John Cutler: evaluation

Transcript context

…That is wild. You're basically like a free product coach for product team. You just come in, help them uplevel the way they build product, and then Amplitude becomes... You need to figure out how to work with data, Amplitude can help you be more data informed. I imagine that's kind of the general idea. Yeah, it's funny, I joke with our professional services team. I mean, so if you're a SaaS company, I think sometimes you have a professional services team. At Amplitude, especially the way that we saw that is companies put money in and that sort of creates skin in the game. They're really paying you less for the professional services and more for the accountability and the access to the expertise. So, I would joke with Jenna from that team that maybe we should have monetized all these workshops. I know Gibb and other people, they're charging 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. In the middle of the pandemic at one point we were like, "What are we going to do? We can't travel for workshops." And I would put in my newsletter, "Hey, anyone want a workshop?" And then suddenly, our sales team, we had to grapple with what are we going to do with these 120 leads, how are we going to work with them. It was funny having to deal with it. But yeah, in general, this is a unique role. I would definitely consider a SaaS company's think about a role like this, but it's really nuanced. We can share some links later as I reflected on what we did right and wrong, but ultimately, I think you shouldn't rely on individual people. You should think of evangelists as almost like concentric circles of your community and some people who just happen to have more expertise. Look, our internal team's amazing, Ibrahim, Justin, and Abbie, and when Sandhya was at the company, and just, everyone's an advocate. Everyone's a potential evangelist. It's just that there's only so many hours in the day. So, you could think of your community as just these concentric circles of evangelists and advocates. It's just like how you design it right that does it. So, yeah, 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 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 of how many companies have you worked with, how many product managers do you think you've spoken to in this career.…

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