John Cutler
Amplitude Analytics
Santa Barbara, CA, United States
Contact John
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Past articles by John:
What Are Vanity Metrics and How to Stop Using Them
Learn about vanity metrics. What are vanity metrics? How do you identify them? And how do you replace them with better KPIs? → Read More
Working Fast and Slow
Her team was delivering into production daily/weekly. They could have easily bragged about how “quickly” they “move things to done”. But she didn’t. Instead, the engineer pointed out that when… → Read More
10 Product Development Traps –
These are not “rules”, but rather tendencies. We seem wired to go in one direction, and have to actively offset the tendency. I’ve fallen into each of these (repeatedly) over the years, and have… → Read More
Certainty Theater –
We often reward Certainty Theater (a not-so-distant relative to Success Theater). → Read More
From Decision Maker to Decision Supporter –
Sometimes you’ll have the best idea, especially when it comes to areas requiring deep domain knowledge. Most of the time, you won’t, nor will you necessarily be the best arbiter/judge of ideas. To… → Read More
Why Don’t They Trust Us? –
Have you ever walked into your favorite restaurant, ignored the menu, and asked the chef to surprise you? What made you trust the chef? Consider how you “do business” with a carpenter, plumber, or… → Read More
The Drift Into Technical Bankruptcy –
So let’s take an org that is experiencing 50%+ drag due to technical debt. You would think that would ring alarm bells everywhere, right? It would be all hands on deck fixing the issue, right? Well…… → Read More
Is Agile the Enemy (of Good Design)? –
Like many of the approaches to design you know and love, Agile is fundamentally about frequent integration. Self-organizing teams, working directly with customers, retrospectives, daily standups… → Read More
Better Outcomes. Less Drag –
Anything that can give the athlete a reasonable shot at their goal event with LESS risk (overtraining, injury, etc.)…we try/do. For most motivated athletes, training hard is not the problem. Training… → Read More
Slack vs. Blocked – John Cutler –
Lacking context, it is easy to confuse the sensation of slack with the sensation of being blocked. This is especially difficult if the “blocker” or bottleneck is somewhere distant (e.g. customer… → Read More
A Single Prioritized List (a Story) –
The best way I could think of writing this was as a dialogue. → Read More
Value and Sequencing –
Let’s take a list of opportunities. For each opportunity I am going to describe the opportunity cost per month (Cost of Delay). → Read More
“They Just Want To Code (or Design) All Day” –
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a product manager is to assume that the developers (and designers) you work with do not care about impact and outcomes. I have heard PMs say things like… → Read More
How Does Your Company Approach Continuous Improvement?
How does your company approach continuous improvement? → Read More
Beyond “Outcomes Over Outputs” –
I often meet with teams/individuals that are eager to be more “outcome oriented” (3/4+). The reasons vary, but center mostly on 1) the belief that it will create better outcomes for the business, 2)… → Read More
40 Roadmap Item Questions – John Cutler –
A quick list of questions to use when workshopping your product roadmap, prepping for a pitch/kickoff, or quickly filtering for well-thought-out ideas. Some of these are tough…but will hopefully… → Read More
Yes, But… –
In most dysfunctional situations, everyone is (somewhat) “right”. → Read More
WIP It Real Good –
You are tasked with designing a system optimized for high work-in-progress levels (high WIP, aka “doing a lot of stuff at once”). What decisions do you make? Take a moment to think that through. OK… → Read More
We Need Fewer Product Managers –
Note 1: This post may read like an attack on product management. That is not my intent at all. I love all things product. This post has been brewing as I interact with more and more companies… → Read More
We Can’t Do That In One Sprint –
They’ll have to wire some stuff together. The table is aggregated in a new way, so that will take some thinking. They have some existing libraries for the charting, and tables, but this is the first… → Read More