#7: Digesting the Product Narrative Soup with John Cutler

Welcome to another episode of Supra Insider. This time, Marc and I are excited to bring you our conversation with John Cutler. 

John writes The Beautiful Mess, a popular Substack newsletter in the product community and frequently posts on LI to his 100k followers. We both learned about John’s work during his time at Amplitude, where he spent 4.5 years as a product evangelist and coach for hundreds of product teams around the globe, giving him a unique vantage point about reality on the ground in many different environments and cultures. John legitimately lives in the “matrix of product management”.

Prior to Amplitude, John held product management roles at Zendesk and Pendo, and drove UX research at AppFolio. John recently left his role at Toast, where he focused on product enablement and is enjoying beautiful Santa Barbara while exploring what’s next.

In this episode, we covered topics including:

* John’s path from product management into product evangelism and the tradeoffs of making that transition

* How the role of product management has evolved and where it might go

* Why it’s important not to follow frameworks blindly and understand the context

* The benefits writing has on John’s thinking and how consistent publishing has allowed him to build a personal brand, creating optionality in his career

* John’s take on the great feature factory vs empowered product team debate and Marty Cagan’s episode on Lenny’s Podcast

* And much more!

John is an extremely nuanced thinker and truth seeker who wants to help bring the product world closer together. We think you’ll love this conversation.

Links

* John’s LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpcutler/

* John’s blog (The Beautiful Mess):

* Elena Verna: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenaverna/

John’s post about Marty Cagan’s episode on Lenny (Product Theater):

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit suprainsider.substack.com