The Punk PM #59

Hey there, punk!

So last week's newsletter—the one comparing product managers to record producers—got a bit of a response.

Page views were up 500%, and the LinkedIn post I put out to promote it had north of 200 likes last time I looked. Usually I'm happy if I get 20.

Here's the thing though: was it actually any better written than usual? Honestly, I don't think so. A lot of my recent posts (on restraint, on constraints, on wisdom over knowledge) have felt like nice pieces of writing. So why did that one blow up and the others didn't?

And that got me thinking, because it's the same puzzle we've got with product. We like to pretend we can predict this stuff: whether the thing we're building will land, whether users will actually care. But the truth is we've no real idea until it's out there in people's hands.

Let's dig in.

Quote of the Week 🙊

Insight 🦉

Topper Headon got to the studio first. The others were late, so he sat at the kit and built "Rock the Casbah" on his own to kill the time. Drums, then the piano, then the bass, the whole spine laid down before anyone else showed up. A doodle. Something to do while he waited. It walked out of those Combat Rock sessions as a single and became one of the biggest things The Clash ever put out. Sitting on a record they'd genuinely sweated over, and outrunning most of it.

Oasis' "Supersonic" was the same sort of story. Booked in to cut "Bring It On Down" as their debut single, Noel Gallagher wrote something else while the rest of the band were eating Chinese. It took ten minutes. They recorded it there and then, and released it instead. The went into the studio with a plan, but the plan went out the window as soon as the band realised they were onto something better.

Neither song was sweated over. Both were the product of messing about with the tools to hand and being awake enough to notice when something worth keeping fell out. That's not just a nice aside about rock and roll. It's the mechanism—and it's the one we keep trying to engineer out of product.

Because we do the opposite. We interview, we size the problem, we build the RICE score and the business case and our confidence matrix, we ship, and then—nothing, or everything, and none of the prep reliably tells us which in advance. You can shift the odds. You can't name the winner. And the harder we plan, the more we mistake the plan for evidence.

What I've come round to is that play isn't the warm-up before the real strategy. Play is the strategy. Not aimless—you still point it at something interesting—but you find your hits by making a lot of things quickly, putting them in front of people, and watching what happens, not by trying to reason your way to certainty at a whiteboard.

A band doesn't plan a hit single. They cut forty things and one of them turns out to be the one. The skill isn't trying to figure it out in advance. It's staying loose enough to write it and sharp enough to know to release it.

The AI era has turned this from a nice idea into the only sane approach. What's buildable is changing faster than customers can say what they want, so the gap between your research and reality is widening even as the research gets better. The studio beats the boardroom now. When you can stand up a working version of something in an afternoon, the cost of trying has collapsed—and when the cost of trying collapses, the team that tries the most things wins.

And this is the part that should take the fear out of it: play your way to a miss and you haven't failed, you've got a first cut. You remix it. Rework it. Fix the bit that didn't land and send it out again. A launch that flops isn't a final release, it's an early take. That's a completely different way of thinking to the one most of us were trained into, where a dead launch is the end of the story rather than the start of it.

We were taught to plan our way to the answer. The work keeps telling us to play our way there instead. Topper wasn't chasing a hit at that kit. He was just early, with the right tools and some time on his hands, having a go.

Action 🚀

Next week, take the idea you've been researching to death and put a rough version in front of real people. A prototype, a mockup, a fake door, a landing page. Whatever you can stand up quickly.

Then watch what your customers do, not what they say. That signal beats another fortnight of planning.

Inspiration 💡

I Spent 6 Hours Writing the Spec. I Built the Prototype in 1 – Sriram Kothandaraman does the sum the rest of us are dodging: the spec took six hours, the prototype took one, and the prototype taught him more. When building is cheaper than describing it, the doc stops being preparation and starts being procrastination in a smart jacket. Stop writing about the idea. Make the thing and let it fail faster. Read more

Willingness to Look Stupid Is a Genuine Moat – Sharif Shameem argues the real barrier to good work isn't taste or talent, it's the fear of the bad first draft. Every decent idea turns up looking daft, so the people who ship anyway simply get more shots at the one that lands. The moat isn't being right. It's being willing to be publicly wrong. Read more

The Wall – George Kedenburg III is the necessary check on all this. AI makes the messing-about instant, sure — but you still hit a wall that no amount of fast prototyping clears, because the wall is taste, and taste you have to earn. Play gets you moving. It doesn't get you good. 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