The Punk PM #55

Hey there, punk!

Something's different this week. After a year and a half as an invite-only newsletter, The Punk PM is going public. If you're new here: welcome. If you've been here from the start: thanks for sticking around.

I'm not going to make a big thing of it. The newsletter is what it's always been—one argument, one action, three links, (nearly) every Friday. What changes is who can find it.

This week's issue is about the tools you use to think. Specifically, that most PMs are using someone else's—and why that matters more than you'd expect.

Let's dig into it.

Quote of the Week 🙊

Insight 🦉

Most PMs are using someone else's tools.

Not just Jira or Figjam—the whole thinking kit. The prioritisation framework from a Medium article in 2019. The strategy template someone shared in the good old days of Product Twitter. The discovery questions from a course that half the industry has taken.

And then they wonder why their work feels like it could have been done by anyone.

There's a difference between tools you use and tools that are yours. Tools you use are borrowed—picked up because they're available, because the team already has them, because they're good enough. Tools that are yours are different. They've been shaped by your specific experience of what actually works. They carry your assumptions about what matters. They're built around the way you think, not the way someone decided a PM should think.

The best PMs I've worked with all have some version of a personal operating system. Not a methodology they've adopted. A kit they've built. A set of prompts they run before committing to a decision. A way of structuring a brief that encodes what they've learned about what stakeholders actually need to hear. A set of questions refined over dozens of interviews. Nothing sophisticated from the outside. Invaluable from the inside.

Here's the thing: AI has made this absurdly easy to start. The barrier to building your own thinking tools—prompts that work the way you work, frameworks tailored to your context, documents that encode your judgement rather than someone else's defaults—has basically collapsed. You don't need to spend weeks on a course. You need to pay attention to what's actually working and write it down.

Punk figured this out in 1976. The three-chord revolution wasn't about the chords. It was about permission. You don't have to be technically accomplished to make something that matters. Start with what you have. Adapt as you go. Make it yours.

The prompt I use to frame an opportunity before committing to it isn't the one from a blog post I read. It's the one I've rewritten a dozen times because the original didn't ask the right questions for my context. It took twenty minutes to build the first version and a year of using it to make it good. That's not a lot of effort when you think about it.

Generic tools produce generic thinking. Borrowed frameworks produce borrowed insight. The way out isn't to find better templates—it's to stop treating your experience as the thing you bring to other people's systems, and start treating it as the system itself.

The three chords are the starting point. The music is yours to make.

Action 🚀

To help you get started, I've put together a pack of prompts from my personal library. The ones I actually use, with notes on when and why.

Take one. Try it as-is. Then change the part that doesn't fit how you work. That's the whole method.

Inspiration 💡

Agent-native Product Management – Marcus Moretti maps out what PM practice looks like when AI handles the execution layer — running strategy reviews, monitoring metrics, generating inputs. Worth reading less for the specific tools and more for the question underneath it: once the process is automated, the PM's job becomes designing the system that runs it. That's a different skill set. Read more

Essential Books for Product Builders – Lenny Rachitsky shares 36 books — recommended only if he's finished them and they've held up over time. Worth scanning for the gaps in your own reading as much as the recommendations. But the more interesting point is the act of curation itself: knowing what's shaped your thinking is itself a form of operating system. Read more

How Anthropic's Product Team Moves Faster Than Anyone Else – Lenny Rachitsky's conversation with Cat Wu, Anthropic's Head of Product for Claude Code. Her hiring filter is quietly radical: she wants people who don't care where the PM/eng/design line is. At the frontier, roles are already merging — PMs coding, engineers making product calls, designers shipping. Job titles are a map; this is what the territory looks like. 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