The Punk PM #44

Hey there, punk!

This week I've been thinking about what actually keeps you ahead when everyone else is racing in the same direction, learning the same tools, chasing the same edge.

Spoiler: it might not be what you think.

Let's get into it.

Quote of the Week 🙊

Insight 🦉

There's a Red Queen Effect at play in product management right now. Everyone's racing to learn the same tricks. Claude Code. AI prototyping. Prompt engineering. The discourse is relentless. PMs who aren't using AI will be replaced by those who are. Maybe. But if everyone's mastering the same tools, everyone ends up at the same baseline. You haven't differentiated yourself. You've just kept up.

The skills that will actually set you apart aren't the ones you can learn from a YouTube tutorial. Critical thinking. Real market intuition. The ability to see around corners. These used to get filed under "soft skills"; a polite way of saying "hard to measure." But they're the skills AI genuinely can't replicate. And right now, while everyone else is outsourcing their thinking to LLMs, the people who still do the thinking are building a serious edge.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about AI-generated insight: it's an average. A very sophisticated average of everything that's already happened. It tells you about the past. The future isn't in the training data.

Andy Grove understood this. In Only the Paranoid Survive, he's clear that data tells you where you've been. Your gut, your vision, your domain knowledge tells you where things are going. The product managers who thrive won't be the ones who prompt best. They'll be the ones who use AI to clear the decks, offloading their busywork so they can focus on the things that actually require insight.

AI is a force multiplier. For creative, curious people, it's a rocket. For people who were already leaning on process and ceremony to get by, it's just a faster way to produce mediocre output.

The split is already happening. On one side: PMs generating user stories at pace, confusing output for value. On the other: PMs who've reclaimed the hours once swallowed by admin and are thinking harder, seeing further, building better.

AI hasn't made the job easier. It's made it clearer.

Action 🚀

Next week, revisit one problem you've recently handed to an AI tool and solve it yourself instead. No LLM, just your own thinking.

Notice what's different. That gap is your edge.

Inspiration 💡

Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste – Kyle Chayka unpacks how Silicon Valley has co-opted "taste" as a proxy for profitable AI decision-making, borrowing the language of culture and art to paper over the fact that the technology itself has none. Read more

Software is a Coordination Problem. AI Can't Help You With That – Pavel Samsonov makes the case that software development is fundamentally a human problem; aligning people, understanding context, iterating on feedback. AI doesn't accelerate that process. Often, it gets in the way. Read more

AI is for the Easy Lifting, Not the Heavy Lifting – Dr Viktoria Korzhova argues that AI belongs in the shallow end (repetitive tasks, admin, boilerplate) freeing PMs to do the work that actually requires judgement. The risk isn't using AI. It's mistaking it for strategy. Read more

Signing Off ✍️

If this resonates with you, hit reply and let me know. 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