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- The Punk PM #25
Hey there, punk!
I’ve been thinking about frameworks this week, partly thanks to a comment from Jason Knight on LinkedIn that stuck with me.
Not because it was spicy, but because it was right.
We love to dunk on frameworks. And then turn around and praise the exact same ones when they work.
So what gives?
Let’s dig into that.
Quote of the Week 🙊
Now, there are two different attitudes towards learning from others. One is the dogmatic attitude of transplanting everything, whether or not it is suited to our conditions. This is no good. The other attitude is to use our heads and learn those things that suit our conditions, that is, to absorb whatever experience is useful to us. That is the attitude we should adopt.
— Mao Tse Tung
Insight 🦉
Pragmatism is a product manager’s superpower, but you wouldn’t know it from scrolling LinkedIn.
One minute, frameworks are the enemy—stale rituals that kill momentum and creativity. The next, they’re gospel—your only hope of building something scalable.
Truth is, they’re both right. And both missing the point.
You don’t get bonus points for being anti-framework. And you don’t automatically build better products just because you’ve got a neatly groomed Jira board.
What matters is this: are you solving the right problem in a way that delivers value for your customers, and your organisation?
If a framework helps you do that, great. If it’s just another ceremony you’re dragging your team through out of habit or hierarchy, bin it. There’s no purity test here.
Product management isn’t a belief system. It’s a practice. And good practice means knowing when to follow the playbook and when to rip it up and start again.
I’ve seen teams spend more time managing their discovery rituals than learning anything meaningful. Beautiful Miro boards, tidy insight trackers, and very little clarity on what they were actually discovering.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen others ditch formal frameworks altogether and just get obsessed with the problem.
Great PMs don’t worship process, they use it. Selectively. Strategically. Sparingly.
Pragmatism > purism. Every time.
Action 🚀
This week, drop the framework. Take one problem your team’s facing and solve it without reaching for the usual playbook.
No templates. No rituals. Just focus, context, and a bit of creative mess.
If it works, great. If not, now you know.
Inspiration 💡
How to Get Your Entire Team Prototyping with AI – Colin Matthews shares a practical playbook for levelling up your team’s AI prototyping game. From building reusable component libraries to creating slick workflows, it’s a blueprint for turning messy ideas into high-fidelity prototypes, fast. Read more
The Illusion of Thinking – Steven Sinofsky unpacks a thought-provoking paper on why AI isn’t the sentient genius we sometimes pretend it is. A sharp reminder that tools don’t think, people do. And misunderstanding that can lead us down some risky roads. Read more
How to Measure Impact in Product Operations – Lucy Pittas-Rothwell offers a refreshingly honest take on one of the toughest challenges in product ops: measuring what matters. No fluffy dashboards here, just smart thinking about meaningful outcomes. Read more
Signing Off ✍️
If this week’s issue hit home, I’d love to hear what you’ve stripped away lately, or where pragmatism helped you cut through the noise. And if you’ve got a friend or teammate who’s buried under process bloat, forward this their way.
Play it your way,
Toby