The Punk PM #50

Hey there, punk!

This week I've been thinking about hype cycles.

I read an article recently that's been rattling around in my head about how far tech has drifted from its supposed purpose.

Somewhere along the way, a chunk of the industry stopped finding problems worth solving and started manufacturing them instead. Identify a gap, build anxiety around it, sell the cure.

It's a good racket. It's not good product thinking.

Let's dig into why.

Quote of the Week 🙊

Insight 🦉

There's a pattern to tech hype cycles if you know what to look for.

NFTs. The metaverse. AI everything. Each one arrives with the same breathless energy, the same "this changes everything" discourse, and the same quietly growing suspicion from normal people that they're being sold something they didn't ask for. And they're not wrong.

Silicon Valley isn't building for users right now. It's building for the wealth cycle. The scale of returns that VCs need doesn't come from bootstrapped companies quietly solving real problems. It comes from hype, from forced adoption, from getting products into markets before those markets have thought to ask for them. The sequence has flipped: here's the technology, now go find a use for it.

But here's the thing: that doesn't mean the underlying technology is worthless.

The dot-com boom was a spectacular mess of bad business models, burned capital, and products nobody needed. It also laid the fibre, designed the protocols, and trained the engineers who built the version of the internet that came afterwards. The infrastructure turned out to matter enormously. We're probably in that phase with AI right now.

Even NFTs—which felt like the purest expression of tech hype for hype's sake—might have a genuinely useful application waiting on the other side of the grift: provenance. Proving that a digital artefact was made by a human, at a specific moment, when AI can generate infinite convincing fakes. As a product problem, that's actually quite interesting. Nobody's building it, because it doesn't feed the cycle.

Tech historian Melvin Kranzberg had a law worth keeping front of mind: technology is neither good nor bad, but it's not neutral either. Its value depends entirely on who uses it and how.

Which brings us to the product question. Because this is where it lands for us.

Good product thinking has always started in the same place: someone has a problem, and you're trying to work out whether you can solve it in a way that creates real value. That discipline— unglamorous, frustrating, necessary—is exactly what the hype cycle is designed to skip. The cycle doesn't start with a problem. It starts with a technology looking for one.

AI is remarkable infrastructure. Applied to the right problems, by people asking the right questions, it's genuinely transformative. But "we should do something with AI" is not a product strategy. It's not a vision. It's not even a starting point. It's the cycle talking.

The job hasn't changed. Find something worth solving. Work out whether it's real, felt by actual people, and worth the effort. Then figure out whether the technology genuinely helps, or whether you're just being handed a solution and asked to construct a problem around it.

That last part is harder than it sounds. The pressure to build on whatever the current hot thing is doesn't come from users. It comes from above, from outside, from the general noise. Staying anchored to the question the cycle never asks—does anyone actually need this, in this form, right now?—is its own kind of discipline.

Sometimes the answer is yes. More often than the industry would like to admit, it's no.

Action 🚀

Next week, when someone pushes an AI-shaped solution in your direction, write down the problem it's actually solving. In your own words, from the user's perspective.

If you can't, push back.

Inspiration 💡

Silicon Valley Has Forgotten What Normal People Want – Elizabeth Lopatto on how the industry keeps forcing tech trends on people who never asked for them. A sharp reminder that real product success comes from improving everyday life—not from finding users for your solution. Read more

'They've Pickled Each Others' Brains' – Anil Dash on how Big Tech lost the plot—and half a million jobs along the way. A candid diagnosis of an industry that chose profit and politics over the people it was supposed to serve. Read more

Boring Is Good – Scott Jenson makes the case that the LLM hype is fading for a simple reason: these models struggle when asked to be genuinely smart. The useful future isn't flashy. It's small, local, and quietly reliable. 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