John Cutler: belief

Transcript context

…What comes to mind is a very top down CEO driven, here's what we're doing, here's the roadmap. Absolutely. So this is the thing, I'm sitting there and the very idealistic product managers are like, "You got to have empowered teams and you got to push decision-making down to the bottom," and I'm like, "Huh, well that company's doing pretty well and the CEO just tells everyone what to do and in fact, they attracted people who just don't mind that and like their vision and they do it." You find people who really like the process driven approach and you find people who do those things. That's one principle done a different way. But then I'll just take a couple principles. I just wanted to get that out of the way, that every one of these I mentioned could be achieved in a couple different ways. 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. This is a structural thing, I think when there's startups, things are very fluid and the strategy's 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 the particular things. Their funding approach, their incentives, the org structure, the architecture, even their technical architecture supports their strategy back and forth. The reason why I mentioned this one is you can have brilliant teams. You meet these brilliant teams where they've just hired in the 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 knock them out of that. So what do you need? You need a strategy, then you need to line the structure around it. This is different than saying ... you're asking me 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 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 that you need to just go straight to commodity pricing like Amazon with whatever you're doing. There is just a stubborn, strongly held belief that is then balanced with their ability to have the loosely held thing. I would just observed this in meeting after meeting with these teams that seem to be having a bout of being more high performing. They would be stubborn about some things that they were doing even when it didn't make sense in the short term and then they would do that. I think that that's another thing. I think related to that when it comes to the product world is just a core belief in the power of products. make sense in the short term and then they would do that. I think that that's another thing. I think related to that when it comes to the product world is just a core belief in the power of products. The Jeff Bezos thing, that the success of today was set in motion three years ago, that product is a layer cake and that you are layering on decisions, the success you're having now is a layer cake of decisions from the last bunch of years that you're doing it. You could rationalize that all you want, but at the end of the day, it's often because either the founders or other people involved have seen how that can work because there is a leap of faith and there's a leap of faith that no amount of data or no amount of 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. I just noticed that pattern over and over that there was just a slightly irrational belief in the power of what it would take to have a nine craft level product versus a seven craft level product or six craft level product. I think that that's another component. I have a couple more in depth like that. Definitely the leadership is coherent, so that's walking the walk, talking the talk and I think this is one of the most fascinating ones because it's very much about being who you are and not being embarrassed about that thing. There are companies probably all know that outspoken, domineering believe that the company just should be run a certain way and they set this vibe, this coherent ... that their actions and words match together. When you think about it that way, it makes more sense. 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, that's not very, very coherent to do these particular things. I think that that's one, the coherent things. Okay, so you've got those high level ones. I think you can definitely add skills and experience. I mean, those definitely matter. I think one thing that happens a lot is how the company views its skills. Here's a challenge we had in Amplitude, just sharing this, is 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 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, is a pro at what they're doing and then how someone could embrace this kind of weird problem, sort of bottom-up motion, top-down motion. It's in product, it's a messy space. You need to be more strategic to do that so the skills need to be mediated obviously between the environment to do those things. Then like all the other, they know how to build software, things don't break, they can experiment without risks. I don't know. They have positive habits. I could go on and on. Hopefully this is helpful just hearing my thought process to go through these things.…

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