John Cutler · 8 min read · Product Strategy
TBM 416: Investment Stewardship (As Habit)
Read the original on cutlefish.substack.com →
This TBM 416 installment argues that understanding the return on product and engineering investments is a habit built through consistent stewardship and a mix of qualitative and quantitative signals, not a one-off calculation. It criticizes vanity metrics, misaligned benchmarks, and cold-start thinking, and emphasizes that value emerges from disciplined focus on outcomes, leadership, and thoughtful resource allocation over time.
Key Takeaways
- Investment ROI is a discipline of behaviors, not just math or spreadsheets.
- Avoid vanity metrics and irrelevant benchmarks; prioritize outcomes and leading indicators.
- Cold-start thinking fails; invest in outcomes from day one and align leadership with capital stewardship.
- Over-hiring and misallocated focus waste value; nurture teams and concentrate on high-leverage work.
- Balance qualitative and quantitative data to guide decisions about what to build, when, and for whom.
Excerpt
I made this little skill if anyone is up for giving it a try. It is based on some prior posts including TBM 320: From Fluffy Concepts to Concrete Outcomes & Behaviors . I’d love your feedback. Every company eventually asks the question: “What are we getting from our engineering investment?” And it almost always goes sideways. There’s finger-pointing. There’s fear. There’s weird math that nobody believes. People retreat to flow metrics because the real question is terrifying. Or they fixate on near-term revenue contributions and vanity metrics. They reach for benchmarks like “revenue per engineer” without any sense of…