What Now For Product Punks?

Hello fellow punks!

Welcome to the 11 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 ⬇️

Someday this social media war is gonna to end...

I migrated this newsletter from Substack to Revue a while ago because Revue's deep integration with Twitter looked like a perfect way to build an audience.

I love Substack, but since I moved across my reader list has grown from a handful to nearly a thousand.

Now that Elon Musk has got his unpredictable hands on the Twitterverse tiller, though, it looks like Revue is going to be one of the first casualties.

So what does that mean for Product Punks?

Most likely I'll move back to Substack (I mean, why wouldn't I?). But one question it does raise, though, is the role these platforms play.

When I was a more prolific blogger, I jumped between writing on my own self-hosted blog (which nobody read) and writing for Medium (which got a lot more eyeballs on my content).

For me, there's a constant battle raging between the need to have control over my own content, and getting it in front of people who might be interested in it.

Over the last year I've built a sizeable following on Twitter, but Musk's chaotic takeover has proven that my following is built on sand.

And what does that mean for mine (and anyone else's) personal brand?

I haven't decided (yet) what the long-term future looks like for my online voice. I'm not going to delete my Twitter account tomorrow, but I'm definitely going to experiment with other, decentralised social media offerings like Mastodon where I can try and regain a bit of control.

If you're interested in joining me, you can find me here 👇

0 Posts, 2 Following, 1 Follower · The Punk PM | Talking about product management principles and resources | Writing the Product Punks newsletter | Lead product hedgehog @hedgehoglab

How to handle estimates as a PM 🔮

I've been working on a challenging fixed timescale project lately, which has got me thinking about the role estimates play in product management.

Humans are terrible at forecasts and estimates, but unless you're lucky enough to work for a truly agile product organisation, you'll always have to deal with them.

Earlier this week I published this thread with some pointers on how to handle them the right way 🔎

My favourite tweets of the week 🐦

Most of the talk on Twitter this week has (unsurprisingly) been about the craziness surrounding Musk's takeover. There have still been a few interesting product management nuggets to pull out, though 🐦

Five values to help you become data-informed

Metrics are for seeing progress, not monitoring performance

Why Linear beats Jira

How company positioning and product positioning differ when you only have one product

A crowd-sourced list of the best books for product managers

What I've been reading 📚

David Bowie is one of my all-time heroes. I was lucky enough to see him live in the mid-nineties, and he's always been someone I've looked up to as a creative.

This article from Creative Pool has some amazing lessons from one of pop culture's ultimate icons ⚡

David Bowie was a true renaissance man - a musician, actor, writer, artist, producer and more. His creative influence resonates as much today as it did when he was ‘Ziggy Stardust’...How Bowie approached his creative life, his influences......

Military leadership isn't all about command and control. It's about learning how to lead in the extraordinary complexity of war.

This post from agile-coach-turned-army-officer Dmytro Yarmak is insightful reading for anyone who's job it is to lead others 🪖

Every Ukrainian has their own story of how they met the full-scale war and how it changed them. As for me, on February 23 at 4 pm I was at the office of one of our agency’s clients. I spoke with the…

As a tech product manager who's always struggled with distraction, I'm acutely aware of the impact technology plays on our ability to focus.

This article from This Too Shall Grow has some excellent actionable advice on how to stave off digital overstimulation 🤯

You might be familiar with this common productivity trap: making use of

every moment of your life, leveraging every teeny tiny break to do more,

only to end up feeling burnt out and with your brain all foggy. Let’s look

at attention, memory, multitasking, and how to protect your brain against

digital overstimulation.

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 on the new structure. Go ahead and shoot me an email with ways you think I can make it better.