Octopus Careers & Throwaway Stickies with Chris Butler

Subscribe to The Beautiful Mess Podcast in your favorite podcast platform using this RSS URL: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/24711.rss

Introduction

In today's episode of The Beautiful Mess Podcast, I am talking to Chris Butler.

Chris is currently a staff product operations manager at GitHub.During his career, he's worked at companies like Google, Facebook, Cognizant, Kayak, and Waze, as well as founding the Uncertainty Project.

Chris embraces the mess like few people I've met. Defying categorization in his career path, inventing models and techniques for collaboration and sense-making, he's well versed in engineering, design and product, and figuring out how to challenge the status quo in big companies.

Somehow he manages to be a mad scientist in terms of ways of working, and have a day job. In this episode we talk about being a change agent, introducing new ways of working, embracing a persona external to your day job, and interesting stories about the Google culture and define career categorizations.

Enjoy.

Transcript

[00:00:00] John Cutler: Hi Chris, welcome to the It Depends podcast. How are you doing?

[00:01:07] Chris Butler: Good. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to say it depends as many times as possible during this podcast.

[00:01:13] John Cutler: You will not be judged for saying it depends in this podcast.

[00:01:17] Chris Butler: I have the it depends jar over here that I have to keep putting, you know, a dollar in every single time I say it on other places. So it's, it's good that this is an open space.

[00:01:25] John Cutler: And it depends safe space for sure. One thing I wanted to start out with is that typically there's things about our personal experience or how we grew up or maybe the jobs we've had, our personal context, which is our own personal It Depends. When you think about your personal experience, what are some things that stood out that have shaped how you view situations?

[00:01:44] Chris Butler: I really hate the question, at a barbecue, "Like, what do you do?" It requires me to simplify down what I am and kind of my experience around what I do down to a place that is you know, maybe not helpful.

[00:01:58] In high school I would help teach the C programming course because I was taught by another student and the teachers there didn't know how to do C programming. So I basically taught that course. I was a senior class vice president, but I ran on the anarchist ticket, mostly about how we would get like better pencil machines in the hallways.

[00:02:16] And then I was, you know, a team captain on a football team, three time All League, Honorable Mention of my Empire. And I also built red boxes and ran bulletin board systems that were like, Warez Bulletin Boards back in the day.

[00:02:30] I try not to require my identity to become one thing. Rather than like a T shaped career or whatever those other things are, like an octopus career. And the reason why I like that is because, you know, the octopus is like a very interesting neural kind of, system where it has one brain, but it also has like brains in all of its arms.

[00:02:49] I guess I've just started to allow myself to be more comfortable with having a bunch of different things that maybe unify in certain cases. And I get paid for those things or it's part of my daily job. But I think I've just always followed my interests.

[00:03:01] The anarchist kind of thread in my background or the fact that I was building red boxes or doing warez boards kind of says to me a little bit that I also have a problem with doing things within the rules sometimes. I don't think this is fair, right? Like just to be very clear, I don't think this is fair, but I feel like I have a natural distrust for leaders. I realized that there are also people, right. And there was a great post that came out a little while ago that was basically like, you will never fully love your manager no matter what, because of just the way, the way that these systems work.

[00:03:29] That's maybe something that has really formed the way I think about all of this stuff and the work that I do on a regular basis is really, it's, it's a lot about how are we pushing back on just the way things are. That's where I would say, you know, I've kind of come from and maybe that's, that's the reason why I am the way I'm today.

[00:03:46] John Cutler: I'm curious, when you start a new job do you know you've found your fellow Anarchist, you know, football captain, you know, cause certainly you could run into the football captain in the hall and say, Hey, welcome, welcome to the Anarchy Club, you were in the Anarcy Club too. And they, they might not be too happy with that statement.

[00:04:04] John Cutler: How do you know that you found your tribe when you're in a company?

[00:04:08] Chris Butler: Joining very large companies is interesting because I guess I see part of what my benefit is to people is building connections between maybe topics that don't make sense together, but also connecting and creating networks within the organization I'm in .

[00:04:23] For example, there's a group called Flux and Gale, and it was started by someone internal to Google that was all about people that are model thinkers, system thinkers, like that type of stuff.

[00:04:35] You kind of have to pretend to just be a regular person at first. I guess. When you find your other community, it's not because you want to just like be the same as everybody else. It's that you want your thinking challenged in this domain and they have the tools, the terminology, the language and the background to be able to then push you.

[00:04:54] I've been doing a lot of stuff with something called design fiction, which is really about this idea of like prototyping some future artifact. And then how do we use that in a bunch of different ways? Like I I've given a talk about like product management is product management, fiction, right? Which like everything we write as product managers is fiction at first. It just happens to be really boring fiction, unfortunately. And so like, how do we do a better job of that?

[00:05:15] But me going into like an intranet site and looking up things like design fiction, I started to find groups of people that were, you know, interested in these topic areas. And from there, I'm just have a natural like networking kind of ability that I then just reach out to people and say, Hey, I did this cool thing over here. I think you might be interested in it.

[00:05:33] So that's, that's how I ended up like finding those people is really based on topic areas, but it's not always, it's not always possible. The intranet site that runs something like GitHub is different than the intranet sites that were inside of Google.

[00:05:45] It's hard, but if you allow for that iterative exploration, you'll find the next person that is like this and, and maybe pushes you in a way that that would be helpful.

[00:05:55] John Cutler: I knew you do a fair amount of speaking external to the companies you work at. curious how the desire to express yourself externally from your companies Is that a balancing act for you so that you can balance the need to project that everywhere internally as well.

[00:06:10] Chris Butler: It's more of like an escape valve because I think like whenever we're at an organization, there are cultural expectations. There's the Overton window of what is acceptable or not. I've had previous leaders say we're kind of cutesy or like too smart or something like that. I have to try to gauge what is the Overton window for process change inside of this organization, and how do I push them a little bit so I can do more of this stuff? I think I've started to come to the conclusion, and I think a lot of people in the Wardley Mapping community also think about this, is that like, I can't use the terminology, I can't call it this thing anymore.

[00:06:42] I was talking to someone at the product ops summit in New York like a month or two ago. And they were an agile coach that had gone into product operations, which feels like a natural progression, honestly, based on the terminology of today. She was saying that if she then tries to do something like hold a retrospective for the team, especially with her current team, they would be like, no, we're not, we don't do that type of thing. We don't get in a room and just like whine at each other about how bad things are. Right. But when she says like, we just had this launch and the launch went well in a lot of ways, but not in all ways, so why don't we get in a room and let's talk about like what went right, what went wrong and what we could do better next time.

[00:07:17] I need a place to be able to experiment with these concepts. And so I use the external speaking as a place to do that. Would say that the values that I really care about personally end up being connection, right? Ends up being how do we actually discover new ways of doing things and then how do I personally learn about things. And so that type of drive for me means that these are going to be topic areas where I think they're on the edge of what is acceptability or considered to be normal or regular for these teams.

[00:07:44] And that's what drives me is it's that escape valve.

[00:07:46] Now, what's cool though, is that like when people that are part of my work come and see me talk about this stuff. They want to do more of it internally. The problem is how do we do it in a way that still allows leaders to kind of feel the culture that they have is appropriate and it's not too much of an assault on that.

[00:08:02] So I think that's the, that's the problem I ended up coming up against is that I want to do these things internally. Right. But it's not always going to be considered to be a good thing if I didn't.

[00:08:11] John Cutler: don't know if you have any, an example of something within the Wardley Mapping community, for example, that if you went down a rabbit hole, it would be the best three hours that had ever had. within Google or GitHub or whatever, if you went down that same rabbit hole in the same way, in that, in a different culture, it would not go over well. Maybe to give people like a very tangible, sense of how that would go down.

[00:08:33] Chris Butler: Well so like with Wardley Mapping, right? Created by Simon Wardley, there's a bunch of different people that, that are kind of in this community of practice around essentially how do we create value chains and then understand the evolution of them over time, right? That's the simplest way I would put it.

[00:08:46] I did a workshop as part of one of the Wardley Mapping online conferences about how you use Wardley Maps as a game board for doing strategic rehearsal or wargaming.

[00:08:54] That's the type of thing where those people are like, "Oh, wow, this is actually a very interesting way to use this map to then talk about evolution."

[00:09:00] When I did that, by the way, I did that inside of Google as part of our summit. And it was interesting because we did two different exercises as part of this. We did scenario planning where we would create basically critical uncertainty--so a two by two of like two different uncertainties, and it creates four worlds that we want to like talk about.

[00:09:16] And the people that were user researchers, designers, they really got that. They, they did a great job inside of Google to do that. The PMs inside of Google had a really hard time thinking about like uncertainty about the future. But then like we, we changed it around and I had people build their Wardley Maps and then we would have random events that would happen and then they would have to like figure out what does that mean.

[00:09:36] I think the thing that I do in a lot of these types of workshops or in these discussions, it ends up being that there's a surprise that they need to realize on their own. And so inside of this, I had felt like our strategy was not as like, well formulated as it could have been and was not communicated out in the way it could have been. And so whenever I asked for reflection at the end of this process of using a Wardley Map, people were like, you know, I was like, how did the strategy work out for you? And they were like, we are incredibly reactive.

[00:10:03] I think it's things like that where you have to sometimes just not use exactly the type of terminology you want to use, but you want to still get people to some type of transformation or realization. And so, that to me is like, maybe looking at those two different communities, like, that type of wargaming thing could have gone on for actually more hours after that with the Wardley Mapping community. Within my community, It was like a little bit like pulling teeth to get people to think about this, like uncertainty and have an imperfect map. Inside the Wardley Mapping community all these maps are disposable. You create a map and then you will throw it away essentially.

[00:10:34] Every time that I've ever done a workshop inside of Google where there's like post it notes, someone's like, "Who's going to write down all these post it notes?" And I'm like, no, we're not. We're just going to throw them all away, like, or recycle them ideally. But like, we don't need to have every single idea captured. It was about the lived experience of everybody inside this workshop that was actually meaningful.

[00:10:52] So it's like stances on what is considered to be expertise or great at something, like how certain or uncertain people are. I think it's those kinds of things inside the communities that end up being I think it's very different.

[00:11:04] John Cutler: Without necessarily revealing privacy stuff or whatever, what, what is it about the the Google culture that predisposes it to how are we going to write up all the stickies?

[00:11:15] Chris Butler: There's a lot of smart people inside of Google, right? For a very long time, the culture was around academic excellence, right? I actually, I interviewed at Google like four times before I got offered a job. And I think it was the first couple of times I got rejected because my high school GPA wasn't that high.

[00:11:28] There's like a real academic kind of smartness type of thing that's there. And so what that means is like, for people that are very smart in a particular domain, they tend to think that if they just think hard enough about something, they will come up with the perfect answer.

[00:11:40] That's not true in my opinion.

[00:11:42] This also is then related to like consensus driven decision making, which I think Google suffers from an awful lot. Where because everybody's like the other part of the culture is kind of like everybody's kind of nice to each other as well. It means that we all have to agree to be able to move forward. Because we're all super smart people, that means all of our opinions are equally weighted. And we have to converge all of them before we can move forward on anything.

[00:12:02] And so that's, those are two things I think from the culture. And again, there are benefits to those types of cultures.

[00:12:07] I would say that in the face of uncertainty, that's why we have to write down and take notes about every idea that came up because we don't want to miss a good idea that was there, when the reality is like, this was really just more of a workshop to get people to talk to each other in a particular way. And, and so I think that's, that's like a key difference, I think, and the reason why actually it's like that inside of places like Google.

[00:12:28] John Cutler: When you think about the Wardley Mapping community. So that's the flip side. Like, what's the first thing that jumps out to you?

[00:12:34] riverside_john_cutler_raw-audio_john_cutler's studio_0002: It's

[00:12:34] John Cutler: seems like it's a honeypot for a certain type of thinking or need. what, what, what about that context sort of is the flip side for that? Um, cause it attracts a certain type thinker, uh, almost by definition of the visualization.

[00:12:53] Chris Butler: I've met a lot of people inside the Wardley Mapping community that, you know, I mean, they're, they're fairly analytical when it comes to trying to understand this because some people are trying to take it into the direction where it's like, we're going to now use this map. Right. And, and you, you know, Double Loop right? Like I think Double Loop is a great example of that type of thing. They are actually trying to, in some way, mechanize these types of strategies. The honeypot of Wardley Mapping is trying to understand what is going on and then making choices about that.

[00:13:19] The antithesis to that is that we actually have to make choices together and we want to make sure that everybody's happy. How much of your organization needs to agree to a strategic direction or not?

[00:13:29] And I used to think it was like high, like you want to get everybody to agree. Then I was kind of like, Oh, well, maybe it's like 51%. You just need like most people. And then now I'm, now I'm actually of the mind that like, if you have a leader that you trust, it's actually only one person needs to actually believe in that strategy and everybody else can like decide whether they want to stay on that train or not. Basically. Right. Culture is another one. Like, yeah, you can try to change culture. It takes a lot of work to change culture, but if this culture is just not right for you, you just shouldn't be there.

[00:13:59] Ideally, right? I think there's issues with like, you know, the fact that compensation and we all have to take care of families and that type of thing that I think ends up muddying this thing. But I think that's the ideal, right? We want to make hard decisions. And I think most of the time making hard decisions is a better strategic value, but that doesn't work inside of consensus driven cultures.

[00:14:20] Like, like a Google. If we were to say to our leaders a lot of the time, like, should we do this or that? They'd say, do both. And it was because we also had unlimited resources almost, right? Search and ads are just printing money. So like all these other things we should be able to just like build whatever we want, but maybe the thing that, that Google has done really well that I loved about Google was that they don't feel bad about killing products if they feel like it's not in line. That's great.

[00:14:44] And then there was like an internal site called Meme Gen which is known publicly, but it's like a meme site for Googlers. And it's usually very scathing of the leadership. And I thought this was probably one of the most interesting cultural things inside of Google.

[00:14:58] If I wanted to understand what was actually going on with the people inside of Google, and it could be negative, a little bit negative sometimes. If I go to Meme Gen, I will understand what most of Google is thinking about, like in reality, not what we're actually talking about when it comes to, like the polished press releases and stuff like that.

[00:15:12] John Cutler: I wonder what it is about that culture that would let that type of thing emerge.

[00:15:19] it that, well, people are doing pretty well from a financial perspective and they're not going to get fired for saying something scathing? Or maybe that's changed now. Maybe you're like, yeah.

[00:15:28] Chris Butler: it's, it is changing. I mean, I think there's always a struggle within organizations about how to allow for people to have, say, political discussions internally. And so that is something. There's an article that just came out recently about how they're removing downvotes because of some of the memes that came out about like the, you know, Israel, Palestine, conflict, right.

[00:15:47] So there's things like that, that I think they're still figuring out. Now, there has been a belief that, that Googlers think that like management is trying to slowly kill Meme Gen because they don't like it.

[00:15:58] Maybe from the beginning though, too. It's like, if, if you have a lot of really smart people. That are doing their own thing. That means that you allow for this type of like hacker culture. Like that's, that's, that's the truth is, is what's going on here. And so I think as like an organization like Google that's trying to become more of like a shareholder holder value type of organization, rather than an engineering driven organization, I think that's where you start to see that change.

[00:16:22] Whereas for me, like it, it actually is very much like an engineer driven way of being is that you just build something because you felt like it was funny, right? That's where, that's where I think Meme Gen comes from, right? And there's lots of stuff like that internally that I thought was like, again, I think is, is an important part of like the culture there, but it's changing over time.

[00:16:41] John Cutler: When you see people forming strategies do you have any example of of some contextual factor that they tend to think that matters that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme?

[00:16:49] Chris Butler: One of the things I see pretty often is that people think about the plan, not about the strategy. And so we end up getting tied around the axle on like the stack ranking priority of this thing over this thing, rather than what are the rules that we're actually trying to kind of think about from this?

[00:17:07] If you look at something like your roadmap or the next projects that are being funded, look at like how many headcount, any of those things are, that is your strategy at that point. And I call it the starter strategy and kind of a, you know, it's fine. Like that's, that's the way most leaders they'll come in. They'll create this like thing, which is a roadmap. That is the strategy, quote unquote, but it's really just like a plan.

[00:17:26] That's actually something that leaders shouldn't be doing. Product leaders should not micromanage as much.

[00:17:30] And I've definitely heard this concept that people should get into the weeds and worry about it. When the reality is like, If you're a product leader, if you're there to talk about the strategy, then maybe you need to know something about how the execution will take place. And I don't want to create this false dichotomy between strategy and execution. Like every execution includes a strategy of some type. But what I really get annoyed with is like, your job is actually to build culture now or to build the team or to create incentives for practicing in a way that you want people to practice. And that to me is less about like you're helping make these little tiny decisions and it's more about like broader things.

[00:18:06] All the decisions then start being like, like led from just the leader rather than being distributed through the team, which is what we really want. That's why you should have a great strategy is because you should make the really hard decisions that people are constantly struggling with very easy. Because here's the strategy that says that we're going to do these things.

[00:18:22] When we have things like escalations happening from the people that are at the ground level or at like the practicing level where they're talking with customers and they're building things for customers. If a whole bunch of escalations happen because of this theme, it sounds like that's actually a problem your team is struggling with, and they want guidance, right?

[00:18:38] But it shouldn't be on a piece by piece basis. It should be that probably those five different things that are in the same theme, that's a strategy. And that's actually something that's really pertinent to today in making decision making, in doing decisions. We don't have enough where people are looking at the escalations to see how that modifies the strategy.

[00:18:55] And then the third kind of last thing I think happens a lot for leaders is that they don't provide the context to their organization as often as they should. We don't have as much, at least I don't see it in a way that really, I think impacts people's day to day is here's kind of the headwinds and tailwinds that I see, like over the last month that I think you should actually know because I have a different context than you. Here's what I think you need to know more about in this world. And I feel like a lot of the time when we do strategy, like reviews, it's just pushing information up in a document or a slide deck or something like that, but there's very little, like, there's no, like, what is the person that's reviewing? What are they going to provide inside this meeting other than just like saying yes or no? Like they should actually be preparing things as well about like what they think is going on with the organization. That that's what I would argue.

[00:19:43] John Cutler: When you think about the last couple of years why are we seeing this increase in people saying leaders should get into the details. Why are we saying this so often? Why is Brian Chesky saying this on an interview and, and every day on LinkedIn, someone's saying or have to be more hands on than you thought you were like, what's going on.

[00:20:06] Chris Butler: I'm sure that there are leaders that are domain experts, right? Like I, I don't, I, I totally believe that's true. Right. And, and I've, I've often gotten in trouble both internally with my teams or externally on Tik TOK about saying, I don't think product managers should be very technical.

[00:20:20] You can be a domain expert as a leader, and you can have good judgment and taste and kind of belief around things. But if you're not actually building teams that are able to be the domain experts. Right. I think that's a failure of leadership or, or a failure of building a team at the very least.

[00:20:39] Because I want to make sure that there's like, there's a difference between like being great at hiring and talent development versus leadership in a certain area versus the management mechanisms and politics and all those different things that like are balled into a manager or a senior leader type of position. I want to make sure that that's clear that like, there's a lot of different ways to be a great senior leader. I think the moment that some moment that your job is there to catch all of the failures of your team. That's probably not a very healthy relationship.

[00:21:08] That's why, like when, when managers complain that they don't get any like feedback from people, it's because that's the way that they usually are interacted with is like, you're there to make the most perfect presentation possible and any, any failure, like, you know, I've, I've heard about certain leaders that if anybody ever fails for any reason, they're suddenly unlucky and they should not be trusted with anything else. And that just sounds insane to me. You've got to be incredibly lucky. And that's like survivorship bias. Right. So then make it to that point. And maybe that's just the way that they think is the right view of the world. But I think, I don't think it is, I think it's bad for the organizations that they're building

[00:21:43] John Cutler: What are some tips to make those sessions more effective?

[00:21:46] Chris Butler: Derek Sivers has like a post that's like a two cents and it's all about the fact that a leader's two cents can be taken way out of context when the reality is it was like, just like a throwaway comment. And now someone's spun up a work stream to like figure out what this like two cent comment meant basically.

[00:22:02] Speak less. Like it's your, your job is, is there to enable teams and to help them, but not to be like the main speaker, right? Like that, that's what I would argue.

[00:22:11] The last thing is to actually believe in the systems that allow for that type of peer feedback. PMs can learn an awful lot from the way that like does great design critiques work or great code reviews happen.

[00:22:23] From those kinds of practices, you end up actually learning something much more from each other. And because there's other people there, you accelerate the learning because other people are dealing with other problems. Allowing for that type of thing and actually not only inspiring it, but actually pushing to have those things inside of your teams. I think that is what great leaders should do is they want to create as many opportunities for feedback, between their team members as possible. And they're not always going to be the right ones to do the feedback because again, there's power dynamics. There's the fear of like losing your job because you screwed up, right? Like these are things that are really visceral for people. I don't think that the leader can always do that. What they can do though is they can push for systems that allow for that type of thing and do a better job of that.

[00:23:03] I've heard this from a leader specifically that they thought that retrospectives were just whining sessions. And then they sent me a couple of articles about how HBR thought that retrospectives were bad. I get it. Like you need a good facilitator for those things sometimes, right? Like people will rat hole or they'll just want to complain or whatever. But I think overall, like having the team talk in a structured way about things is better than not doing it. Is what I would argue.

[00:23:27] And I think this is why leaders, what they should be doing more of, is actually telling people on their team why they made a particular decision. And what was the process by which they did that. And if it's just intuition, Like, I just have tons of experience in this industry and so I'm making a decision based on this. That I think is the part that we, we need senior leaders to describe more.

[00:23:44] And this is why like things like forward looking case studies, like decision forcing cases I think are so interesting is that you get everybody in a room from both junior to senior people and I would run these inside of Google. We get L3s to L7s inside of this room. They have to create a slide that is going to be for this offsite. It's very, it's a very PM activity. Right. Um, they, they have five minutes to create a slide that is going to basically frame this conversation that needs to take place.

[00:24:09] And it's really interesting because like the L3 people, they, they are like very much, okay, well, here's the traffic light grid of options and characteristics and like red, yellow, green, everything like that, the L7s they would just be like, I have two questions for this audience. It's just like question one, question two. And it's like, the discussion is what matters in that case.

[00:24:27] And what's really cool is just seeing the way that those senior leaders think about that in comparison to the junior ones. And they're not wrong or right. They're just like two different ways of looking at it.

[00:24:37] I think this is why like strategic rehearsal thing I was talking about for wildly mapping, like. Those senior leaders should not go off and do email during those summits and just have their people do these activities. They should be there actually describing how they would do this. We need leaders to present more of their expertise as well inside these things to be able to describe this.

[00:24:55] So that's why, I tend to want to have these types of containers for conversations that rather than the weekly, you know hand down of here's what's going to happen. I want the leader to be part of a game that talks about different decisions and see how different people in that room would do it because you learn about everybody's decision making capability.

[00:25:15] That's what I would say. I think those things are more helpful. I've been starting to read this, this book about LARPing live action role playing, but there's this idea of a conceit where I'm going to play this role. It's not really who I am. Right. But I may be a jerk right now or like six hats is a great example of that, right? Like one of those hats is a jerk and it's okay because that's just the way six hats work. Right. So I think like allowing for those types of things that are more exploratory, I think, actually help the entire team learn from each other.

[00:25:40] John Cutler: Back in the beginning of the podcast you talked about how you were okay with the flexibility in these particular environments. Right? Now I understand better about how you might be okay with like, uh, this is going to be improv slash, uh, we're going to do a two by two and improv and you're going to make slides and, and going to be fine with, uh, we're going to throw it all away afterwards.

[00:26:05] Chris Butler: Right. That's right.

[00:26:06] Dave Snowden. We call it acceptation. I think it's this idea of like meta or interdisciplinary thinking. I think we, we can gain an awful lot from that. And, and that's, that's what I love about this work.

[00:26:16] John Cutler: One thing I like about how you're describing this though, is that you seem. to like the theory side of it, but then you seem to like manifesting it in an actually very visceral, hands on, out in the world type way. And one thing I've noticed Is that often that duality is not something that people immediately understand, right?

[00:26:37] Do you ever get pigeonholed as being very theoretical and academic and you're like you have to raise your hand and say actually "Do you want to do an improv, uh role playing session with me? Like let's LARP. We're gonna go LARPing now." How do you communicate that duality that you seem to have to folks? ,

[00:26:55] Chris Butler: I've been definitely called very academic, like very theoretical. But what's funny too is that like with a lot of the people that if I like be coaching someone or trying to mentor them, you know, I'm asking a lot of questions because I'm trying to understand what is the context of what's going on.

[00:27:10] And, and people have said like, you know, I'll have a conversation with Chris and it's like the first 55 minutes are just like meandering. I have no idea where they're going. And then he gives me like three things to do with the 55 minute work. And it's like exactly what I needed, basically. You're absolutely right.

[00:27:24] I think like part of the product manager's job is to be a toolbox of like methodologies and frameworks, right? It's like shu ha ri from the agile world is, is what we're trying to do.

[00:27:32] I think once you get to that point where you're doing your own way. It's usually just a combination of things that have worked. I mean, I think you've said this too, about the fact that like frameworks are usually just an experts encodification of what they usually do. Right. And it worked in that moment, in that place, in that time. And it's trying to now turn it into something that anybody can pick up as a tool. But the reality is like, there's pieces of it that won't exactly work in every context.

[00:27:54] Rather than assuming that there's this process that just has to work this exact way, how do we build something that is appropriate and fit for this. And I think maybe dropping another kind of like honeypot name is probably Christopher Alexander and pattern libraries and stuff like that. The way he thinks about things is that we're going to create a beautiful place that is going to be a place for someone to live, that is situated in the environment and gives them the things that they want, like the ability to have like a great breakfast with a beautiful view or something like that.

[00:28:24] He really railed against the idea of kind of establishment of licensing for architects, the way that like architecture started to become something that was all about like the perfect way of doing something.

[00:28:34] And if it's going to be for people, you have to build things in a very special way. And that's why I think like. We need all these tools and then we have like a team, which is a bunch of just people together and we need to figure out how they work and what they, what they want to work like. And that's why those things are, but it's, it's very hard.

[00:28:49] I definitely try to do that. Usually it's just through workshops, right? It's like, that's the simplest way. Let's get in a room and we're going to format this conversation where it's not one person talking the whole time. It's all of us talking in this particular way.

[00:29:00] And so that's kind of a, just for me, that's the brass tacks of this is like conversations.

[00:29:06] John Cutler: Awesome. Well, I think that's a good way to end, actually. That's like a nice way of wrapping this up. This was a lot of fun and. I think I'm supposed to ask, you know, where are people supposed to find you? Although I think people are generally fairly findable now at the moment.

[00:29:23] Chris Butler: Yeah. I mean, I'm on LinkedIn. If people want to connect and I'd love to hear if you try anything that I've talked about, I'd love to hear how it works for you and whether it does or doesn't. The Uncertainty Project is a community of like decision makers and strategists that I think is interesting.

[00:29:36] And there's like, that's where I've been doing some, some more interesting writing about this. But yeah, just in general, just always excited to hear how people are doing their job.

[00:29:44] John Cutler: Great. All right. Thank you so much, Chris.

[00:29:46] Chris Butler: You're welcome. Thank you.

Get full access to The Beautiful Mess at cutlefish.substack.com/subscribe