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- Punk PM #2
Hey there fellow punks!
A big thank you to everyone who’s signed up for The Punk PM so far. It’s great to know so many people are interested in what I’m thinking about product management, creativity and innovation.
This newsletter is only two weeks old so I’m still figuring it all out, but I’m hoping you’ll want to stick along for the ride—the signal to noise ratio should be pretty high.
Quote of the Week 🙊
The question is no longer about whether AI is going to reshape work, but what we want that to mean.
- Ethan Mollick (Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier)
Insight 🦉
In 2025, AI will continue to transform product management as we know it. That doesn’t mean we should be fearful, though. AI isn’t coming to take our jobs, despite what all the doom mongers will have us think.
When it comes to AI, we’re conflating the ability to sound intelligent with actual intelligence. For all the hype around OpenAI’s o3 model, we haven’t reached AGI yet (and may never do).
For all their ability to write convincing strategy documents, or analyse research data, LLMs don’t have the same level of insight that real humans can bring to bear on a problem.
When your knowledge is based on the entire Internet, what you get is the average of everything ever. That can be pretty damn good, but it’s not going to be particularly innovative.
Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but true creativity comes from connecting dots in ways that have never been done before—something people, not generative AI models, are extremely good at.
That doesn’t mean we should be dismissive of AI, though. This isn’t hype in the same way as IoT or NFTs. The genie is well and truly out the bottle; we’re not ever going back to the way things were before AI.
Like the invention of electricity, AI has the potential to change the world in very profound ways. As product managers, it’s up to us to figure out what some of those ways might be.
Action 🚀
Last week I linked to Claire Vo’s Product Management Is Dead talk where she discusses using AI to automate away the busywork of product management. What time-sucking admin tasks can you delegate to a custom GPT this week so you can make room for more deep work?
Inspiration 💡
The festive break was a great opportunity to work my way through my Readwise Reader backlog.
Here are some of the standout articles I read:
There’s been a lot of conversation across social media recently about “founder mode” as an approach for management and leadership, particularly in a startup setting.
What it really boils down to, though, is micromanagement and meddling from people with limited expertise in the domain they’re parachuting themselves into (see Elon Musk and Twitter as a pretty high profile example).
Janna’s article is a must-read for product managers trying to navigate this new idiom and make sure their products stay on track.
The Death of Critical Thinking will Kill Us Long Before AI by Joan Westenberg
Joan Westenberg is one of my favourite online writers right now. Their no-holds-barred commentary on technology, politics and social media is especially refreshing.
This isn’t a product management article specifically, but it’s worth a read in relation to how we augment our roles with technology.
As product managers, we can’t lose sight of the importance of critical thinking as fundamental part of our jobs. Once we start delegating it to AI models and algorithms, then we really are ripe for replacing.
We need to make sure we’re using technology to give us more space for thinking, not abdicating from it.
This is an old one, but seeing though this is my first post of 2025 I thought it’d be worth resurfacing my favourite-ever article on planning and goal setting (which I re-read at the end of every quarter).
As a product manager in an increasingly chaotic and uncertain world, you need to keep your options open. Instead of setting rigid annual development goals, you’re much better off defining your long-term vision, then figuring out what you need to do on a quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily basis to get you there.
This approach can also work well for product teams and makes it much easier to course-correct when you need to (it’s pretty similar to Ramp’s approach for increasing product velocity which helped them outcompete their competitors with a fraction of the team).
Signing Off ✍️
If this resonates with you, hit reply and let me know how you’re pushing the boundaries of product management this week. And if you think a friend or colleague would enjoy The Punk PM, feel free to share it with them!
Play it your way,
Toby