The Punk PM #52

Hey there, punk!

On the latest edition of The Inside Track podcast we got talking about creative rituals. I'd argue they matter more for product managers than half the things we actually spend our time on.

Because here's the thing: you're not going to find your next great idea in the five minutes someone's "given back" at the end of a video call.

You have to build the right conditions.

Let's dig into it.

Quote of the Week 🙊

Insight 🦉

Nobody teaches you how to have good ideas. Product management just assumes you'll arrive with them.

We get trained on frameworks, discovery processes, prioritisation models; all useful for organising thinking once you have it. But the actual generation of creative thought? That's usually left to chance. We've built elaborate ceremonies for almost every part of the job except the part that's actually the most important.

Steve Jobs said creativity is just connecting things. The more you've been exposed to, the more connections you can make. It sounds simple, but it's a description that does something useful. It separates creativity from talent and attaches it to practice instead. You don't need to be inspired. You need to have collected enough interesting material that the connections start happening almost by accident.

Copywriters have known this for years. They call it a swipe file—a private archive of things that made you stop. Articles, phrases, ideas, images. Not organised, not useful in any obvious way. Just things that landed. When I was a music journalist, I had a physical folder of cuttings: features I admired, leads I wanted to steal, a paragraph that opened in a way that resonated. I'd sit with it, let things rub together, and waited for something to spark.

I still do the same thing as a PM. It's a library in an app called Sublime now. Every Kindle highlight I've ever made, articles, screenshots, memes, half-formed thoughts jotted down while I'm watching Netflix at 11pm. My creative ritual is sitting with a coffee and browsing it. No agenda. Just letting things collide. I've wired it up to Claude Code so I can describe something that's bouncing around my head and see what my own library throws back. My past self curating for my present self.

But this only gets you halfway. The activation matters as much as the inputs. The dog walk. Ten minutes with the guitar mid-afternoon. A page of free writing before the day starts. None of this looks productive from the outside, but that's precisely why it works. You won't make unexpected connections in a back-to-back calendar. Insight needs space to surface.

The most creative people I've worked with aren't necessarily the most talented. They're the most curious, and they've built habits that turn that curiosity into something useful. They collect widely and they protect the space to let things connect.

You've got the admin rituals sorted. Don't forget to build the creative ones.

Action 🚀

Next week, find a gap in your shedule and block out twenty minutes. No agenda, no output; just an opportunity to step away from the day-to-day and get your creative juices flowing.

Meetings and busywork will always fill the white space if you let them.

Inspiration 💡

Inside the research mind behind Ryan Holiday and Rick Rubin – Billy Oppenheimer works behind some of the most original thinkers operating today. His argument: the slow, unglamorous work of deep reading and connecting ideas is the creative edge AI can’t touch. Use it to clarify sentences if you want. Just don’t ask it to think for you. Read more

Research as a Form of Pattern Disruption – Alexi Gunner on why most cultural analysis recycles the same ideas and calls it insight. The fix isn’t more signals — it’s stranger ones. Slow down, follow the unexpected, and you start finding things the internet hasn’t already flattened into noise. The interesting stuff is always where nobody’s bothered to look. Read more

Work Fixtures – Dennis Nehrenheim on why the rigid morning ritual is the wrong model for deep work. A work fixture is better: a flexible, order-independent checklist of conditions that get your brain into focus state, regardless of what the day’s thrown at you. Less ceremony. More signal. 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