Hello fellow punks!

Welcome to the 50 of you who have signed up for this since the last issue. It’s great to have you on board. Hopefully you’ll stick with me while I figure out what this newsletter is all about.

Here’s this week’s issue ⬇️

What's this product management thing again?

It's been a couple of weeks since I last published this newsletter.

The reason? 

I've been on holiday, so I've been thinking more about the benefits of drinking Prosecco in a hot tub than the craft of product management.

And that brings me back to something I regularly seem to talk about:

You can't keep doing great work if you never take time to recharge.

For many of us, product management feels more like a calling than a job. But that doesn't mean we should let it turn into an obsession.

There's a reason we often have our best ideas when we're in the shower or out for a walk.

When we give our subconscious mind room to process the problems we're facing, it can surprise us with innovative solutions we might not have considered otherwise.

It sounds like a cliche, but to do your best work you need to have the best rest.

I'm not suggesting you should shut down your laptop at 5pm each afternoon, but you need to make a conscious decision about how to balance work and play.

I read my work emails and Slack messages out of hours and do my weekly planning on the weekend, but I always make time to hangout with my kids every day.

Do what works for you.

And remember: 

There's more to life than product management.

What I've been reading 📚

One activity you can never do too much of is reading.

All the knowledge in the world is at your fingertips. If you don't read, you don't grow. It's that simple.

This article has some excellent advice on how to better leverage what you read:

Surgical Reading: How to Read 12 Books at Once - Superorganizers - Every — every.to

How to efficiently get what you need out of reading, multiple books at a time

Anyone who's ever tried to build something online will recognise the perils outlined in this post.

As creators, we can't help but develop the voice our audience wants to hear.

But how can we make sure it stays authentic?

The Perils of Audience Capture - by Gurwinder - The Prism — gurwinder.substack.com

How influencers become brainwashed by their audiences

We often think that innovation is about technological advancement, but in reality it's about people.

Focusing on human behaviour and psychology can make it easier to predict how new technology can encourage change.

Likewise, focusing on culture is one of the best ways to help your people innovate:

Scout, Juggle, and Ignore Technology to Out-Innovate the Competition: Lessons from CSAA - Outthinker — outthinker.com

Debbie Brackeen was in the “innovation” business before it was even called “innovation.” After completing her undergrad at Stanford University, she found herself in the heart of Silicon Valley. She spent her first years at Apple followed by stints at a variety of high-tech companies from HP to venture-baked start-ups. Today she is the chief […]

What I've been writing ✍️

Twitter threads are the new blog posts.

Instead of trying to find the signal in the noise on sites like Medium, you can learn a lot more from following the best product people on Twitter.

Here are 21 of my favourite product management-related Twitter threads:

As a product manager, you can't get away from creating roadmaps.

If you're not careful, though, you'll end up with a roadmap full of executive-level requests littered with dates you've got no idea are achievable.

Here are ten tweets that can help every PM build roadmaps that actually move their product forwards:

That’s it!

See you next week (probably).

Toby

The Punk PM

P.S. Feel free to share this with anyone else you think would find it interesting.

I’m still playing around with ideas for content and format for this newsletter, so I’d love to hear your thoughts. Go ahead and shoot me an email with ways you think I can make it better.