What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess)

**John Cutler** (0:00)
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 place, but you're not going to go super far. You're not going to go from a process-driven, meritocratic, XYZ 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 like, I think it starts with self-awareness. And then that's like, that's how people form their authentic leadership vibe. And then they flex a little bit and then they embrace other perspectives.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:49)
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 experience as building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today my guest is John Cutler. John is one of the most prolific, beloved, and long-time 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.
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John Cutler, welcome to the podcast.

**John Cutler** (4:21)
Yeah, thanks for having me Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:22)
I kind of know you as John Cutler. I feel weird to call you just John.
Do you find that to be true? And also do people call you John Cuttlefish because of your Twitter handle?