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John Cutler: recommendation

15 Jan 2023 Lenny's Podcast What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess)

“I would say that one model that I use is the sort of the chronic and acute challenges of the companies.”

— John Cutler

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Speaker
John Cutler
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
recommendation
Recorded
15 Jan 2023
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…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. I would say that one model that I use is the sort of the chronic and acute challenges of the companies. And especially in the last year, you meet a bunch of companies dealing with the same economic conditions. And I will tell you, no, not all companies are equally dysfunctional. And no, not all high performing companies are equally beautiful in all roses. 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 those things. So it's kind of, again, both things can be true. It's like, yeah, there's nothing perfect in product. However, it is true that some companies are healthier than others. An example of that is the companies that leaned in to responding to the pandemic instead of counting the days until it was over. Massive difference. I've seen this over and over, probably with 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, but the happiness of the people there, 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 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 onto a second piece of advice.…

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