John Cutler: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? You can nudge yourself a little bit away from your happy plate, but you're not going to go super far. You're not going to go from like a process-driven meritocratic, X, Y, Z person all the way to like I'm going to start a collectivist company where everything is sort of a consensus decision to do that. You're not going to do that. But I think it starts with self-awareness 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 at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today my guest is John Cutler. John is one of the most prolific, beloved, and longtime writers and sharers 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. 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 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. With one API, your team can add over 150 HR, ATS, accounting, ticketing, and CRM integrations right into your product. You can get your first integration into production in a matter of days and save countless weeks building custom integrations, letting you get back to building your core product. Merge's integration speed up the product development process for companies like Ramp, Drata, and many other fast-growing and established companies, allowing them to test their features at scale without having to worry about a never-ending integration roadmap. Save your engineers countless hours and expedite your sales cycle by making integration offerings your competitive advantage with Merge. Visit merge.dev/ lenny to get started and integrate up to five customers for free. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation AB testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools, or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool.…

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