The Best of John Cutler
8 most popular John Cutler articles, as voted by our community.
I like the beautiful mess of product development.| newsletter: https://cutlefish.substack.com/
John Cutler on Business Ideas
TMB 5/52: Powerful Ideas > Perfect Measures
Powerful ideas, imperfectly measured, are more useful than perfect measures for not-so-powerful ideas. Example: The goal of your business is to transform how other companies do business. "That happens…
John Cutler on Product Management
TBM 17/52: Decision Making vs. Decision Understanding
Big thanks to @ChrisSpalton for the review and drawings! Two anglers wade in a river. One-hundred meters from each other. They complete each other's thoughts. I cast here. You cast there. I move here.…
«Decision drift is when you decide something, but then your commitment drifts. Your team feels they are going back to the drawing board often»
TBM 55/52: Making a Model (Step-by-Step)
A quick work update—I'm leaving Amplitude after a fantastic run. What an amazing team and professional (and personal) adventure. I wrote a brief reflection here (on LinkedIn). As TBM readers, you've…
«To get warmed up, I start brainstorming inputs and outputs—first from the input to output direction and then from the output to input direction. »
John Cutler on Software Engineering
TBM 212: A Problem vs. The Problem
Unexpected time to write today… (I wrote a post about Product-Reality Fit yesterday). Have you ever been in a discussion about the definition of a problem and found the whole conversation going in…
TBM 214: From Assumption to Next Step
I used to do a lot of assumption mapping and elicitation exercises. One of the significant challenges was what to do with all of the discomfort and anxiety-inducing assumptions. Teams understood the…
Popular
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TBM 27b/52: Why Most Strategies Lack Clarity
NEW: Check out my three (free) Miro templates: Competitive Analysis, Can / Should, and Mandate Levels. If you’ve read TBM for a while, these will look familiar! Please send feedback. A big thank you…
TBM 49/52: Pyramid of Leadership Self/Other Awareness
How can you work more effectively with diverse individuals and teams as a product leader? We all tend to have our "go-to" explanations when things go wrong at work. A couple of examples: You can…
20 Things I've Learned as a Systems (Over) Thinker
Take care of yourself. Your brain is working overtime—all the time. Practice “radical” recovery. You may spend a lot longer thinking about things than most people. Pace your delivery. If you go deep…
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