The Punk PM #63

Hey there, punk!

Last week I banged on about changing your surroundings to shake loose new ideas. Which is all well and good until it's a wet Tuesday, you're chained to your desk, and hopping on a train to go and think somewhere nicer just isn't happening.

So this week is the follow-up: what do you do when you can't change the room? You flip the record and find a way to interrupt your own thinking from the inside. Same goal as last week. Different method.

Let’s get into it.

Quote of the Week 🙊

Insight 🦉

In 1975, Brian Eno and his mate Peter Schmidt—a painter—made a deck of cards. Each one had a single cryptic line on it. "Honour thy error as a hidden intention." "Use fewer notes." "What would your closest friend do?" They called it Oblique Strategies. The idea was that when you got stuck in the studio, you'd draw a card and do what it told you.

Eno used it on the records that made his name, like the Berlin Trilogy with Bowie. Later it was borrowed by Coldplay and Phoenix (and plenty of others). He'd apparently hold a card up to a musician halfway through a take. Do the opposite of what you'd normally do. Treat the mistake as the plan. And the results weren't weird art-school B-sides. They were some of the best pop records ever made.

Here's the bit I find interesting. Half the cards are so abstract you couldn't follow them if you wanted to. "One of the errors is a hidden intention”; “not building a wall, but making a brick." What do those even mean? Nothing. And that's the point. The card isn't an instruction. It's an interruption.

Because when you're stuck, you're rarely short of effort. You're stuck in a groove running the same handful of moves faster and faster and telling yourself it's progress. I do it constantly. I'll circle a problem for an hour, convinced I'm thinking, when really I'm just replaying the same three thoughts in a slightly different order. The card doesn't answer the question. It knocks you sideways so you stop asking it the same way.

Last week I wrote about changing your surroundings—how a different room (or a new country, if you’re the Rolling Stones) loosens your thinking. This is the same thing, but pointed inwards. You can't always get out to shift your head. Oblique Strategies shifts it from the inside.

As product people we need that more than most. Screens, flows, journeys, edge cases. It's a language, and like any language it makes some things easy to say and other things almost impossible. Ask a room of PMs to improve a product and you'll get a better screen. Ask them to reimagine it and, somehow, you'll still get a better screen.

So make your own deck. It doesn't have to be Eno's. "What if there's no interface at all?" "Solve it for the user who hates us." "Delete the feature everyone agreed on." The line doesn't matter. The swerve does. The half-second where your trained brain loses its footing and has to grab for something it wouldn't normally touch.

One caveat: the prompt doesn't make the work good. Eno's actual genius wasn't the box. It was knowing which happy accident to keep and which to bin. The jolt gives you options. Taste is what tells you which one's worth pursuing. And that’s something none of this can do for you.

Action 🚀

Next week, build your own Oblique Strategies. Before you try and tackle a problem you're stuck on, jot five instructions on index cards. Draw one at random and take it seriously for ten minutes. You're not looking for an answer, you're looking for the thought it knocks loose.

Inspiration 💡

Research as a form of pattern disruption – Alexi Gunner argues we've never had more futurists, trend decks and TikTok oracles, and the future has never looked more samey—because most research exists to confirm the pattern, not break it. Good research should do to your assumptions what an Oblique Strategy does to a stuck take: knock them out of true. The point of looking isn't to be reassured. Read more

Boring Is Good – Scott Jenson’s title could have come straight out of Eno's deck (one of the cards literally reads "Do something boring"). Jenson's case is that the unglamorous plumbing is where durable product value actually lives, while everyone else chases the shiny thing. Boring isn't the absence of an idea. Sometimes it is the idea. Read more

Generative AI Enhances Individual Creativity but Reduces the Collective Diversity of Novel Content – Anil Doshi & Oliver Hauser is the empirical sting in the tail of this issue: AI makes any single person's output more "creative", while quietly making everyone's output more alike. Which is exactly why the deliberate swerve matters. If the machine drags us all toward the same middle, the edge is whatever knocks you off it. 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