John Cutler

dang, time flies ... 10 years later. 12 Signs You're Working In A Feature Factory, 10th anniversary. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-445-th...

Most personality frameworks attempt to describe relatively stable tendencies. But what you actually care about at work is more like: “What will this person do in this specific kind of situation, with these incentives, norms, power dynamics, and constraints?” cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-440-th...

Have you ever felt like a weirdo in your company? Like there are only a handful of people who “get you”? Or have you gone to a conference and gotten a little confused bc suddenly it seems like you have a lot more in common with everyone? Then return to work... cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-438-th...

The right but early club... cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-438-th...

I started posting on Twitter in 2015 Wrote 69,497 tweets, 1,572,552 words 43,457 were non-thread replies 90,157 DMs with 2,875 ppl Total likes 1,264,180 Total retweets 201,093 I posted 11,153 pics replied to 8,543 people 122,689 ppl followed along The stopped johnpcutler.github.io/cutlefish-th...

"return on tokens" .... cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-437-to...

This is all to say that time is WEIRD. It always feels too long, and too short. There are always opportunities to work smaller, and there are always situations where working small misses the “bigger picture”. But here’s a bit of philosophy: life is only happening NOW. substack.com/home/post/p-...

If what you are mapping is incoherent, don’t fall in love with the map (or your personal ability to navigate with it). Use it to refactor what you see. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-434-ho...

Other bets never prove much value at all. When the team keeps building anyway, the product moves right w/o moving up, turning a cheap experiment into an expensive obligation: the build trap. Liquidation is not necessarily failure. Refusing to liquidate is... cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-430-in...

If you love what you do and want to keep doing it, you’ll need to figure out how to detach from using the workplace as a proving ground for your worth. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-429-ho...

AI can be your scribe, your thought partner, data-stitcher, or your counselor. And AI can be your consigliere, your spin doctor, or your propagandist. Team superpowers. Or Orwellian Ministry of Truth. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-428-ye...

BOTTLENECK! cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-427-th...

The language sounds like “this is for your growth,” but the structure (and any halfway sensible reading between the lines) says “this is for our Q3 goals.” They’re co-opting a personal journey for organizational benefit and calling it empowerment. substack.com/home/post/p-...

And once you are pulled in, you are more likely to escalate the situation. You may push harder, read resistance less generously, over-identify with the pain, reach too quickly for a practice, turn disappointment into anger, cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-424-wh...

Some of the same people who benefited from riding the ZIRP wave to safer places of leadership are now waxing, not very poetically, about flattening orgs, 10x engineers, getting into the details, reducing bureaucracy, and getting closer to the work. cutlefish.substack.com/p/ai-wont-sa...

"The founder stays involved because the context lives in their head. The team never develops that context because the founder is always there. The founder concludes they must remain involved. " cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-422-ex...

context is produced through our interactions... www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhUh...

So four buckets: bad ideas AI makes worse, good ideas AI can supercharge, genuinely new things we haven’t imagined yet, and the meta-skill of reading context that ties it all together. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-420-th...

recommends tbm posts .... github.com/johnpcutler/...

But humans aren’t ants. We have more to convene about than which path to take. The trails are the traces we leave for each other: context pointers, shared docs, evolving principles. The quests are the purposeful work we do together cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-418-ca...

And I want to make a passionate plea: before your organization goes off and fires all of its “glue people” on the assumption that AI can pick up what they were doing, please stop and think about what those people were actually doing. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-417-be...

change lenses and actions... give it a go! github.com/johnpcutler/...

I have no idea what this ... but it was fun! johnpcutler.github.io/rightwords/i...

Legitimacy, by contrast, determines whether that control is accepted as justified. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-414-le...

I built my dream talk prep "app" ... with all the dumb quirks I like

"Links to everything and anything, and those links go everywhere (Miro, dashboards, Jira tickets, other docs, call recordings, etc.). The pool of artifacts is ever-expanding" cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-411-me...

The work of product leadership isn’t simply defining the problem and handing it to the team. It’s creating the conditions where people can engage with the situation from multiple elevations and perspectives. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-410-da...

I'm so sick of things being dead. And quiet (but not).

cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-408-ba...

Three kinds of juggling... cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-407-th...

In AI discourse, “context” is increasingly framed as the new source of truth. It’s a familiar and seductive idea that if only enough information can be assembled and surfaced, clarity and control will follow. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-406-se...

"context engineering"

Techno-authoritarian thinkers elevate centralized, algorithmic control above humanistic complexity. People who bought into these areas (with their wallets and political donations) are on product podcasts talking about how great everything is. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-405-ho...

We want to believe, in our bones, that if we could just understand where all the energy and time is going, it would unlock newfound confidence and certainty. But as with many seductive things, the truth invariably feels just out of reach. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-403-th...

​Below, I take a journey across companies at different stages of evolution. I explore the competing mental models, what is important, and how perceptions shift. It is not an attempt at a linear model or a maturity model, but rather a narrative device. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-402-th...

A few years ago, I read an article from @johncutle.fish and @tomdkerwin.bsky.social on how leaders navigate uncertainty and ambiguity. It inspired me to write my answers down to a new section of questions every few years. This is part two! It's been fun to look back and see my thinking mature

With a vineyard, any rebalancing of the vineyard portfolio involves multi-year, largely irreversible changes to the land, vines, labor model, and production cycle. www.linkedin.com/pulse/spm-me...

Burning Down the House Too Much Time on My Hands Everybody Wants to Rule the World Just Enough Is Never Enough Running on Empty Dreamer Slow Ride Someday Never Comes The Logical Song Takin’ Care of Business cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-399-10...

Need a bit of help to improve this, and maybe this is helpful as is! cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-397-th...

The layers are not steps toward a single, correct explanation. They are ways of seeing the situation from different angles, adding context and constraints. The goal here is not to fully explain the situation, but to act more thoughtfully within it. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-396-so...

It’s all bets, opportunities, and BAU until someone loses their job. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-395-wo...

As a facilitator, I always like to run a quick confidence straw poll on items once you've taken a first pass at urgency, value, and duration: johnpcutler.github.io/prioritizer/...

I made a little prioritization tool johnpcutler.github.io/prioritizer/...

The basic idea is this. So much becomes clear when you actually label the relationships between things. It’s something I do every day, and I do it very naturally. But it is not something everyone does naturally. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-393-wh...

I'm getting out of tech and starting an accessory company

How and why tools matter... youtube.com/watch?v=qcAH4x0e4XM&feature=youtu.be

The challenge with anything this nuanced is that some people lack the experience to understand it. For example, many people perceive product management’s role as running a functional feature factory, and nothing more. www.linkedin.com/pulse/functi...

TL; DR, if you keep tilting at windmills around empowerment, autonomy, being “problem first”, or any of these broad industry memes, you are probably missing (a big part of) the actual challenge and opportunity in your company. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-391-yo...

Simple!