Punk Isn’t a Lens for Product Management. It’s a Challenge to Its Epistemology.

A response to Thomas Daly’s “Everything I Learned About Product Management, I Learned from Punk Rock”

by Dr. Emily Neuhoff

I read a piece recently by Thomas Daly at Medium about how the punk ethos mirrors product management — DIY mindset, speed over polish, community building. I love the framing. It’s thoughtful, sharp, and passionate.

A juxtaposition of styles: the left side features an organized corporate workspace with design sketches labeled "Define," "Test," and "Agile," while the right side displays a punk-inspired area with graffiti and rebellious slogans like "Who’s It For?" and "Build Different."

In his article, Thomas Daly is clear-eyed, generous, and — like many who’ve glimpsed the value of punk from the product side — inspired.

And yet, I want to suggest something slightly more uncomfortable:

Punk isn’t just a productivity philosophy. It’s a refusal of the epistemologies that structure most of modern product work.

An intricate cartoon illustrates the raw essence of survival beyond mere features, highlighting DIY culture and community reliance with zines, couch-surfing, and live music.

It’s not just “do it yourself.”---

"No one's coming to save you."

It’s not “build fast and break things.”

It’s

"What happens if we build outside the frame entirely?”

When we reduce punk to a mindset — a collection of bold, edgy tips for better team velocity — we risk missing the deeper discomfort that punk forces us to sit with. The ideas that:

• Expertise is suspect when it’s built atop gatekeeping.

• Innovation isn’t innovation if it reproduces harm.

• Speed is meaningless when it leaves people behind.

Punk doesn’t just tell us how to build better.  It asks why we build at all. And who gets to define what “better” means.

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🧷 DIY ≠ Hustle Culture in a Leather Jacket

There’s a tendency to romanticize DIY as entrepreneurial scrappiness. But in punk, DIY emerges not from “lean startup” strategy, but from resource refusal — a deliberate turning away from systems of access, funding, validation. It’s refusal as praxis.

The zine wasn’t a content strategy.

It was a rejection of formal publishing channels.

The house show wasn’t a fun community-building moment.

It was because no one else would let them on a stage.

So when product teams invoke DIY today, the question becomes:

Are we building outside of the system?

Or just building the system back into ourselves, with fewer layers?

⚔️ Punk Doesn’t Disrupt. It Dismantles.

Punk doesn’t worship disruption.

It mourns what’s been broken.

And then asks what needs to be rebuilt.

The Sex Pistols didn’t invent chaos.

They mirrored it back to a society that had ignored its underclasses and sanitized its own violence.

In product, we often say “question the status quo” — but punk reminds us to also question why that status quo was built in the first place, and who benefits from its persistence.

That’s a deeper, more vulnerable task than MVPs or design sprints.

It’s also one we rarely make space for in metrics or roadmaps.

🎙️ Authenticity Isn’t Just Tone. It’s Tension.

To say punk values authenticity is true — but perhaps incomplete.

Punk values the tension between the ideal and the real.

It lets things be unfinished. It welcomes contradiction.

It doesn’t “simplify the message for stakeholder alignment.”

It says the complexity is the message.

In a product context, this would mean:

• Saying “I don’t know” more often.

• Letting pain points exist without immediate resolution.

• Holding space for multiple, even opposing, truths within the same system.

Authenticity here isn’t “radical candor.”

It’s epistemic humility.

⚡ Punk Isn’t Speed. It’s Urgency Without Optimization.

A lot of modern product process is obsessed with optimization.

Faster sprints, faster launches, faster feedback loops.

But punk doesn’t prioritize speed for speed’s sake.

Its urgency is rooted in urgency of message, not output.

A three-chord track wasn’t recorded quickly because it was efficient —

It was recorded quickly because the artist had something to say, and they didn’t know if they’d have another shot.

What would it look like if our product work centered urgency of impact over urgency of delivery?

What if speed wasn’t measured in velocity points,

but in the cost of waiting?

🏚️ Community Isn’t a Feature. It’s the Point.

It created infrastructure for belonging — zines, venues, couch floors, mixtapes.

It was messy, often unsustainable, sometimes unsafe —

but it was driven by relational survival, not market validation.

In tech, we often mistake community for social capital.

But punk shows us that community is where systems break down and rebuild themselves.

It’s not scalable. It’s intimate. It’s reciprocal. It resists productization.

“The future is unwritten.” — Joe Strummer

When we look to punk for insight, we can find tactical inspiration: speed, resourcefulness, experimentation.

But if we’re really listening?

Punk doesn’t offer us tactics.

It offers us an epistemic interruption.

It challenges us not just to build faster —

but to build differently.

To ask who we are building for.

What we are building toward.

And whether the systems we rely on…

deserve to survive us.

Not everything from punk belongs in product.

But everything in product deserves to be punked —

at least once.