About
Before Ufotable animated Episode 19 of Demon Slayer, the manga was selling 50,000 copies a week. After it aired, it sold 100 million. Nobody optimized their way to that. One studio made a creative bet and the world noticed.
That's the argument From Pixels to Punk is making. Product management and creative craft are not different disciplines. They're the same discipline practiced in different rooms. The instincts that made Demon Slayer a cultural phenomenon, that saved Green Day's career, that turned a flopped manga into Jujutsu Kaisen — those are the same instincts great PMs use every day.
Every post starts with the story. The PM lesson comes from the story because that's where it actually lives.
Ryan McDonald
Ryan is a product manager who grew up on pop punk, anime and game dev. He thinks the best lessons in building products come from unexpected places, and that the PM industry has spent twenty years optimizing for the wrong things. This blog is the correction.