Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess)

Starting point is 00:00:00 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?

Starting point is 00:00:17 You can nudge yourself a little bit away from your happy place, but you're not going to go super far. You're not going to go from like a process-driven meritocratic, XYZ person all the way to like, I'm going to start a collectivist company where everything is sort of the consensus decision to do that. You're not going to do that. But I think it starts with self-awareness,

Starting point is 00:00:35 and then 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. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experience as building and scaling.

Starting point is 00:01:00 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.

Starting point is 00:01:27 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,

Starting point is 00:01:50 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. Merge's unified API can remove this blocker from your roadmap.

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Starting point is 00:03:43 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 discover. Epo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics, and instead use your North Star metrics, like activation, retention, subscriptions, and payments. And Epo 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?

Starting point is 00:04:27 To be true, and also do people call you John Cuddlefish because of your Twitter handle? Yeah, John Cuddlefish, there is this, I learned yesterday there's a DJ, a famous DJ called John Cutler without the H. So I don't know if people are into house music to do that. Yeah, I think usually it just like most John's like forms into like Cutler or J.C. or something like that. So but just John is good, yeah, for now. Or Cuddlefish. You could just call them Cuddlefish. That would be fine. You said they actually, we were talking before this. He said you do some music. So is that DJ actually you?

Starting point is 00:04:56 No, but that would be really funny. In fact, the person yesterday who reached out over Twitter said, like, dude, I don't know what you're doing now in your career, but I really like your earlier work. But that would have been pretty cool to be John Collar, the DJ. I wrote songs and played rock music and stuff, not like a house DJ. Okay, this could be the next phase of your career, which we'll talk a bit about. But let me just say that I'm so incredibly excited for this conversation.

Starting point is 00:05:22 I've been hoping to do this for a long time. And now that you're between gigs, we finally found an opportunity. need 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 can 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

Starting point is 00:05:53 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 it gave 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 remember almost specifically the day that Sandia, from Amplitude reached out and was sort of floated this idea of this role to me.

Starting point is 00:06:28 And I'm so grateful for Sandia and Justin, Matt Alhazer, 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, I kind of, I guess, you know, kudos to them for thinking this weird idea could work.

Starting point is 00:07:04 So I'm really, really grateful for that. But yeah, my official title was Product of Manjolist. I don't think that I super fit that role, but that was the title that we had. And basically, my job was to wake up every morning and do things that would overlap amplitude the product, but then help uplevel our customer. sort of up-level the broader product community. I call them like current customers and future customers. That's how I woke up every day,

Starting point is 00:07:30 that like I'm either talking to a current customer or I'm talking to a future customer. And, you know, this product transformation is happening all around the world just means it's a matter of time. Eventually they'll become amplitude customers, so I should just try to make them awesome and try to help them with different expertise. But my day-to-day was spent a lot advocating

Starting point is 00:07:48 for different ways of working, doing coaching, doing workshops. I wrote the North Star Playbook in partnership with Jason, who was a co-writer with that. We did a lot of one-to-one coaching sessions. 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 did meet with hundreds and hundreds of people and did workshops for thousands and thousands of people and talks for more than that, tens of thousands, really in terms of the top. box. So it was just a, yeah, crazy experience doing that. So the technical details is I

Starting point is 00:08:28 predominantly reported into marketing and product marketing. And then I did a stint actually where I was on our product team as we're sort of getting our education efforts going. Ultimately, we moved that over to customer success and I went back to marketing. So that's the, you know, the technical side of it I reported into marketing. But I do remember, you know, the day I arrived and probably a couple weeks later we had our all-hands, you know, annual kickoff, and there was a big presentation about our goal being the trusted expert.

Starting point is 00:08:56 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 a crazy role, sure.

Starting point is 00:09:16 That is wild. You're basically like a free product. a coach for product team. You just come in, help them up a level the way they build product. And then Amplitude becomes like, you know, you'll 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 SaaS company, I think sometimes you have a professional services team. At Amplitude, especially, the way that we saw that is like companies put money in and that sort of create skin in the game. They're really paying you

Starting point is 00:09:46 less for the professional services and more for the accountability and the access to the expertise. So I would joke with Jenna from that team that like maybe we should have monetized all these workshops. You know, like I know Gib and other people, you know, they're charging like a good chunk for North Star workshops. And here we were just kind of doing them for free. So ultimately, maybe there was another strategy there, but that we did those generally for free. And sometimes I kind of stuck my foot in it, you know, in the middle of the pandemic at one point, we're like, what are we going to do? We can't travel for workshops. And I would put in my newsletter,

Starting point is 00:10:18 hey, anyone want a workshop? And then suddenly, you know, our sales team, we had to grapple with like, what are we going to do with 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 SaaS companies think about a role like this, but it's really nuanced.

Starting point is 00:10:39 We can share some links later as I reflected on what we did right and wrong. But ultimately, I think you shouldn't rely. on individual people. You should think of evangelists as almost like concentric circles of your community and some people who just happen to have more expertise. Look, our internal team's amazing, like Ibrahim, Justin, and Abbey and when Sanio 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.

Starting point is 00:11:13 that does it. So yeah, recommended. It's a little tricky, but yeah, it 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. 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 might have been over the four years, maybe 800 one-on-ones, individual leader one. on ones. I'm thinking it was at the peak, it was in one year's 150 workshops and then

Starting point is 00:11:49 it overlapped in the next year, then it became 200. So, but most of the average, maybe, let's say, three or 400 workshops, 100 a year. It's heavy. Like, and then there was these just general, like, conference talks and other things that we're doing. I tried to total, I exported all my Google calendar invites. I tried to categorize all them at some point, 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, I think it was Sandia who needed to, like, we had three days to go in to close a customer,

Starting point is 00:12:26 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 in North Star should be. And it started this ball rolling. And then they wrote a blog post about it. So if you search North Star, you get to sign your post.

Starting point is 00:12:44 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 North Star framework. And I have to always chime in like, no, we did not invent that thing. You should go to Sean or you should go to any of these people who've done it in the past.

Starting point is 00:13:08 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. When I arrived at Amplitude, people would send pictures of those playbooks sitting on their desks. And people thought, oh, it's just this piece of marketing content. How do they pull it together? I did some research in our CS team developed 110 page bulk of research from working directly with customers around retention and engagement. then we had a PM and a great content writer Archina zero in and kind of like make it palatable. Then we did arc for it.

Starting point is 00:13:49 So it didn't just magically appear. People think that these artifacts that Amplitude has just magically appeared, but they were just, you know, it's a company filled with passionate experts of these things. And it was like tested, iterated, tested, iterated, expanded, tested, put into motion, put into practice. And that's how you create these kind of franchise, like, cornerstone pieces of content for your company. You don't just snap your fingers one day. So anyway, I wanted to point that out. Huge group effort for all these things.

Starting point is 00:14:21 How does it feel to have left amplitude at this point? Imagine you're going through some roller coaster promotions. Oh, geez. Well, the mensomata gratitude definitely mentioned that. 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,

Starting point is 00:14:42 one day you're with intercom, then you're with a two-person startup, and then you're with like Figma. 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 XSexecis. at amplitude, not necessarily me. So I didn't get to dictate a lot of times the conversation.

Starting point is 00:15:12 It's like, shit, I'm not doing a very good job here. Like, this person thinks in a very different way to do that. So, yeah, a lot of gratitude. I would say it got really heavy a lot. 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 the tension from teams. You know, you're meeting leaders who are about to leave five days later.

Starting point is 00:15:39 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, yeah, I'm a joke about the product therapy thing, but I would finish the day at two or three and then have to do another one. You know, wake up at five to do an ameer workshop, five to seven, be two in workshop, then take a break, then do another two-hour workshop and then talk to a leader about how everything was going to explode. And then another leader. and then I was still on a team in amplitude, so I might go to my own meeting where we're working through our own challenges. And then it's like four or five in the afternoon.

Starting point is 00:16:12 Oh, my God, I haven't done it 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 achieving the almost similar results in like very, very different ways. They behave in different ways. The context in the pandemic or the economy,

Starting point is 00:16:34 me 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 shit. And I'm like, and I've, I've seen how 50 other companies are going from shit where this is you're doing it. So the power of context, the regional differences were so fascinating. You know, you're on with, I was on with a team that was based in India and just the passion and curiosity. there was not one jaded person in the room. Like there was not one person like been there, done that, you know,

Starting point is 00:17:10 when's the performance review cycle ending or anything like that? It was just like all out passion and hunger for information. So those days were amazing. So yeah, you could talk a lot about it, but it definitely, it feels like a relief in some ways because the amount of tension to do it. And so for my next plan, actually what I'm doing is I'm going to work at toast in a couple weeks.

Starting point is 00:17:34 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 of these four years is that I wanted to pivot back to help put most of my energy into helping my own company. They're growing super fast. So the numbers are in the hundreds of everything or in the thousands of everything. And they're not just the POS business.

Starting point is 00:17:55 They've got these different businesses like guest services and back office stuff and things. So I kind of wanted like Amplod, was a super horizontal, if you think about it. It's almost like a diagonal. And so it made your headspin, and I kind of wanted to go back to VerticalSAS. There's a company here in Sinaba, how it called Appfolio that I liked working at. And I really like had a soft spot for vertical SaaS, but I'm thinking put my energy into an internal team for a little bit to pivot back into that. And so I'll be helping 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

Starting point is 00:18:31 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 going to also say, a lucky toast. Wow. To get John Cutler. Go them. Oh, lucky me. I mean, geez, like, toast is this 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 at toast. 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 And you noticed, I asked on Twitter what I should ask you. You have a lot of fans on Twitter.

Starting point is 00:19:06 And there's a ton of questions. And one actually got pretty spicy. And I want to touch on it briefly. This 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 a 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. Like the beautiful mess is like so angsty. It couldn't have been like more.

Starting point is 00:19:46 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. So it's probably pretty consistent with personality to do those things. I mean, I actually really appreciated Jason pointing that out. And in fact, like at the end of this year, I put this post out to people saying, hey, here, 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 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

Starting point is 00:20:24 give like a little background about, you know, the newsletter and what I was looking for for that. And so I think that the first thing that I did was, you know, four years ago, I kind of scanned the product advice landscape. And I noticed, you know, three things. First, there's sort of three perspectives that pervaded. And again, I just want to make a huge caveat. This is not a judgment on any of these particular perspectives. It's more like I noticed a lot of it. And the first was that, you know, to be successful, number one, maybe success is tools, skills, mindset.

Starting point is 00:20:58 So that's kind of one group of particular things. The second that in terms of worldviews, we mentioned like international worldviews too, but there was like 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 U.S. until you do meetings with other teams, just how individualistic we can be when it comes to how we think about teams should be set up and stuff. And then I think the third thing I realized was that it was very often very context-free.

Starting point is 00:21:33 And I mean that actually in the nicest way. Like, it was optimized to make sure that someone, it could be actionable, that someone could take that away. And that's what I really like about the content that you put out there. And I like about a lot of the guests on the podcast, 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, 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.

Starting point is 00:22:04 The second part of that is like this idea of success being mostly about individual skills in CHOP. So, you know, the 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 that happened 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.

Starting point is 00:22:48 So there's this very like hierarchical view. And as I started to also dig in more into the stuff, 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 at all to do that. So anyway, I kind of thought about it as a product. Like, okay, what's my opportunity here? There's a lot of this great advice. It's very actionable.

Starting point is 00:23:25 I don't know, in the U.S. were pretty individualistic, so the advice probably lands with people really, really well. And then also it's really actionable and said, 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.

Starting point is 00:23:54 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 the United States. You know, your team is like in a team of many, many teams in your company. The systems are nonlinear, so things, you know, the bird

Starting point is 00:24:10 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 Buda-Mil-Khometa. the next thing is that I'm a sucker for like weird counterintuitive dynamics in companies. I don't know what it is. Like I absolutely love that.

Starting point is 00:24:29 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 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 to 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 of counternew stuff. 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 really clear three pillars, but then everyone walks away from the meeting, be like, I don't know what we're doing this. That's like another example of a counterintuitive thing. So, you know, that was the second thing, the counterintuitive stuff.

Starting point is 00:25:27 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 to do this thing. So like, I would say like I'm really, really triggered. People will say, but probably triggered by Jason. He said, wow, bring solutions, not just problems. You know, like that's my like krypton. I like the system 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 counterintuitive 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.

Starting point is 00:26:14 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 posts, I probably given frameworks to do that. I just don't think too much about it. I just kind of go in 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 back to this thing of complex problems, I think it's the difference between oversimplifference. and focusing. You can have like a really complex problem and you can over simplify it and that's not great. But you can have a complex problem and be like, you know what? I need to hold some things

Starting point is 00:26:54 constant. Not going to make any progress unless we hold some things constant to do that. So that's like to me the balance I'm playing all the time between like how many variables to hold constant to make sure that people can get some value out of it. I don't know about you, but like that's the tension I have. But you write really actionable stuff. And you know, so I really admire that too. I'm jealous. I try. 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 where I wrote about how virality is mostly a myth. And I added the word mostly to it at the end. And I kind of like, should I just go for it and be like, virality is fully a myth. But I'm like, no, it's not actually.

Starting point is 00:27:34 So I can't really go that far. It's kind of messy. I love that. So in the spectrum of advice, like every post of mine will say mostly maybe it depends. And then. And 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 1% of people that have talked to and met with and seen what happens within product teams.

Starting point is 00:28:05 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 had to just like boil it down, what have you seen most differentiates the highest performing product teams? First of all, they're top 1%. They're super, super productive. They can levitate like they can do. Yeah, they have no emotion.

Starting point is 00:28:34 I'm just kidding. I'd like to do this. No, okay, this is my tack for answering the question. So first of all, I have this friend Josh Arnold and he had this great principle that held true in my experience talking with. teams. And he calls it the reverse anachrine interprin principle. And so in in anachrine 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

Starting point is 00:29:03 performing companies can be very, very different. And so that's something that's 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 the song is about you. But it's not. It's just, it's just is, you know, it's just like those things. So either you have the very easy to identify Anteat.

Starting point is 00:29:44 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, vastly different. So let's just start with that as a basic thing, which is one reason why it kind of makes me hard to answer the question. So, you know, a great example here is great product leadership. Like we need great product leaders. But you meet a muff product leaders and you see that like some people are like these curious, serving product leaders, they're not really talking a lot,

Starting point is 00:30:17 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

Starting point is 00:30:36 and you see that there's 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, this is great. Like, 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 shit.

Starting point is 00:30:59 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, paste app 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.

Starting point is 00:31:20 Okay, so those are like the basics, but still none of those, all that interesting, right? You're like, oh, you're saying you need information to make decisions, and it's kind of not very satisfying to think that, right? But then if you think about three companies, let's say think three, we can even play the game together. You know, I'll give you two. You could give me the third one.

Starting point is 00:31:36 But like, let's say, company A buys into the whole idea of an extremely rigorous decision-making process. It's very process driven. It's like, you do this, you do that. We red team our decisions. We bring in people to like push back. We've got this particular thing. So maybe that's how they achieve it.

Starting point is 00:31:52 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 diverse things. There are highly successful companies that achieve both of the. those particular things. I don't know, what am I missing? So, Lenny, you think about it. 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 as 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,

Starting point is 00:32:34 and the very idealistic product managers are like, you've got to have empowered teams, and 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 to do it. 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.

Starting point is 00:33:02 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 in 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.

Starting point is 00:33:33 So their funding approach, their incentives, the org structure, the architecture, even their technical architecture supports their strategy back and forth. And the reason why I mentioned this one is you can have brilliant teams. You meet these brilliant teams where they've just hired in 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 going to like knock them out of that. And so what do you need? You need a strategy.

Starting point is 00:34:03 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 even believing that this is a done deal and you just need to move faster than everyone else in the space, or even the belief

Starting point is 00:34:37 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 held things. So I would have just observed this in meeting after meeting with these like teams that seem to be having a bout of being more high performing. You know, they would be stubborn about some things that they were doing even when it didn't make sense in the short turn. Right?

Starting point is 00:35:02 And then they would do that. So I think that that's like another thing. I think related to that when it comes to the product. world is just like a core belief in the power of products. The Jeff Bezos thing that like 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.

Starting point is 00:35:26 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 AB 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

Starting point is 00:35:55 in the power of what it would take to have like a nine craft level product versus a seven craft level product six crap 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 to 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,

Starting point is 00:36:34 should be run a certain way. And they set this vibe. It's kind of this coherent that 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 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 co-eastern.

Starting point is 00:37:04 hearing things. And so, okay, so you've got those high-level ones. I think you definitely add skills and experiencing those definitely matter. I think one thing that happens a lot is how the company views its skills. So here's like a challenge we had in amplitude, just sharing this, is like, you could view amplitude as just another B2B SaaS company or maybe just an analytics company. But one of the challenges we had when it was like how to build our team is to think about where do you draw the line between someone who's just done B2B SaaS for the last 10 years as a pro at what they're doing? And then how someone could embrace this kind of weird problem, 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.

Starting point is 00:37:47 So the skills need to be like mediated obviously between like the environment to do those things. 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

Starting point is 00:38:03 just hearing my thought process to go through these things. But like, I think that the, you know, the TLDR of this whole thing is those top ones I mentioned seem like common sense

Starting point is 00:38:14 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.

Starting point is 00:38:28 She's like, yeah, this is sort of like, 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 like these things that seem so common sense are actually hard with what they're doing.

Starting point is 00:38:47 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 put in motion. And there's also a lot of power to just making it like a very important value to the company. Like just calling it barraevers. in steam. Yeah, that stuporning it. You know, I'll use the example of a company.

Starting point is 00:39:03 I mentioned this company at Folio 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 SaaS company. But I think, you know, in the story that they tell is like, when they started at Poloia, they're like, we want to find a place for the money flows, and we want to be really close to customers,

Starting point is 00:39:21 and we just want to, where they believed in customer, they were engineers who 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 believe that the quality, you know, you should never be worried about the quality. They just believe that quality wasn't something you sacrifice as the norm. It's just got to work.

Starting point is 00:39:50 And they believe that was possible. And when you think about it, those things are always debated, like, oh, should we get technical debt or not or like how much customer contact is or not? And like, these two founders basically are like, that's it. We don't sacrifice on those things. And they've done really well with that. 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 and kind of

Starting point is 00:40:17 traits you've just shared. And then I have a two-part question around this. So I wrote these down. So 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 product.

Starting point is 00:40:40 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 and building stuff they're building. Contextual skills to like, yeah, exactly. So 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 founders are this way and it's really hard?

Starting point is 00:41:18 The pie chart, that's the problem. I mean, that is the like the trillion dollar question. So I don't really have any answer. I have a couple thoughts on it. What do we know? We know that you can have a bunch of geniuses in the room, and if there's not coherent leadership and there's not coherent structure in what you're doing,

Starting point is 00:41:37 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. Now, they made a lot of mistakes.

Starting point is 00:41:55 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, bail 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.

Starting point is 00:42:21 they build their career or seven, eight, nine years. There is a concentration of people who are very skill, 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'm not going to throw out a percentage point into it.

Starting point is 00:42:41 I'm just going to note that, like, I think that the biggest challenge is that we all need to challenge our biases. I do too. So four or five years ago, I would have said, well, personal skills, nothing. It's all the environment. There's people on Twitter who do this all the time. They're like, bad management kills everything. You know, skills aren't important. You should just be able to do anything with anyone. And I used to be one of those particular people. And I also have this sort of

Starting point is 00:43:03 humanist bent 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 know myself, right, to do that. And I would suggest that there's people on the other end of the spectrum who could benefit from shifting a little bit. And to embrace some other ideas too. So they are 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 trace everything back to leadership anyway.

Starting point is 00:43:33 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 SaaS companies, 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.

Starting point is 00:43:49 But I think that everyone can benefit. from like challenging their, uh, there, maybe their, their happy place, me included. I like that. It's like it's an optimistic perspective. Basically, anyone can change. Anyone can improve. Don't assume that it's just not possible. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:44:04 And give it a shot and 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 and are not flying high anymore. So high performance is not this like state. You achieve. It's actually a continuum. that you're always, we have this in our personal lives too. We're flying high and we think we do everything.

Starting point is 00:44:25 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 or are you going to be asked about your SOC2 compliance? Sock 2 is a way to prove your companies taking proper security measures to protect customer data and builds trust with customers and partners, especially those with serious security requirements. Also, if you want to sell to the enterprise, proving security is essential.

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Starting point is 00:45:43 Just go to vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A-com slash 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 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 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

Starting point is 00:46:18 confirmation bias. You know, we'll point to that company. and say, I mean, let's, let me just use an example. Like Satina 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 set the

Starting point is 00:46:46 in motion, the couple of strategic imperatives that were going to let things going. Now imagine Microsoft didn't have all the wealth of talent that it had or all the wealth of structures or like the good parts of the tradition. Let's say the bad parts served them well for a long time, but maybe they started to become a little bit outdated and then they were putting them in a competitively bad situation. It's even that situation, you can like idolize that particular leader for doing it, but there's many things that could happen to be able to do that. And so there's this idea of like Great Man Theory. And this is something I talk about a lot where in Great man theory, you know, success is the result of these, like, highly influential, highly effective

Starting point is 00:47:25 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 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 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? Definitely not like I think the rules of the world are that blank happens. It's like,

Starting point is 00:48:11 what do you believe in and what do the people around you believe in? And how can you be a coherent leader? And you know what? You can't, you can nudge yourself a little bit away from your happy place, but you're not going to go super far. You're not going to go from like a process driven meritocratic XYZ person all the way to like, I'm going to start a collectivist company where everything is sort of the 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 people. 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 grown 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 could just be other factors that make it feel like everything's going great.

Starting point is 00:49:15 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 leader or 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.

Starting point is 00:49:53 Yeah, which is why things don't go well. They're their asses on the line. 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 power and importance of, I don't know, strong values, strong culture. Have you found that that's just not essential? And what are your thoughts on you?

Starting point is 00:50:13 No, I think it's kind of the fabric that creates those other things. You know, it's the fabric that creates coherence, like coherent around what? If culture is what we're doing, is what we're acting, and the way we act is sort of a function of some of the belief systems and the culture and the value systems that we have, I sort of, maybe I just almost take it for granted that that's like sitting underneath those particular things. But here's an example where sometimes, you know, nuances matter. I'll just use amplitude.

Starting point is 00:50:44 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 the 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, like, well, this is our culture. We're into ownership. It's not saying much, saying that you believe

Starting point is 00:51:18 in ownership without the addition of like, what we would do successfully and 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 are the best culture or the best way or some of the best companies in terms of how they built product, who comes to mine? I mean, 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

Starting point is 00:51:58 these. I'm just going to 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.

Starting point is 00:52:21 They've got one of the biggest, most iconic brands in the whole world at their hands, you know, and I'm like sitting and, I'm just going to single out her. Like, yeah, there's a situation here. It's not easy.

Starting point is 00:52:32 It's not great. It's not like high performing by any, you know, like, you take a tiny Silicon Valley company. Like, yeah, it's hard to be at Lego.

Starting point is 00:52:39 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. I think of it more of these moments where I'm like, wow, this shit's hard. It's not ideal. And that people are coming to work every day. And there's a group of people in this room who are extremely well-meaning.

Starting point is 00:53:00 And you know what? The impact of their work might not even be seen in their tenure at that company. Some of these larger companies might take a decade to really work themselves through. And so, I don't know. When you asked 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, yeah, I'm not going to give a lot of names, but just shout out, Angela. She's doing an awesome job. Go, Angela.

Starting point is 00:53:26 That reminds me of something I wanted to ask around the cultural differences between product teams in different countries. You talked about India, talked about Lego. What have you found to be the main differences in how product teams operate? operating 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 notice is definitely, like, the individualist

Starting point is 00:54:01 and what I would call most, like, communitarian vibe. You know, the idea of, like, individualism versus the idea of the team being sort of a community of people together. So that's one and you pick up about that a lot when you go to different places. I mean, in the United States, you know, you'll find this situation where you've got this one engineering manager and they are like brokering the projects with every single engineer on their team and everyone wants the promotion and there's this whole, 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.

Starting point is 00:54:36 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 stuff. And that's an extreme example.

Starting point is 00:55:00 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 vibe and more. So to say that it's just about the world is not really just right. So I think that the, yeah,

Starting point is 00:55:18 the collectivist individualistic thing is important. I do think that certain cultures are much more sort of hierarchically oriented. There's much more deference to the hierarchy in the particular, 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 there's some of the things that come to mind yeah as we're going through it so yeah 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 PMs don't work at companies like that.

Starting point is 00:56:09 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 just a lot of 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-S Silicon Valley companies. I certainly learn a lot when I talk to companies in the Bay Area and 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.

Starting point is 00:57:05 that are just 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, I have friends who will go and work at those companies are like, oh, no, no one changes the rules here. We just do it this way at Amazon or we just do it, whatever. So this similar thing happens in these particular companies, like, there's only one way to do

Starting point is 00:57:32 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 point 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 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.

Starting point is 00:58:18 So in many of those companies, they should focus on creating these sort of areas or pods where 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. And 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?

Starting point is 00:58:49 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. And sometimes like maybe even you write a post is like, well, how does Figma work?

Starting point is 00:59:13 And they're like, we use these frameworks. And so this company's like, well, we've got to use these frameworks. And I think that the way that I tend to think about frameworks is that they're more like a job 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

Starting point is 00:59:33 aren't working out. So I think that that's another thing. Maybe some of those companies could benefit from doing, but we're getting kind of more into the kind of digital transformation or the big company space. But I think back to that particular question, I think you need to view a lot of advice coming from Silicon Valley just contextually. It's startup. There's a tradition of how these companies work.

Starting point is 00:59:53 Many of them are just optimized very much for that first big art. 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.

Starting point is 01:00:34 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 going to like install all the frameworks or install everything they're doing. Yeah, this is 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

Starting point is 01:01:10 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 Figma builds product and then not adding a little bit of like, maybe this won't work at your company, you know. But maybe it can. And I talk about this a lot, this sort of, I do believe there's sort of this fundamental attribution bias at play where people in these high 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,

Starting point is 01:01:49 actually overestimate the kind of like systemic drag in their organization and underestimate what can be possible. And you think about that. We do that a lot in just our lives in general. You know, we see someone being really successful and we'll say, well, but my situation is this. And when things are working for us, we're like, I'm a genius. You know, like I'm a genius. We're doing this ridiculous 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

Starting point is 01:02:28 then these other company, 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, Anheiser-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? Anahezer-Bush, it's like, why? We're going to distribute beer because it's a pandemic. And so we're going to have, and I think actually they started to become more even used for logistics. Like you could,

Starting point is 01:03:07 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 small companies. And then there's like, the fast and 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-led growth motion by spanning all the different acquisitions they had.

Starting point is 01:03:38 You know what? They're on top of their game. This is not like a slouch company, but it's really hard for them to do that. or at Amplitude we'd have a lot of like not old fintech but not newest fintech companies. They're printing money, you know, and they're just like embracing this particular thing. And 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.

Starting point is 01:04:09 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.

Starting point is 01:04:52 And Kerry, 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 they 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 business? 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

Starting point is 01:05:20 than just the like high performing, low performing spectrum. There's just a whole universe of fun companies out there. As you were 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

Starting point is 01:05:40 you think listeners should follow if they work at maybe a non-Silicon Valley type team. Like Marty Kagan is who comes to mine 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 just generate like this full list for people. Maybe it would be interesting. Maybe I'll take that as an action item to like list a couple of these. We'll put in the show. I'll give you an example of like one guy and his name is John Smart.

Starting point is 01:06:07 And he wrote this book called Better Sooner, Safer, 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 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 is unraveled.

Starting point is 01:06:39 and what he had to put in motion to take like an old school bank and at least try to get some part of some kind of transformation working in that particular company. Like, I think there's a whole like realm of people like that. And I'm going to like list, you know, 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.

Starting point is 01:07:06 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

Starting point is 01:07:26 and I have a lot of respect for those types of techniques because they're more universal versus like some very like arcane niche activity. Awesome. Cool. And we'll do our best to include whatever full list you come up with in the show notes. Yeah. So I've been asking a lot of very specific questions.

Starting point is 01:07:44 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 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 advice I have to share. Yeah, I think kind of going back to the reps thing, I think. I think that there's this fire hose of amazing information that's out there. And I contribute it to it and you contribute to it.

Starting point is 01:08:15 And there's just, I mean, think like what a time to be alive. Like you can literally just get the podcast going. You can listen to anyone you want. You know, like that's, that's like pretty amazing. And I was thinking to myself, the joke as I saw you put this thing about Andrew Huberman, about who gives these sort of like life hacks 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.

Starting point is 01:08:37 when I wake up in the morning. Can I be healthier? Sunlight? Yeah, I got my sunlight. I went for my sunlight before screens to prepare for our talk today. But actually? Yeah, that's great. I happen in my habit tracker. Sunlight before screens. Like every day. Yeah, I got my, got my watch that I got a couple of days. I'm on vacation. I'm between jobs now. So it's about like all health. Yeah, optimizing. But I think that you need to keep in mind that this like this is a skill. And skill, skill is knowledge times practice, mediated by your environment, the habits you form,

Starting point is 01:09:15 and the motivation that you have in the 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,

Starting point is 01:09:33 we have this data-informed product loop 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 North Star 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.

Starting point is 01:09:50 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 how you prioritize, etc. And it helped 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.

Starting point is 01:10:07 No one can prioritize it. Well, you could do all that right, but you don't design any bets and can't ship anything. Oh, that's kind of a problem. But you could do all that right, and you don't know the impact of anything you've shipped. But you could even do all that right and not circulate the learning back in your company. And then you're still not going to succeed in these things. 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

Starting point is 01:10:30 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 are you putting? Because I worry that people are loaded up with knowledge

Starting point is 01:10:55 and feel almost, 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 company is never good enough. Like they can't empower their team. You know, they just can't follow anyone's advice.

Starting point is 01:11:15 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's like one thing that comes to mind. Partly being responsible for some of that. is what I, my advice to people is don't feel like you need to read everything coming across your plate. It's instead wait for the moment when you need that thing.

Starting point is 01:11:43 Like, I'm working on SEO right now. Cool, I save that thing about SEO. I'm going to go do it. Just like adjust in time learning because you learn it so much better than like, oh, shit, I have to load all the stuff in my head in case it becomes useful. Absolutely. And I think one thing you think of is think about the podcast 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 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.

Starting point is 01:12:14 I know pricing. 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 believes that they're going to figure everything out for themselves and it's just like no it's

Starting point is 01:12:47 actually a thing pricing is a thing or you know what meeting design is a thing there's people 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 lecturer. Like, when you were 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.

Starting point is 01:13:17 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 there when you need it, you know, like find someone. way to store it, save it, maybe even just assume Google will find it for you. One more question along that same thread is you talk about the importance of going through these loops. At some companies, you just can't really. The company moves slowly. It's super waterfall. They plan really long.

Starting point is 01:13:43 Do you have any advice for someone that's like, oh, I want to go through loops more often. This is really good advice. 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 shit. 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?

Starting point is 01:14:17 Write the one pager. Go and talk to that executive and say, look, I know you've told me to do this, but 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.

Starting point is 01:14:32 Hey, nothing's 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 going to build the thing. Like, you've gone through the motions for doing it. And I think people underestimate that. Because the environments are kind of feel like stullifying, I guess is one word, or like stilted, you know. And so 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

Starting point is 01:15:00 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 fucked up. I worked at a messed up company. You can curse. It's all good. Yeah. Well, yeah. So I worked in a messed up company who is all shit. 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 shit show too. I've talked to plenty of them that are shit 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.

Starting point is 01:15:40 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 going to 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 the way it is. And your point about how like top tier companies can also be messed up and everything could be going to shit is like very true, especially a hypergrowth company where you're 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 just has to be that way.

Starting point is 01:16:19 I would say that one model that I use is the sort of the chronic and acute challenges of the company. 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 no, 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.

Starting point is 01:16:58 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 the share price hasn't necessarily reflected it,

Starting point is 01:17:24 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 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

Starting point is 01:17:44 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 were going to 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?

Starting point is 01:18:25 It might be like the ability to model problems, systems thinking, decision making under conditions of uncertainty, facilitation tools that you have, like the ability to look at a competitive ecosystem and maybe see a thing. And yeah, maybe there's a little bit of sense to it. 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 to be like, you have a product mindset or you don't. A great example.

Starting point is 01:18:58 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 says 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 crazy it's like it's so easy to go down the path of being like well there's can people and should people there's high agency people and low agency people

Starting point is 01:19:42 There's this person and that person. It's much more interesting and go and be like, yeah, may there might be a little bit of a personality component to it. But what skills is 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 and 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 to do that.

Starting point is 01:20:08 And yeah, I've got like, yeah, there's a bunch of other things, you know, like the diverse perspectives, diverse mental models, maybe working with someone like you to like 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'd love them to be able to like have role models like that.

Starting point is 01:20:40 Like highlight people that aren't like on Twitter that are doing the work. Yeah. And not like me or not like, you know, any of the particular people where they can say, wow, that leader, you know, I was speaking to someone recently, I wrote about this in my, my newsletter. And she was just sort of forlorn. She was like, I follow these people in this space. And I know what my beliefs are.

Starting point is 01:21:07 And I know that that person has beliefs that I'm not. not sure vibing with like completely. But the message to me is the only way to get ahead 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,

Starting point is 01:21:47 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 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

Starting point is 01:22:23 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 going to 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 pieces of advice. Yeah, I'm obsessed with the writing, obviously.

Starting point is 01:22:58 And I think a bit of background about me is like, you know, I was pretty involved in music and songwriting. and it was similar kind of thing. I just liked writing lots of songs. Like, I like that there's a certain, like, buzz you get when you're creating and then you, in the case of music, it would be like you record the demo and you get it out there.

Starting point is 01:23:15 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 kid's finally asleep, and it's like one in the morning, and I've got to write this post. And so sometimes it comes off as being like a little bit rough

Starting point is 01:23:31 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 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, Keneffen, which is like a way to understand the systems and decision-making problems you have. 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

Starting point is 01:24:11 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 any sense. 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.

Starting point is 01:24:50 So the idea is that at first we know nothing about ourselves. And then the next level is that we 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 to be able to do that. So an example is I remember talking to executive and they're like, people only stay because of their managers and because of their money. That's it.

Starting point is 01:25:11 And I said, everyone? They said, yes. Do you believe that? Yes, because everyone believes it. It's a physical law of life. And here I am like, oh, my God, I join a company because of the mission of company or whatever. So they're kind of stuck down like second level, you know, where they believe that.

Starting point is 01:25:27 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, I had this whole blog beforehand that I did it.

Starting point is 01:26:08 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. It's different model. 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 1 a.m. 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 doing those, you know, sharing those things and doing that.

Starting point is 01:26:50 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. He's like, you're writing about amplitude. I'm like, no, dude, I'm not writing about amplitude. 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, like Craig's going to read that to do that particular thing. But I can, what I'm really excited about is that part of my job will be involving doing a lot of writing and 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 an education every day. So I'm hoping to maybe get that inspiring my work in different ways. Amazing. I imagine you might rename your new letter, the beautiful mess, slightly less messy. Yeah. Jam and toast. The jam and toast decision. The addition. Yeah, there we go. 2020.

Starting point is 01:27:51 Also, as you were talking, I imagine a chat GBT3 type chat bot powered by John Cutler content could be something to try. Oh, it could be a funny. Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of obsessed. I like the chat GBT thing because I like having things like having a developer inspired by Hemingway debate, a developer inspired by Tolstoy, discussing how to resolve a Git issue. So that's what I've been obsessed by lately is like when you know how chat GBT works, you can. actually make it do really funny things. And back to the worldview things, it's actually really effective. This is a very actionable tip.

Starting point is 01:28:29 Like if you feel you're heavily grounded in, let's say the, I 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 worldviews. And it'll be like, you'll get the humanist view and you'll get the humanist 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.

Starting point is 01:28:51 That is awesome. We check the checkbox talking about AI. Very hot these days. Yep. Score. One final question before we get to our exciting lightning round. I'm going to come back to the questions that folks asked you on Twitter. And there's a question that I saved up.

Starting point is 01:29:08 And the question it was by Jeff Fedor. And his question, T, 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 gig. Like, I wrote this blog post made it probably six years ago called, you know, how to know you're working in a feature factory. And I've always disobeyed my jam, you know, the outcome, like outcome and impact-focused thing.

Starting point is 01:29:39 So it's not like I've really had to like hide anything. And, you know, so one thing I could say is like the power of qualitative data. But even Spencer says that too. You know, he's talking about like early on and. 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 country. 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,

Starting point is 01:30:09 like, 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 big project. And again, I don't think it's too controversial internally, but I think I might have been much more 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,

Starting point is 01:30:46 but 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,

Starting point is 01:31:09 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 let'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,

Starting point is 01:31:26 I don't think that people at 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 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.

Starting point is 01:31:41 Great answer. Also actionable advice. How about that? Yeah, I can do. You just need to find it. It just send me a message and say, do you have the actionable advice for it? I probably do. I just maybe didn't have to learn to organize it.

Starting point is 01:31:53 Good tip. You're going to 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 going to go through them, whatever comes to mine. Fireway. Are you ready? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 01:32:06 What are two or three books that you recommend in most to other people. Yeah, this one was pretty easy because they are fairly similar 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.

Starting point is 01:32:34 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. That's all really good. 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 unscernation.

Starting point is 01:33:08 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 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 adopting the exact metrics that everyone has and doing that. The second one, I think, would probably be accelerate. So Nicole Forsgrin,

Starting point is 01:33:42 Jean 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,

Starting point is 01:33:56 I don't know, it's been out for a while now, 10 years. They did the, the Dora report, which was like their, their yearly report

Starting point is 01:34:02 where they did big surveys, like 10, 20, 30, 40,000 people responding to it. Nicole, Forestryant's 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,

Starting point is 01:34:21 Google bought door. I don't know exactly how all the parts like came to 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 culture elements to it, but then also like the practices and things that you're doing. 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

Starting point is 01:34:54 improving your development practices and things you're doing. And then I think probably the last one, man, I just love this book, 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 us pretty basic, straightforward method to do it.

Starting point is 01:35:22 But I tell you, I'll go into companies, like, a year after they had Jeff in and, like, learn 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. journey map with a couple like sticking 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

Starting point is 01:35:44 idea, but it will teach you a lot about product when I do that. So those are like three that come to mind. Killer suggestions. I love, I love answers that of 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 void, you know, I've got a four-year-old. I don't really spend a lot of time. I'm the 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 like, I will just like listen to some, I'll like binge things those, but I do really like, 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

Starting point is 01:36:27 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 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,

Starting point is 01:36:44 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 good. Awesome. Jason, we'll love hearing that. Next question. Favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?

Starting point is 01:36:57 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. That's really good. And then there's this animated series called Buba.

Starting point is 01:37:09 And he's this, like, funny guy. I like Buba and somebody. Great. I'm sure these will be useful to families. Hardcore product movies, you know, like, really, like, that's going to, like, up your game a lot. Yeah, I'm sure there's something to learn. Two more questions.

Starting point is 01:37:26 Favorite interview question that you like to ask folks? Oh. 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 with the team to do it. And you would go through it and then you'd answer it. And then maybe in the process of doing that, you mentioned someone you work with.

Starting point is 01:37:57 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. To 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

Starting point is 01:38:33 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 taught 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 they were just everything's better. and when you don't, like, everything falls apart. So just, like, have snacks with you. That's basically the advice that I have to people. Very practical.

Starting point is 01:39:05 Look at you, actionable advice left and right. Yeah, you got it. John, and I feel comfortable calling you John now. I feel like you just got to know you. You're just like a John now. 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.

Starting point is 01:39:22 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, too, 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 Cuttlewood at LinkedIn. Yeah, I think what I would love to hear from people is just, you know, send recommendations of people we should hear more from. I think that would be like, I think that would be really helpful. 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

Starting point is 01:40:07 new adventure that you're on. And I'm excited to maybe follow up maybe in a couple of years of just like what you've learned from this next phase of life. I really enjoyed the show and thank you for having me. Awesome. Thanks, John. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, 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 lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess)

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