The Punk PM #9

Hey there, punk!

Nine weeks in already—that’s wild. Feels like I just started this thing, but here we are.

Last week, my friend and former colleague Ben Jones gave The Punk PM a shoutout on LinkedIn. That was a cool moment—it’s nice to know this little experiment is resonating. If you’re here, reading this, thanks for sticking around.

Let’s get into it.

Quote of the Week 🙊

Insight 🦉

Your users don’t care how hard your team worked—they care if your product actually solves their problem. And sometimes, they don’t even care about that.

The sunk cost fallacy is real. The more effort we put into something, the harder it is to walk away. If your team spent weeks (or months) on a feature, it’s easy to convince yourself it’s valuable—because the alternative is admitting all that work was for nothing.

But effort doesn’t equal impact. Some of the best ideas come together in hours. Some of the worst take years.

Think about music: an artist spends three years crafting a deeply personal album, and no one listens. Meanwhile, a band messes around for a couple of hours in the studio, and the throwaway jam becomes a global hit.

Great product leaders know when to cut their losses. If an initiative isn’t working, the time and money already spent shouldn’t dictate your next move. The sooner you call it, the faster you can redirect those resources to something that actually makes a difference.

The hardest part? Admitting that your next feature won’t magically save the day. Sometimes, the right call is to rip it up and start again.

Action 🚀

What’s one initiative you’re sinking time into that you don’t feel confident about? What would it take to decide—objectively—whether to kill it or keep going?

Inspiration 💡

Replit and Anthropic’s AI just helped Zillow build production software—without a single engineer by Michael Nuñez

Replit, Anthropic, and Google Cloud are enabling non-engineers at Zillow to build software with AI. No coding required. It’s another sign that AI is shifting who can build what—and how quickly.

Turning Big Fears into Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Fear kills ideas before they even start. This piece by Anne-Laure le Cunff breaks down how to shrink big, intimidating leaps into small, manageable experiments that help you push forward.

How Language Models Work by Dan Shipper

A solid explainer on how AI models generate text—breaking down why they feel so smart (and where they fall short).

Signing Off ✍️

If this hit home, hit reply and tell me—what’s your strategy for dodging the sunk cost fallacy this week? 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