S1E5: Navigating the Beautiful Mess with John Cutler
In this episode of “Productly Speaking”, we discuss John Cutler's journey into product management, his contributions to the product management community through The Beautiful Mess, and his thoughts on self-gaslighting and the doubt loop. We also talk about his audience, where he finds his inspiration from, his thoughts on getting started creating content for the PM community, and the different voices that are already out there. This is an exciting discussion that's like drinking a large cup of bulletproof coffee with a side of wisdom, resilience, and a dash of humour.
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Quotes
“This relationship people have with their current employer causes a lot of people to share overly generic things. They don’t feel like they can talk about specifics, unless their company happens to be a company that welcomes people talking about specifics. And what that means is we have this sort of Instagram version of product management.”
John Cutler
“There’s just like this leadership industrial complex, it’s this almost toxic stoicism of bite your lip, don’t complain, it’s just you, you can self-improve your way out of it all the time.”
John Cutler
“It’s ok to have fun.”
John Cutler
Resources
John Cutler
John Cutler focuses on the messy overlaps and patterns of product—The Beautiful Mess (the title of his newsletter). Until recently, John supported product teams at Toast as Senior Director, Product Enablement. Prior to Toast, he was a product evangelist and coach at Amplitude where he interacted with diverse product teams and product leaders from around the world. There are few people in the world that have this kind of exposure, and if you follow John’s writing over the last couple years I’m sure you can see the influence of this perspective. He has a background in product management and UX research, including B2B SaaS companies like Zendesk, Pendo, and AppFolio, and before that B2C, ad-tech, banking, and media. John is a prolific (or some might say obsessive) writer, with almost a thousand posts spread across various newsletters, blogs, and Medium.
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