Product management through the lens of pop punk, anime and game dev. Building cooler products with more energy and less corporate nonsense.
Break the rules — Build cooler products — Have fun doing it
In August 2009, 25,000 people sang along to a projection at Saitama Super Arena. Crypton Future Media had bet on something two years earlier that nobody else in the synthesizer business understood.
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Before 'Lemon' hit 85 weeks at number one, Kenshi Yonezu uploaded 30 songs to NicoNico as Hachi: no face, no label, no real name. The anonymity wasn't a gimmick. It was the work.
Netflix burned $70M on Cowboy Bebop and got laughed out of the industry. Then they made Edgerunners. What changed wasn't the budget.
Every other mangaka would have kept Aki alive. Fujimoto's instinct to follow through is the lesson most PMs never learn.
In 2009, Sony's head of worldwide studios played Demon's Souls for two hours and called it unbelievably bad. FromSoftware published it without them. Then they built a genre.
Spy x Family isn't a spy story. It's about a creator who spent 18 years failing, built a facade to get his real idea past the gatekeepers and accidentally made something true.
NieR: Automata's creator was a self-proclaimed loser who hid from his publisher, designed a game that lies to you for 20 hours and then asks you to sacrifice everything for a stranger. It sold nine million copies.
In 2026, roadmap season means AI pressure, stakeholder FOMO and planning cycles that collapse before the ink dries. Pop punk solved this exact problem and it wasn't by playing more songs.
The story of Evangelion isn't about giant robots. It's about a depressed creator who ran out of money, shipped anyway, faced death threats and spent 26 years iterating on the same product.
Why great PMs must be great creators — lessons from Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen on building products people obsess over.
When three of five members walked out of a Tokyo metal band in 2023, the remaining two had a choice: fold or rebuild. They rebuilt and came back sharper.
Product management isn't dead but the old way of doing it is over. A rallying cry for PMs building in the middle of creativity and chaos.
Every YOASOBI song starts from a written story. That constraint isn't a limitation — it's the reason 'Idol' became the first Japanese song to top Billboard's Global chart.
In 2015, Tom DeLonge walked away from one of the biggest bands on Earth to research UFOs. Everyone thought he'd lost it. He was building an ecosystem.
YouTuber Kize Bae gave herself 30 days to learn drums from scratch. What she discovered and what I found when I picked up the sticks myself — is more useful than any PM framework.