John Cutler is currently the head of product education at Amplitude. An important part of his job is to act as a consultant to product teams that use Amplitude; over the course of his entire career, he’s seen and helped hundreds of product organisations.
Moving this reply here, from the Weekly Experiments thread:
There’s no problems splitting ACTA into multiple sessions. 
In fact, that’s what I’m intending to do with my next session (which is with a Judo coach, on video analysis — which makes it easier to do a simulation interview, since I only have to find a set of Judo videos for him to analyse!)
The other thing that I should add is that I used Otter.ai to create a recording and transcript of our sessions, and then I cleaned that up and relistened to everything before handing the notes over to Cutler. This was very time consuming — perhaps more time consuming than the call itself.
One point of feedback on this - I found it very difficult to read through this article based on the way it was laid out (in the table with non horizontally justified columns) . I don’t know how else you might approach it, but there has to be some way to increase readability.
I hear you on this — I was trying to capture the actual output format of the ACTA process (which requires three different tables).
The other bit of this is that John had final say on the formatting and content of the post, so I’ve kept to his wishes.
I’ll give this a rethink when I do my next ACTA post.
I thought this diagram was pretty profound:
(Note: high WIP is considered bad. I didn’t realise the implications on team task allocation before.)
Follow up: https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-3652-looking-at-example-boards
This is insanely good stuff. If you’re in a product org, or you have some org design skills, you don’t want to miss this. This is basically like an NDM style cognitive training program.
@cedric at the end of this post you referenced self study material from CTA - was it worth the investment? I don’t recall seeing it referenced anywhere after this post
My take is that it’s ok, but not as good as actual practice. Or, to put this differently, I had actually all the information I needed to put CTA to practice (and whatever information I didn’t have, I could’ve gotten through books).
But the high order bit is just putting the sheer number of hours needed to get good, and I didn’t do that:
“yeah, that’s fair. it probably took me a good 40 hours to get passable (i had a lot of time on my hands during quarantine)”
https://x.com/mattgoldenberg/status/1768806544785781213?s=20
Thank you for that insight. I’m interviewing for a Director of Product Operations role at a 400 person startup, so I’m going back through some of my favorite posts of yours mining for ideas. The John Cutler article was a really relevant one (especially his thoughts on WIP which is crippling my team at my current company), as is all the data driven operations content that I’ve been obsessing over for the last year. Appreciate all you do!