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Product Punks is back!!
Toby Rogers
January 15, 2023
Hello fellow punks!
Welcome (again) to the 900+ of you who signed up for Product Punks on Revue. It’s great to have you on board. Hopefully you’ll stick with me while I figure out what this newsletter's new home, Beehiiv, is all about.
Here’s this week’s issue ⬇️
Product Punks: Part III
Like Greg Isenberg, I'm still bullish about newsletters.
In terms of signal to noise ratio, newsletter subscriptions far outstrip anything else (apart from books, obviously). My daily Product Twitter summary on Mailbrew comes close, but I'm not expecting that to survive the Elon Musk takeover fallout.
Which brings me round to why this newsletter has a new home.
I originally launched Product Punks on Substack a couple of years ago with lofty ambitions to create something in between The Profile, Superorganizers and The Browser that focused on the best product content and people.
The problem? Nobody read it.
Even on Substack, distribution was hard—and constantly posting into a void is no fun.
That's why I was so excited about Twitter's decision to buy Revue. At a time when the social network's strategy seemed to be focused on creators and a move towards long-form content, making the switch to Revue seemed a no-brainer. I already had close to 20k Twitter followers; surely I could convert some of them into subscribers?
The answer was far better than I expected.
Just by integrating my newsletter into my Twitter profile, I grew from little more than a handful of subscribers to close to a thousand in a matter of months.
I don't think my content was significantly better—it was all about the distribution.
Which is why the death of Revue hit hard. And why it's taken me a couple of months to get Product Punks back up and running.
I've been an admirer of Beehiiv since the early days of The Milk Road and had been wanting to try it out.
Musk may have forced my hand, but hopefully I've found a more stable home for the kind of newsletter I want to build.
And hopefully you'll want to hang around while I build it.
What I've been writing ✍
My ambition for this newsletter is to help find the signal in the noise and comment and curate the best product management-related content each week.
For my own writing about product, strategy, creativity, and innovation, I'm planning to bring back my blog ⬇
I still exist on Twitter, but it's for FOMO on its death spiral—I don't expect to do much writing there anymore.
I post occasionally on LinkedIn, but I've never really got into it. For now, it feels like Mastodon is going to be the home for my short-form content 👇
What I've been reading 📚
Your customers don't care about the technology you use to build your product. They care about whether it solves a problem for them well enough to want to use it. Like Steve Jobs said, you need to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology, not the other way round 👇
Ken Norton is one of the greatest product management writers and thinkers. This article based on his keynote talk at the Mind The Product conference compares product managers to jazz icons Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington 🎺
When you're building products, you've got to be clear about your USP. Are you offering something genuinely revolutionary, or are you building the software equivalent of a niche ice-cream flavour 🍨?
Toots and tweets 🐘
Product managers as Frozen characters:
Product managers...
What Frozen character represents your PM style?
— John Cutler (@johncutlefish)
Jan 12, 2023
The conflicting primary focus of PMs and designers:
Most PMs primary focus seems to be delivering features (and if they’re good the outcomes those features enable) as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Designers primary focus often seems to be perfecting their craft by attempting to deliver an idealised design process.
— Andy Budd (@andybudd)
Jan 11, 2023
How product ownership gets diluted in large organisations:
Product Ownership in large organisations often get diluted because we want the team to be ‘flat’
What do I mean by that?
Rather than having product trios, product + tech lead + design lead, we have just a single Product Owner who we expect to magically do all three roles.
1/
— Ant Murphy (@ant_murphy)
Jan 6, 2023
Idea backlog anti-patterns:
Don't put too much focus on your market category:
Other stuff 🗞
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.