The Punk PM #62

Hey there, punk!

I've been on holiday for the last couple of weeks. As always, getting away from work and clearing some headspace did something to my creativity. Even on a family holiday—mostly just hanging out and having fun with the wife and kids—I've come back with a pile of ideas I didn't even try to have. Which is a decent reminder that creativity needs change to thrive. You can't keep having new ideas in the same rooms, breathing the same air. You've got to switch things up. Even when it's uncomfortable.

Let's dig into it.

Quote of the Week 🙊

Insight 🦉

In 1971, the Rolling Stones ran. Not from the law, not from a scandal (although they'd had plenty), but from the taxman. Britain's top rate had climbed to 93%, and the biggest band in the world did the sums: stay, and the UK government took all but a few pennies in the pound; leave, and they got to keep what they'd earned. So they decamped to the South of France, parked their mobile studio outside a rented villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer, and set up in a basement that had reportedly served as a Gestapo headquarters during the Nazi occupation. Out of the heat and damp and chaos—a house full of hangers-on, no fixed plan, and more heroin than was good for anyone (especially Gram Parsons)—came Exile on Main Street. Arguably the best record they ever made.

The thing worth noting is that nobody chose it. This wasn't a creative retreat booked six weeks out with a facilitator and a flip chart. It was a forced dislocation, and it was a mess. The album before it, Sticky Fingers, was the sound of the sixties Stones signing off—polished and assured. Exile is the sound of something new clawing its way out of the dark. Two records little more than a year apart, and a chasm between them. What had changed was everything around them.

Building product isn't so different, because underneath the roadmaps and the tickets it's a creative act. And creativity doesn't feed on comfort. It feeds on friction. On being somewhere your brain hasn't already mapped so the usual shortcuts stop firing and you're forced to actually think. If the Stones had trudged back to Mick's place in Berkshire, where they'd cut most of Sticky Fingers, they'd have made a perfectly good record. Familiar rooms produce familiar work. That's not a failing, it's just how it goes.

And it's the trap most of us walk into without noticing. The same desk, the same standup, the same dashboard feeding the same thoughts in the same head. You can run a competent product roadmap like that for years. What you can't do is have the idea that breaks the pattern. Inspiration rarely arrives at a desk where everything's already working. It turns up unannounced when you're somewhere else, thinking about something different entirely.

I'm not about to tell you to expense a chateau (although that could be fun). What actually matters is smaller and more deliberate. Spend a day where your customers actually are instead of where you picture them. Borrow a problem from a domain that has nothing to do with yours—how a kitchen plates two hundred covers, how A&E decides who's seen first—and hold it up against your own. Have a conversation with someone who's never heard of RICE and would be appalled that grown adults spend their afternoons arguing about it. Any of it will do, so long as it knocks your needle out of its comfortable groove.

There's a corporate version of this that's become cliché—the offsite, the innovation sprint, the away-day with a branded lanyard—and most of it is theatre. A change of venue isn't a change of mind. The Stones didn't make Exile because the light was nicer in the South of France. They made it because they'd been ripped out of the safety of their London pop star lives and had to build something new to survive. As a product manager, you're probably not going to be forced into exile anytime soon. Which means discomfort has to be a choice. And choosing it when comfort is right there is the hard part.

Great products, like great records, rarely come from a place where everything's running smoothly. Sometimes they come from finding your own version of that borrowed basement in France.

Action 🚀

Next week, work somewhere you've never worked. A café, a library, a different floor, a train with no wifi. Take the problem you're stuck on with you, and don't try to crack it. Just let it rattle around somewhere unfamiliar and see what shakes loose.

Inspiration 💡

AI and the Romantic Fallacy – Matt LeMay makes the case that sits under this whole issue: when you let AI strip the hard, messy parts out of creative work, you're not saving time, you're deleting the bit where you actually work out what you think. The struggle isn't friction to be optimised away. It's the whole mechanism. Take it out and you're left with something fluent and hollow. Read more

The Courage to be Curious – Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist who studies curiosity, catches herself reaching instinctively for the familiar explanation—the assumption she already trusts, the thing she'd rather not question. Which is exactly the trap. Curiosity isn't a personality trait here, it's a decision you have to keep making against your own pull toward the familiar. Read more

5 Ways Learning "Irrelevant" Knowledge Improves Your Thinking and Creativity – Sam Rinko is the practical flipside: the fastest way to have a thought you couldn't have had at your desk is to go and learn something with no obvious relevance to your job. The connections that feel like insight are almost always something borrowed from a field next door. Nothing is irrelevant. 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