter and tweets and things like that is it often doesn't have a clear recommendation of here's what you should do or concrete piece of advice you could take away it's kind of like messy which is appropriate because your newsletter is called the Beautiful Mess and so my question to you is why have you found that you like to embrace the mess in your writing and your thinking and your
advice I was reflecting that like the newsletter it's almost like an emo band um like the Beautiful Mess it's like so angsty it could have been more like if I had a man if I I did not have an emo man when I was 16 but if I did I would have called it the Beautiful Mess um so it's probably pretty consistent with personality 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 it's important to me and then what it's like to just be a weirdo like you know like we all have our like weird freak things you know 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 the first thing that I did was you know four years ago I kind of scanned the product advice landscape and I noticed you know three things first there are 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 and the first was that you know 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 World Views we mentioned like International World Views too but there was like a 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 uh 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 like the content that you put out there and I like about a lot of the guests on the podcast like they kind of lay it out in those particular things 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 and then the product mindset stuff which
is a little bit like you have it or you don't or you develop or you don't it's like very mysterious so again I'm going to go through these things and then 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 um 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 so that's something that I wanted to be
able to explore in doing it and then the context-free advice was obviously like 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 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 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 I thought okay well what would be my particular angle so I thought about the angle about wanted 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 Deep In States you know your team is like in a team of many many teams in your company the systems are non-linear so things you know the the bird flapping its wings in Brazil you know creates the tornado type of stuff
and so I wanted to make sure that we got like dug into that particular stuff in the beautiful messed up the next thing is that I'm a sucker for like weird counter-intuitive Dynamics in companies I don't know what it is like I
absolutely love that and so like maybe I give like two examples like one I'm obsessed with this idea of high work in progress like 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 the newsletter I wanted to explore stuff like that like why when a bunch of people know rationally that you should not load yourself up with work why do really really smart capable intelligent passionate people in their personal lives and on their teams just like load themselves with up with work what are they optimizing about
you know so that'd be like one example counter news so if the other stuff is like strategy stuff you know every company has these three pillars and it seems really smart for the CEO to have this like really clear three pillars but then everyone walks away from the meeting be like I don't know this that's like another example of a counter-intuitive thing so you know that was the second thing the counter-intuitive 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 do you think so like I would say like I'm really really triggered people will say it's probably triggered by Jason he said wow bring Solutions not just problems you know like that's my like Krypton I like the systems thinking stuff I like all that so anyway long story short there like wanted to help people like me
I like the complexity stuff I like all these weird counter-intuitive Dynamics and then I thought that like there's a lot of representation for the very deterministic advice that people have that's a really good explanation there's like a piece of like what does the market want and let me deliver it and then there's a piece of like how is my brain working yeah 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 like I probably in my doodling in post I probably given Frameworks to do that I just don't think too much about it I just kind of go into 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 you know that's the difference and 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 could 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
um I don't know about you but like that's the tension I have but you you write really actionable stuff and you know that so I really admire that too I'm jealous all right try it but then I'm jealous of always having to kind of
nail it down to something very concrete and simple this last post actually was a little bit of a balancing act I wrote about how virality is mostly a myth and I added the word mostly to it at the end and the kind of like as like should I just go for it and be like reality is fully a myth no it's not actually so I can't really get it it's kind of messy you know I love that so in in the spectrum of advice like every post of
mine will say mostly maybe and then like so we all have some opportunity to like Flex into the other direction okay so shifting a little bit coming back to just the bigger picture of John Cutler you've had more exposure I think to product teams and product managers more than like you're definitely in the top one percent of people that have talked to and met with and seen what happens within product teams and so there's a lot of
stuff I want to dig into there and the first is around what you've found differentiates the highest performing teams so let me just ask you kind of this very succinct question and see where it goes if you have to just like boil it down what have you seen most differentiates the highest performing product teams first of all they're they're top one percent they're super super productive they can levitate like they can do
um yeah they have no emotion I'm just kidding like to do no okay this is my attack 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 antichrine inner principle and so in inocrine and a Tolstoy is basically like the dysfunctional families are all different and the happy families are the same
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 be like how did you know that was working in my company and I would just be like well I just no 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 this song is about you but it's not like it's just 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 like 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 um to answer the question so you know a great example here is
great product leadership like we need great product leaders but you made enough product leaders and you see that like some people are like these humble curious servant product leaders they're not really talking a lot and they're just 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 they like to spar you know I need people who can spar with
me so that's just like one potential example there of like okay you meet enough teams and you see that there's a many ways to achieve great leadership even an example another example would be and then I'm going to start listing these things off and then hopefully this makes more sense yeah you meet lots of great teams and the better teams make high better decisions faster now that's like that high level thing
that you I say that to you and you're probably like well no that's what I would soon 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 okay so those are like the 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 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 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 jurors things there are highly successful companies that achieve both of those particular things I don't know what am I missing so Lenny you think about it it's like what are you know so there's the rigorous process driven approach then there's the company that's all about like 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 very top-down CEO driven here's what we're doing here's the roadmap absolutely and so this is the thing I'm sitting there and the the very idealistic product managers are like you got to have empowered teams you've 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 and 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 is the companies that are very high performing have coherence between the structure of their company and their current strategy and this is like a structural thing I think when there's startups things are very fluid and the strategies in 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 mention this one is you can have brilliant teams you meet these brilliant teams where they've just hired in like the quote unquote Best of the Best and they're just struggling with a
strategy structure mismatch and no amount of let's Empower people or no amount of doing whatever is gonna like knock them out of that and so what do you need you need a strategy then you need to line 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 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 or even believing that this is a done deal and you just need to move faster than every 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 like there is just a stubborn strongly held belief that is then balanced with their ability to have the Loosely helping so I would have just observe 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 that you know the the Jeff Bezos thing that like the success of today was set in motion three years ago that like 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 it's 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 a a nine craft level product versus a seven trap 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 like outspoken domineering believe that the company is just should be run a certain way and they set this Vibe it's kind of this coherent that they their actions and words match
together 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 and we believe in our customers and their actions don't match those particular things like 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
definitely add skills and experience I mean 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 SAS 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 on B2B SAS for the last 10 years is a pro at what they're doing and then how someone could Embrace this kind of weird problem 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 this thing and then like all the other you know they know how to build software things don't break they can
experiment without risks they don't 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 like I think that the the you know the tldr of this whole thing is those 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 um 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 linked into the jobs and just not rushing it and isn't that kind of like it's it's 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 advice is common sense that doesn't mean it's easy to get emotion and there's also a lot of power to just making it like a very important value to the company like just calling it yeah that's right stop learning it you know I'll use the example of a company I mentioned this company AppFolio here in Santa Barbara but Klaus and John founded that
company it's just a gem of a company it's an amazing vertical B2B SAS company but I think you know in the story that they tell us 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 they believed in customer they were engineers who had had seen the light around customer development just 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 believed 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 it's just gotta work and they believed 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 or not and like these two Founders basically are like that's it we don't sacrifice on those things and you you like they've done really well with that that's a threat I want to actually follow up on it's just the power of culture and values and things like that but before we do that let me just summarize maybe the top five attributes
some kind of traits you just shared and then I have a two-part question around this so I wrote These down so the things you've basically the things you've found are true for the companies that seem to be best at Building Product and software and running product teams one is coherence between what they're doing and what their strategy is two is strong opinions loosely held three is belief in the power of product
four is the leadership is coherent that their advice matches their words and their actions and then five is just like the necessary skills and experience in building stuff contextual skills too like um yeah exactly so it's kind of a two-part question one is if there's like a pie chart of what contributes to this working out what percentage would you say is just the people that they hire that contributes to them succeeding here and
then related questions just like can you change a team to be high performing like does that happen or is it often just like this is just the way they are in their culture and their boundaries are this way and it's really hard the pie
chart that's the problem I mean that is the like the trillion dollar question so I don't really have an answer I I have a couple thoughts on it um what do we know right 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 like if no one's done this before who knows because how many startups were started by people who hadn't done it before you know who had passion for doing something this is now they made a lot of
mistakes now granted people would say like all right 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 at a lot of companies that are known to be higher performing they're 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 like 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 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 this sort of like humanist Bend to what I'm doing and so I very much want to believe like I'm always the person's like oh we should give them the seventh chance like I'm no 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 you know so
they're the people who are like well it's 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 chase everything back to leadership anyway so when anything's wrong you're like well this happened under this person's watch therefore they are a failure you know but how many SAS come you know how many companies in general will hire a string
of Highly qualified people into a particular department and then fail each particular time right 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 uh they're maybe their their happy place me included I like that and do those things it's like it's an optimistic perspective basically anyone can change anyone can improve don't assume that it's just not possum
yeah and give it a shot and then can you create a coherent environment where maybe that could happen and frankly uh we may be getting this later there's a lot of companies that were flying high in or not flying high anymore so high performance is not this like stay 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 you know we feel those lows so that's kind of how I think about that particular thing this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate growth if your business stores any data in the cloud then you've likely been asked are you going to be asked about your sock 2 compliance sock 2 is a way to prove your
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v-a-n-t-a.com Lenny to learn more and to claim your discount get started today coming back to the first question about people and maybe you just answer this but do you find that like it's all about the people and who you hire and maybe at the top that lead to the result at the company or you're saying like it's sometimes the right amazing people sometimes it's the process sometimes it's the market it's other it's the
latter and I think that's that's why I called the damn thing the Beautiful Mess because I think that everyone we all have confirmation bias you know we'll point to that company and say I mean let's let me just use an example and Microsoft You could argue you know it's 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 like 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 and 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 they're 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 and this is something I talk about a lot where in great man
Theory you know success is the result of these like highly influential highly effective men in a lot of cases and that like you can explain history through these heroic men and that's sort of a thing you know like a lot of people Base history on doing that and I think that this again just the uh the other perspective here is that things are a lot Messier and you can't just Trace everything to these sort of like you know 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 so yeah I think that 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 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 you can nudge yourself a little bit away from your happy plate but you're not gonna go super far you're not going to go from like a process driven meritocratic XYZ person all the way to like uh I'm gonna 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 Vibe and then they Flex a little bit and then they Embrace other perspectives that's just my perspective on it that really resonates it makes me think about companies especially in the past couple years that did really well because the
market was pulling them and everything was just killing they're just growing like crazy and you would assume it's the founder the CEO that's the result of that but then when the market tanks things stop working and that's a really good I think example of just like it's not necessarily the person it could just be other factors that make it feel like everything's going great and people are great there are people that have an outsized effect in
particular companies a great example there is like 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 leaders 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 yeah which is why they're you know things don't go well their their asses online yeah exactly coming back to a thought I
had as you were talking earlier about values and culture it's interesting that wasn't on your list of just like the the power and importance of I don't know strong value strong culture have you found that that's just not essential and
what are your thoughts on no I think it's kind of the 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 amp amplitude we had some values and we had hog you know humility and it's like this idea of like ownership and a growth mindset to do 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 struggle 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 it's not saying much saying that you believe in ownership without the addition of like 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 when you think of the companies you work with over the years and you don't have to answer this if you don't want but when you think of
like the companies with the best culture or the best way or some of the best companies in terms of how they build product who who comes to mind I mean I I will get I know I will mention some companies like um but I'm not going to mention what people think like in doing these I'm just gonna mention moments where I was like this thing is really clicking yeah and not because it wasn't easy or like there there is a leader at Lego her name is Angela
and when I'm talking to her I'm just like this person just has it dialed in you know like this is really hard 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 and I'm just gonna single out her like yeah there's this situation here it's not easy it's not great it's not like high performing by any you know like uh you know you take a tiny Silicon
Valley company like yeah it's hard to be a 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 what I'm going to say to this question like I I think a bit more of these moments where I'm like wow this shit's hard um 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 these larger companies might take a decade to really like work themselves through and so I don't know I when you ask that question I thought more about like individual moments where I spent time with teams or like that team I mentioned
you in India where it's like everyone's super humble and whatever so awesome I'm not gonna give a lot of names but just shout out Angela she's doing an awesome job go Angela that reminds me of something I wanted to ask around the cultural differences between product teams in different countries you talked about NBA talked about Lego what have you found to be the main differences in how product teams operate and companies
operate across different countries like say California versus Paris versus Australia yeah and again I'm not an expert in this and I think Aaron Meyer wrote that or mayor I'm not sure how to pronounce her name wrote that book the culture map and so you should just like find what those people wrote because they're much smarter than I am about this but here's like the individual things that I noticed it's definitely
like the individualist and what I would call almost 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 but you know you'll find the 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 um you know 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 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 so 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 like the Bay Area there's companies that are more like the collectivist five and more so 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 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 you know where people are sitting and the information flows in a certain way and you know some companies tend to that being more bureaucratic 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 you know 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 yeah as we're going through it so yeah this this relates a lot to something else you often talk about that much of the advice on the internet and books newsletters like ours is geared towards Silicon Valley type Tech startups and in reality most VMS don't work at companies like that a lot of them are going through Transformations they're trying to transform the way their culture works and I imagine a lot of companies you
work with are trying to get to that point and they're just a lot of the advice doesn't actually work for them what have you found along those lines of just companies going through this and things you've learned there so putting myself in the shoes of those particular companies like I said I think some of my most like rewarding interactions have been with these like 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 well let's just take these like bigger companies for a second you know 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 like there's some structural things that probably they could avoid but then there's also just
structural things that are just part of the 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 like high performing companies my friends will go and work those companies they're like oh no no one changes the rules here we just do it this way at Amazon or we just do
it whatever so the 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 industrial complex that they're sort of trying to transform into doing these things so anyway my my point is is that they so many of these companies just have structural things that make it very difficult
you know 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 like larger kind of transforming companies and I think that the couple things that I sort of remark on is that 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 can 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 you know 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 meaning shipping shipping product shipping and learning like going through the full loop you know can they go
through the full loop of what they're doing 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 as the end goal you know they kind of look there you know and sometimes like
maybe even you write a post it's like well how does figma work and they're like we use these Frameworks into those companies 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 aid they're more like a learning tool that the team kind of uses to keep themselves on track 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'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 like 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 like 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 and so I think this is a thing that a lot of the big ride share 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 it's 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 like adapt this advice on the small instead of thinking they're just gonna like install all the Frameworks or install everything they're doing yeah
this is a really really good advice I imagine folks are listening that may be working at a company like that it feels like there's two sides to it one is there should just be an awareness of this may not work at us we're not going to be figma and let's just get used to that and then to this good like reflection for me that I'm probably causing some damage with people reading a post on like here's how fake my bills product
and then not adding a little bit of like maybe this won't work your company you know but maybe it can and I talk about this a lot this this sort of I do believe there's sort of this fundamental attribution bicep play where people in these high performings 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 given he's doing this particular thing when things work
we're competent when things don't it's like the system and everyone else is incompetence to be able to do it 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 like large Enterprises on one end of the spectrum and then these other companies you know these modern product companies but I brought up that like 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 and it's literally one of the biggest B2B companies in the world and you know what Anheuser-Busch it's
like what we're going to distribute beer because pandemic and so we're gonna have and I think actually they started to become more even used for Logistics like you could 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 you know
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 like 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 you know at amplitude we'd have a lot of like not old fintech but not newest fintech companies they're printing money you know 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 newbank in Brazil when there was just you know 15 people in a room and now like they're massive so there's I think that we tend to paint there's like the we tend to
paint things as a 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 like some of these companies that you'd never even expect there's a company here in Santa Barbara that's like they do Refrigeration use AI to refrigerate industrial facilities and Carrie who's the leader there that company is like one of the best leaders I know
and Jesse who's like one of the Founders is you know Harvard PhD student who understands that I am 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 you know so I don't know I think that there's a lot more diversity than just the like high performing low performing
Spectrum there's just a whole universe of fun companies out there well as you're talking I was thinking about there's a small group of people like you and Marty Kagan and a few other folks that have worked with tons of different and diverse product teams and not just say Silicon Valley teams and I'm curious if there's any other names of folks you think listeners should follow if they work at maybe a non-silicon valley type team like Marty
Kagan is who comes to mind first but I don't know if you have anyone else and if not that's all good yeah there's a couple people but I feel like I should go back and like just generate like this full list for people maybe it would be interesting maybe I'll take that as an action item to like yeah list a couple of these put in the show and I'll give you an example of like one one guy and his name is John smart and he wrote
this book called better singer say for happier and he I think he was at Barclays bank I think that's how you say it in England and you know what he like LED this transformation and then I think he's gone on to he has a consultancy now for
doing things and the guy is just awesome to talk to he's really really humble about what you know the thing the book like 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 Bang and at least try to get some part of some kind of transformation working in that particular company like I think there's a whole like Realm of people I like that and I'm gonna like list maybe I'll follow up with a couple more lists of like 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 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 um techniques because they're they're more Universal
versus like some very like Arcane Niche activity awesome cool and we'll do our best to include uh whatever full list you come up with in the show notes yeah so I've been asking a lot of very specific questions I want to give us a chance to kind of zoom out a little bit and see what other advice you may have for product managers and and the product Community broadly like it feels like you're in this kind of reflective phase
after working with all these companies and you tape time you have more time to think so I'm curious what comes to mind when you think of just like here's here's advice I have to share yeah I think um kind of going back to the Reps thing I think that there's this fire hose of amazing information that's out there and like I contribute it 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 keep listening yeah you know like that's that's like pretty amazing and 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 things 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 sunlight you know yeah I got my sunlight
I went for my my sunlight before screens to prepare for our talk today actually yeah that's great what happened to my habit tracker or something like before screenings like every day yeah I got my got my bike watch that I got a couple I'm on vacation I'm between jobs now so it's about like all Health yeah optimizing um but I think that you need to keep in mind that this like this is a skill and skill is knowledge times practice
mediated by your environment the habits you form and the motivation that you have into particular things and so I think that I learned about that a lot like working with learning experience designers and amplitude that like we tend to think that this is just a function of the knowledge that we pick up and the number of podcasts that we listen to but really it's about going through this Loop so at an amplitude we
have this data informed product Loop uh that we would teach and it's basically like you need a strategy you need to develop qualitative models you need to add measurement to those models like Northstar framework would be an
example of a qualitative model you need to add measurement to those models figure out how you're doing it you need to prioritize where to focus you need to design bets you need to measure the impact of those bets and then you need
to circulate what you learn back into the strategy back into your models back into your how you prioritize Etc and it helps you figure out where you're kind of weak at the moment so for example you need a strategy without that nothing is possible but you could have an amazing strategy and you don't deploy it with the right models no one can prioritize it we could do all that right but you don't design any bets and can't
ship anything oh that's kind of a problem we could do all that right and you don't know the impact of anything you ship well you can even do all that right and not circulate the learning back in your company and then you're still not going to succeed in anything so that's an example of what I mean by like the loop and so one thing you could think about for your career that I think people should focus
on and also in terms of sharing the content that they share so we're sharing a lot of content around knowledge and job AIDS like knowledge and job AIDS and maybe a little bit of motivation like how did that person succeed and do that but if you think about your career just think about how many times can you get around that Loop and what what are you putting because I I worry that people are loaded up with knowledge and feel almost um
I meet some of these leaders and they feel beaten up by the advice industry they feel beaten up that they can never be good enough they cannot be like whatever company or you know they feel like their their company's never good enough like they can't Empower their team you know they just can't follow anyone's advice and so I think people are beating themselves up when I think that you shift for some people to focus to like
taking that knowledge and just getting that Loop going for your teams or getting that Loop going for your career or getting that Loop going for your company is like probably like a pretty safe bet so I would think that that's
like one thing that comes to mind partly being responsible for some of that is what I yeah me too my advice to people is don't feel like you need to read everything coming across your place yeah it's instead wait for the moment when
you need that thing like I'm working at SEO right now cool I saved that thing about SEO I'm gonna go do it just like a just in time learning because you learn it so much better than like oh I have to load all this stuff in my head in case it becomes useful absolutely and I think one thing you think of is think about um the podcasts you listen to and think about that content is almost like you don't know what you don't know often so
I think that the challenge is is that like if you've been doing PM for a while product management for a while you don't really I don't fit everything in my head I just like for example pricing I know pricing is a thing I know that there's some people are amazing at pricing I know that if someone told me like well you should just price it like this my Spidey Sense would say you don't know what you're talking about because I know that
there's more to it than just what you just said you develop your spidey sense for things and you know that there's people you have to like dip your toes in like understanding like that's the beauty of podcasts like your mind can
get blown and then it puts in the back of your brain you're like there are some people who know a lot about that versus you know the founder who who believes that they're going to figure everything out for themselves and it's
just like no it's actually a thing pricing is a thing or you know what meeting design is a thing there's people who obsess about it or service design is a thing or interaction design or strategy you know something to do so that's building on what you said I think that there is a especially if you're starting out there is a definite value of almost seeing the 501 level courses or hearing that like genius lecture like
when you're in college as a freshman I remember I dropped out but like you would see the genius professor and you wouldn't understand any of it but you know it's a thing and then it helped you like guide the way you're doing so I think that you should kind of balance out those things but to your point like at the end of the day you got to just put this stuff in motion somehow yeah and then just know that
it's it's there when you need it you know like find some way to store it save it maybe even just assume Google will find it for you one more question along that same threat is you talked about the importance of going through these loops at some companies you just can't really the company moves slowly super waterfall they plan really long do you have any advice for someone that's like oh I want to go through Luke's more often this is
really good advice Point number one is you often underestimate what Loops are available to you in that company they throw up their hands I've tried to Mentor people like this I think we've done a decent job but the first thing
I'm like just don't throw up your hands and say it's all like going to like just at least document like what was the so even if like someone from on high says build X you can at least say you know what uh selected option is X
what would the one pager look like if x was one of five options write the one pager go and talk to that executive and say look I know you've told me to do this like what would we observe if this was working versus not working I'm here to help you with that great you've got some metrics along the lines what you're doing just nudge it just one little thing hey nothing stopping you from writing down all the potential
assumptions and risks that you have even if someone's like forget all that you're just gonna build the thing like you've gone through the motions for doing it and I think people underestimate that like because because the environments are kind of feel like still like stullifying I guess is one word or like stilted you know and and so they they just sort of throw up their hands but I would say that like work with what you've got
because the last thing you want is to have a job opportunity two or three years from then and all you can do is shrug your shoulders and say I worked at a up because I worked in a messed up company it's all good yeah well yeah so you I worked in a messed up company it was all you you're not really honoring yourself for doing that so I'd say that like that's my point about the fundamental attribution bias like is it hard yes
is it easier in those Silicon Valley companies well maybe not maybe those are a show too I've talked to plenty of them that are shows but do you have an opportunity to kind of nudge things forward in your space probably and bring to the systems thing is it true that some people don't have the privilege of leaving their company for whatever reason that is true also you know so like many things can be true but that
doesn't mean that you can't try I think to kind of like almost like write your portfolio as you go because if you wait two years you're gonna think it was just all a blur and messed up whereas the opportunities might be there in your day-to-day as you're working through I love how much your advice is optimistic and empowering and not just as though it is and and your point about how like top tier companies can also be messed up and
everything could be going to is like very true especially a hyper Growth Company where you just constantly changing it's also very chaotic and things are just breaking all the time and there's people too who just assume it's just has to be that way I I would say that one model that I use is the sort of The Chronic and acute challenges of the companies and especially in the last year you meet a bunch of companies
dealing with the same economic conditions and I will tell you no not all companies are equally dysfunctional and know not all high performing companies are equally beautiful in all roses like legitimately some companies work down the chronic issues which allows them to face the acute stressors and other companies are just mired in acute issues to do this thing so it's kind of again both things can be true it's like yeah there's nothing perfect
in product however it is true that some companies are healthier than others an example of that is the companies that leaned in to responding to the pandemic instead of counting the days until it was over massive difference I've seen this over and over probably with like 15 to 20 companies the companies that were intentional in designing their response to the pandemic versus being like just let managers deal with it whatever we're
just going to sort it out have had an order of magnitude better now maybe this the share price hasn't necessarily reflected it but like the happiness of the people there like they're going to come out of this stronger than the companies that were just like it's going to go back to normal and we're not we're going to delay all these org design decisions until some future date so I don't know if that tells you
about high performing but it's like the high performing companies saw the threat of what existed and then took deliberate steps coherent steps to frame what their response would be so that's just an example of that awesome I took us off track a little bit I think you're gonna go on to a second piece of advice yeah I think that there's well okay so one definitely slightly annoying to me recently I'll just get into the stuff
that annoys me is that let's do it I personally don't think I used to use words like a lot like product sense and product mindset and product things like that I'm personally trying to do a better job this year about trying to unpack those things as legitimate skills and competencies so if you think about product sense what is it might be like the ability to model problems systems thinking decision making under conditions of uncertainty uh
facilitation tools that you have like the ability to look at a you know competitive ecosystem and maybe see a thing and yeah maybe there's a little bit of sense to it you know it's like I want to help customers or whatever
but I think that I'm trying to make a concerted effort to unpack those things into things that could be taught and that's going to certainly be part of my role at toast right like the last thing I want to do is be like you have a
product mindset or you don't a great example I was even talking with Craig just the other day and we were talking about how in some environments there's this should can divide which I really like which is some people are just locked into the can they're Uber pragmatic people so it's like can we do this is it possible given the debt that you know whatever constraints that you have and then there's people who for some
reason go in and say like should we do it what should we do here like if those things were not an issue what should we do so it's very easy to to I joked with Craig it's like it's so easy to go down the path of being like well there's Ken people and should people there's High agency people and low agency people there's this person in that person it's much more interesting to go and and be like yeah maybe there might be a little
bit of a personality component to it but what skills as the should person bringing to bear on that particular situation maybe it's a level of systems thinking maybe it's a level of like looking at the environment being able to decouple the current tactics from maybe the optimal tactics for doing it so that's like one thing that I'm excited about um to do that and yeah I've got like yeah there's a bunch of other things you know
like the diverse perspectives uh diverse mental models um maybe working with someone like you to like try to try to raise up some of this like more diverse like I really want someone to be like who's working at some company X to be able to go and say now that leader I can relate to like they're dealing with certain challenges that we're having to deal with at our company and I I'd love them to be able to like have
Role Models like that like highlight people that aren't like on Twitter that are doing the work yeah and and not like me or not like you know any of these particular people where they can say wow that leader you know speaking to someone recently I wrote about this in my my newsletter and she was just sort of forlorned she was like I follow these people in this space and I know what my beliefs are and I know that that person has beliefs that
I'm not sure vibing with like completely but the message to me is the only way to get in head in Tech is to have those beliefs and John is that right do you need to believe like this in this case it was like this like very individualistic very meritocratic you know kind of get ahead push ahead type of vibe which I respect that thought leader for putting out there but this person didn't buy into it which would have all been okay except
she said is there a place for me in this in this environment well I need to sacrifice my beliefs to get ahead and I told her about some companies that I know like I told her about Carrie who I just mentioned like who's been like working on building like the diversity even like in a small company I told her about different leaders and different companies that like hey there's some companies where he is a real team Vibe
and there's some companies that that and she was like that's really good to know so I think that that's one thing I want to like work on in the next year to make sure that people have role models and not the people talking like me but like actual you know maybe I could be a role model to people in my new role but like ideally there's like role model leaders who they can relate to that would be great awesome I love that I feel like
you just talking about that makes an impact there something I'm definitely trying to do with this podcast is not just have all the same people that we see on Twitter all day and have a lot of people people have never heard of but if you have suggestions let's definitely talk offline I'd love to do more and more of this yeah so those are clearly some of the things on your mind as you're kind of in this period of reflection I'm curious if you
are gonna keep writing and keep your newsletter up maybe publish more books and then just broadly how do you make time while you have a day job to write because a lot of people always wonder that I'm curious if you have any uh pieces of advice there yeah I I I'm obsessed uh with the writing obviously and I think a bit of background about me is like you know I was pretty involved in music and songwriting and it was a
similar kind of thing I just like writing lots of songs like I like that there's a certain like buzz you get when you're creating and then you in in the case of Music it'd be like you record the demo yeah and you get it out there I think what people have correctly picked up on is because I have a full-time job sometimes it'll be like Thursday night and my kids finally asleep and and it's like one in the morning and I was like
I've got to write this post and so sometimes it comes off as being like a little bit rough or even accentuating the fact that I don't give them an answer you know because it's like two o'clock in the morning now and I kind of don't want to give them an answer I want to go to sleep to do these things so I think one of the things I'm going to hope to do is maybe um be more deliberate about like trying to provide at least some
maybe some mental models for dealing with the mess I mean there's things like that out there there's this thing connecting which is like a way to understand the systems and decision making problems you have you know are you dealing with like a clear system a complicated system a complex system or chaotic system and I like things like that because that helps do two things I like like one I want to give people something actionable to be able to
address what they're doing but it doesn't like remove the complexity in the particular situation so I have like role models in that this guy Simon wardley does this kind of mapping which I think is great there's um there's these other techniques that I want to try to lean into and maybe develop some of my own that sort of help people have something actionable and embrace the mess if that makes sense yeah so like for
example I recently wrote about something called like the leadership the Pyramid of leadership self-awareness and it's a simple model but it goes deep how I want it to go deep so the idea is that at first we know nothing about ourselves and then the next level is that we start become self-aware but believe the whole world is wired just like we're wired and then you go up to the next level and you believe that the world thinks different
things but you still think your way is the best way uh to be able to do that so an example is I remember talking to executive and they're like people only say because of their managers and because of their money that's it and I said everyone they said yes do you believe that yes because everyone believes that it's it's a physical law of light and here I am like oh my God I join a company because the mission of company or whatever like so
they're kind of stuck down like second level you know where they believe that like yeah the world thinks different things but I'm absolutely right and then as you get up to the top you become like a little bit more aware that there's other valid views and then at the top you're sort of like no you don't like dishonor yourself and throw away who you are but you realize that this is a huge asset in the world that there's diverse
views that you can bring together to do really really amazing things so that's like an example of some writing I've even done recently where I'm kind of like it's a complex topic but I try to make it more actionable to do that so that's one whole thing the other thing too is like leveraging all the crap that I have I think it's like 700 800 posts maybe nine like there's I had this whole blog beforehand that I did it and then I have
these hundreds of images with these Frameworks and then it's like 50 70 talks that I've done like floating on YouTube and then there's the all the mural boards I made at amplitude is different models so I kind of feel like I could pull some of that together to make it more actionable for people like give people almost like a meta guide to Cutler content so that they're not just dropped into me like writing
something at 1am and being like Oh just another one of those like damn it you didn't give me an alternative to NPS this newsletter sucks I mean frankly I would say the same thing too if I just stumbled into the newsletter to do it so
those are a couple things that I'm thinking about for the content definitely not going to stop uh doing those you know sharing those things and and doing that so yeah excited about this next year also the question about
writing I mean one thing with a full-time job where most of my work is internal obviously I need to respect my team you know like I can't again I go back to that funny thing with Spencer or he's like you're writing about amplitude I'm like no dude I'm not writing by now because it's like every company has that problem yeah but if I'm working alongside people I obviously can't be like no I can't say oh your manager
sucks you know it's like Craig's going to read that uh to do that particular thing but I can what I'm really excited about is that part of my job will be involved in doing a lot of writing a lot of teaching is hopefully like
work it out with the company so that I can share things that are not too specific about the company but much more like they've got like five different businesses at toast they've got all these people so it's going to be like a
education every day so I'm hoping to maybe get that inspiring my work in different ways amazing I imagine you might rename your newsletter the Beautiful Mess slightly less messy yeah jam and toast the jam and toast decision uh the the delicious yeah there we go uh also as you were talking uh I imagine that chat gbt3 type chatbot powered by John Cutler content could be a something to try oh it could be a funny yeah I
mean I'm yeah I'm sort of Obsessed I like the Chachi BD thing because I like having things like having a developer inspired by Hemingway debate a developer inspired by Tolstoy discussing uh git com like how to resolve a git issue so that's what I've been obsessed by lately is like when you know how Chachi BT works you can actually make it do really funny things and back to the world view things it's actually really effective if
you this is a very actionable tip like if you feel you're heavily grounded in let's say the I don't know maybe you're like a hardcore objectivist or you believe in individualism you can just type into chat GPT and say take this situation and interpret it by five different World Views and it'll be like you'll get the humanist View and you'll get the communitarian view and you'll get the like you know collectivist view they'll
do that so anyway it's a fun tool for that it's really cool that is awesome we checked the check box talking about AI very very hot these days yep score score one final question before we get to our exciting lightning
round I'm gonna come back to the questions that uh folks asked you on Twitter and there's a question that I I saved up and the question it was by Jeff Fedor and his question to you was what if you always wanted to say but couldn't now
that you're between gigs oh that's good so one thing is I didn't really need to filter myself very much when I was at amplitude which is kind of the beauty of the the gig like I wrote this blog post maybe probably six years ago called you know how to know you're working in a feature Factory and I've always disobed my jam you know the outcome like outcome and impact focused things so it's not like I really had to like
hide anything and you know so one thing I could say is like the the power of qualitative data but even Spencer says that too you know he's talking about like early on in amplitude you can rely a lot on a lot on qualitative data so like that wouldn't be all that controversial that's a funny thing there's not that much Contra I pretty much say what I say partially under the under the guise that that I'm talking to so many teams so
therefore it's never about amplitude absolutely not I think the one thing that I would change like I I don't think that many people in the company would disagree with me but one anti-pattern I see a lot on the part of implementing Analytics is that people go in and like undertake this like huge implementation you know they want to like Implement all their events they kind of want to get they want to treat it like this this big
project and again I don't think it's too controversial internally but I think I might have been much more at like adamant to people that's just like use our free plan and get 20 events going and you know what you might wipe them out later but like you don't even know what you don't know yet like you would see these companies that are like really qualified companies and it would be like a couple months of back and forth of
them trying to get like document every question they have and every metric they need and everything that you had and I would watch them and like I understood why they were doing that but I really just wanted to kind of shake them which I you know again I wouldn't have done this because then I would have been talking about the companies I was talking about every day I just wanted to shake them and just be like just sit me down with the
developers of your company for three hours and that's like Hello World a couple of events here like this is like you don't know you know like you could be getting value this whole time and again I don't think that people would amplitude would disagree but I think that that's like I wasn't going to talk about that all day because that would be sort of like belittling customers that who do want this like big implementation
thing so yeah not pretty kind of inside baseball for analytics but that's one thing that I was thinking about for Jeff awesome great answer also actionable advice how about that yeah I can do you just need to find it you just send me a message and say do you have the actual advice for it I probably do somewhere I just maybe didn't have the time to organize it good tip you're gonna get a lot of DMs with that we've reached our very
exciting lightning round I've got five questions for you I'm just gonna go through them whatever comes to mind fire away are you ready yeah yeah absolutely what are two or three books that you recommended most to other people yeah this one was pretty easy because they are fairly similar uh lately so I really like the book how to measure anything finding intangibles or finding the value of intangibles in business so that's by
Douglas Hubbard and the reason why I like that is again like at amplitude the number of people would come in like what are all our competitors measuring we want to know exactly which metric to measure and and again I'm laughing with you because I know you have these posts like here's exactly the metrics that you should track I really respect those posts and that's why you that's the power that you have it's all really good um
but what Hubbard reminds you is what why the hell are you measuring things to begin with you know it's to reduce uncertainty for like critical decisions or to achieve certain objectives that you have the reason why it's important to read that book is like a you figure out someone who's again actionable has thought this through so it gives you kind of a framework to thinking about it but B he really challenges this idea of like when
making decisions in conditions of uncertainty you only need to reduce the uncertainty to an acceptable amount to be able to make the next decision that you need to make and we never have like people are like product is like science it's really like an art it's it's like a game that's being played out you never have complete information to do it so I think that's a good book to remind people about what like to be more
creative and thinking about measurement instead of thinking about measurement and metrics is just about like adopting the exact metrics that everyone has and doing that um the second one I think would probably be accelerate so Nicole forsgren uh Gene Kim she has humble like that's just one of the best books in the world about the factors contributing to Performance and it's built on many it's six I know it's been out for a while now 10 years
they did the the Dora report which was like their their yearly report where they did Big surveys like 10 20 30 40 000 people responding to it Nicole version is an amazing scientist and like you know so they like structured their thing correctly they would have a hypothesis about what is equal to Performance and how all these individual practices contribute to it and then they've updated it over time and I think that you know Google bought
Dora I don't know exactly how all the parts like came into place but that book is amazing just sort of teaching you how to think about the idea of performance because they'll include things like you know the Western topology which is like is your company operating like a bureaucracy or dictate you know like these certain uh culture elements to it but then also like the practices and things that you're doing you know so
that's a great book when you're trying to think about like how do I model performance and then it's also an amazing book because you can just literally put the stuff into motion about improving your uh development
practices and things you're doing and then I think probably the last one man I just love this book this Jeff this Jeff Patton book about user story mapping I love what Jeff Patton did like he took this extremely simple idea which is that
you can like lay out a customer journey and then organize you know take a slice across that journey and develop it and he gives this pretty basic straightforward method to do it but I tell you I'll go into companies like a year after they had Jeff in and like learned this and they're still like buzzing about hey user story mapping and it's just he's a super humble guy and he would never like outstate the value of this he'd be like yeah it's
just a journey map with a couple like sticky notes on it but I always when someone's new at product management I'm like hey this is a deceptively simple book like you'll learn this very basic idea but it will teach you a lot about product when I do that so those are like three that come to mind Taylor suggestions I love I love answers that have books I've never heard of that seem really amazing so you check the checkbox
there thank you next question favorite other podcast other than the one you're currently on I'm in like a voice you know I got a four-year-old I don't really spend a lot of time because I I'm this sort of like I'm such a lightweight it's like I'll do knowledge project because Shane sent me you know what I mean like I I like I will just like listen to some I like binge things those but I do really like um I've actually been going through old
episodes of Maggie Crowley's podcast that she did when she was at drift lots of good guests and I really like Maggie's perspective and like I like the guests that she had on there so sometimes I'll go back to like an old podcast he does these really great memes and stuff but Jason Knight like actually has a fun podcast and I listen to and some of those things so I think that like but realistically I'm not like a
huge podcast uh listener I'd like to go back to like a podcast that hasn't been out for a while like Maggie's and just sort of catch up on all the guests because I thought that was really awesome Jason will love hearing that next question favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed oh man you know like again have a kid it's nothing there's this thing called there's a show called Sunny bunnies it's these fluffy bunnies
um that's really good and then there's this animated series called booba and he's this like funny guy I like booba and so anyways great I'm sure these will be useful to families hardcore product movies you know like real really like those are gonna like up your game a lot yeah I'm sure there's something to learn two more questions favorite interview question that you like to ask folks oh so so one that I like to do is I do
like the behavioral questions like tell me about stuff but then I'll ask them like imagine I'm interviewing a person you worked with now answer in there tell me about of the same situation so you know you'll be like oh you know Lenny tell me about a time that you're faced with adversity and you did this and then you worked through the team to do it and you would go through it and then you'd answer it and then and then
maybe in the process of doing that you mentioned someone you work with and I'll be like now imagine that you're Mary who you just spoke about and things and like how would she answer the tell me about thing as it relates to you and so I think it can show some really interesting like self-awareness you know because often people answer that question like they are the hero of the story and the other people are the accomplices
in it but then like if you challenge them like what was that story from the perspective of one of the people you work with I think it's really interesting awesome um let's do it so it is a behavioral question I do think that's like the right way and if you dig enough you can really get like the depth of the story but I do think it's fun to like challenge people to see how flexible their thinking could be about
that situation I don't know if that's like you know right from an HR perspective but I like it I like it too final question you mentioned you have kids what's the best lesson someone touched you about raising kids it's a
challenge every day I just think they operate better when they are fed the kid as a product is like if you feed the product then if they were just everything's better and when you don't like everything falls apart so just like have
snacks with you that's the basic advice that I have to people very practical look at you actionable advice left and right yeah you got it John and I feel comfortable calling you John and I feel like I just got to know you you're just like a John now um we hit our goal of I think it's going to be the longest episode I've done this was amazing John we've reached the end two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to learn more
reach out ask questions if you want them to and then two how can listeners be useful to you I still am using Twitter a fair amount I think but LinkedIn could be good you know John cuddlefish on Twitter and then just John Cutler at LinkedIn yeah I think what I would love to hear from people is just um you know send recommendations of people we should hear or more from I think that would be like I think that would be
really helpful um even in the role that I have you know I want to start like a guest speaker series to bring people in to talk to our team and so I think that that would be something that I can work on Amazing John thank you so much for doing this I'm really excited for this new adventure that you're on and I'm excited to maybe follow up maybe in a couple years of just like how what you've learned from this next phase of life I
really enjoyed the show and thank you for having us thanks John thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode