The Beautiful Mess

The Beautiful Mess

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TBM 353: Conversation Quality and Scale
You can often "just tell" how a team (or company) is doing by listening deeply to their conversations and observing how they interact. You can also boil…
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John Cutler
2
TBM 352: Funding, Planning, and Context
This post is all about planning, funding, and context. My main thesis is as follows: In a lot of early-stage startups and companies experiencing rapid…
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John Cutler
TBM 351: The 4 Prioritization Jobs (And Why It Matters)
After all these years, I finally put something into words about prioritization.
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John Cutler
10
TBM 350: Connecting Dots
As the title of my newsletter suggests, I'm obsessed with the mess of product development. Over the last couple of weeks, I've spent a lot of time with…
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John Cutler
3
TBM 349: A "Product Transformation" North Star
What % of product teams in your company can operate fairly independently while having a clear line of impact from their day-to-day work to what matters…
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John Cutler
1

March 2025

TBM 348: Shared Understanding At Scale
Information overload, lossy models, telephone games, the lure of loops, pretty-but-mostly-worthless-cascades, and the quest for the one roadmap view to…
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John Cutler
2
TBM 347: "Why Don't Our Leaders Care About How We Work?"
John, many of your posts are about taking a thoughtful and intentional post when designing your company's operating system. I very much appreciated TBM…
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John Cutler
TBM 346: Broken Record Models
As a product manager, it is your responsibility to guide the conversation with your partners in ways that are more product-centric, and less reactive…
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John Cutler
2
TBM 345: Back On Track
In retrospect, it was like someone had flipped a switch, and I had missed it. We weren't in that transformation mode anymore. I had a lot of trouble…
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John Cutler
3
TBM 344: Context, Possibility, Intent, and Action
This post describes some core principles for designing the right mix of rituals, artifacts, frameworks, and cycles for your team or organization.
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John Cutler
1

February 2025

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