Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 7recommendation 4evaluation 4preference 3uncertainty 2commitment 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
21 published records
“Yeah, this one's 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, at Amplitude the number of people who would come in like, "What are all our competitors measuring? We want to know exactly which metric to measure." And again, I'm laughing with you because I know you have these posts. Here's exactly the metrics that you should track. I really respect those posts and that's the power that you have. That's all really good. But what Hubbard reminds you is why the hell are you measuring things to begin with? It's to reduce uncertainty for critical decisions or to achieve certain objectives that you have. The reason why it's important to read that book is A, you figure out someone who's again, actionable, has thought this through. So he gives you kind of a framework to thinking about it. But B, he really challenges this idea of when making decisions in conditions of uncertainty, 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, people are like, "Product is science." It's really an art, 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... 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 Forsgren, Gene Kim, Jez Humble, 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, I don't know, it's been out for a while now, 10 years? They did the Dora report, which was their yearly report where they did big surveys, like 10, 20, 30, 40,000 people responding to it. And Nicole Forsgren is an amazing scientist. So they structure 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 Google bought Dora, I don't know exactly how all the parts came into 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 the Western topology, which is your company operating a bureaucracy or... These certain culture elements to it, but then also the practices and things that you're doing. So that's a great book when you're trying to think about, "How do I model performance?" And then it's also an amazing book because you can just literally put the stuff into motion about improving your development practices and things you're doing.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“So I really like the book How to Measure Anything, finding Intangibles or Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Marty Kagan is who comes to mind first, but I don't know if you have anyone else.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think that there's a lot more diversity than just the high performing, low performing spectrum.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“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 the power and importance of, I don't know, strong value, strong culture.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“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.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“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, there's the big smoke companies and then there's the fast nimble companies, but there's everything in between.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“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, you're definitely in the top 1% of people that have talked to and met with and seen what happens within product teams.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“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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- Lenny's Podcast
“What I find with companies is that ... and certainly we struggled to communicate this too, and I think we were pretty good at communicating where we sat on this particular thing, but a lot of times people write up these cultural documents and they're just like, "Well, this is our culture.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think kind of going back to the reps thing, I think that there's this fire hose of amazing information that's out there and I contributed to it and you contribute to it.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“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.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I like the ChatGPT thing because I like having things, having a developer inspired by Hemmingway debate, a developer inspired by Tolstoy discussing how to resolve a GIT issue.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I just wanted to shake them and just, "Sit me down with the developers at your company for three hours and let's like Hello world, a couple events here, this is, you could be getting value this whole time." And again, I don't think that people at Amplitude would disagree, but I think that that's, I wasn't going to talk about that all day because that would be sort of belittling customers who do want this big implementation thing.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“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.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“There's a company here in Santa Barbara called AppFolio that I like working at, and I really 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.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“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 and be like, "I don't know what we're with doing.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I love the fact that people scan the market and say, "People want to know about prioritization and so I'm going to tell the world about prioritization.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I would say that one model that I use is the sort of the chronic and acute challenges of the companies.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“There's top tier companies, there's second tier companies. So, there's this very hierarchical view, and as I started to also dig in more into the stuff in 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.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think what people have correctly picked up on is because I have a full-time job, sometimes it'll be Thursday night and my kid's finally asleep and it's one in the morning and I'm just like, "I've got to write this post.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast