"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 be..."

"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 podca..."

"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..."

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"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..."

"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 wh..."

"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 ..."

"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 basic..."

"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 kno..."

"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 ..."

"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 wonderf..."

"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 wa..."

"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 differ..."

"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 t..."

"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 ..."

"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 tou..."

"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..."

"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 th..."

"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 hie..."

"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 c..."

"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 ot..."

"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..."

"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 perce..."

"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 ..."

"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 thre..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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 becaus..."

"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 a..."

"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 ..."

"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 kn..."

"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..."

"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 gr..."

"the Enterprise proving security is essential sock 2 can either open the door for bigger and better deals or it can put your business on hold if you don't have a sock 2 there's a good chance you won't ..."

"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 le..."

"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 coul..."

"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 bel..."

"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 struct..."

"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 m..."

"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 ar..."

"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..."

"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 t..."

"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..."

"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 particula..."

"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 thi..."

"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 a..."

"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 inte..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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 opportu..."

"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 li..."

"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..."

"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 bu..."

"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 S..."

"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 remem..."

"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..."

"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 y..."

"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 m..."

"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 w..."

"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 ..."

"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 m..."

"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 ..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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 ma..."

"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 read..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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 pod..."

"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 kn..."

"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..."

"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 prod..."

"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..."

"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 l..."