A Question That Stuck With Me

On creativity, agency, and what I told aspiring PMs at NYU

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I want to share something that came up when I spoke at NYU’s PM club a few weeks back.

It was a fireside chat with PMs from Meta and Adobe Photoshop, and about 30–40 students showed up with the questions you’d expect: how to break into PM, what skills actually matter, how AI is changing everything. All fair questions, and ones I’ve asked myself at different points.

But the question that stayed with me came from a student who asked what creativity actually means in our work.

That question goes deeper than it sounds, especially in product management. A lot of the job is framed around execution, optimization, and shipping against roadmaps that already exist. Creativity can start to feel like something adjacent to the work instead of central to it.

What I told them is that creativity isn’t a job title or a role you graduate into. It’s an approach. It’s the way you bring your own set of interests, instincts, and experiences into problems that already exist and shape them differently because you are the one doing the shaping.

You can see it when someone connects things that don’t obviously belong together. For me, it was Economics informing personalization at scale. Filmmaking instincts influencing how a product story gets told. A sensitivity to human behavior showing up in how systems are designed. None of that shows up in a skills matrix, but it changes the quality of the work.

This is also why I think people underestimate how much agency they actually have, even inside rigid systems. You can be creative in a boring job if you decide to be. You can find room to steer, not just execute. You can choose to be a driver rather than a passenger, even when the road looks predetermined.

We also talked about AI, and the anxiety that sits underneath a lot of conversations right now. The question people ask is whether AI will replace them. The more useful question is what remains distinctly human in the work.

It isn’t raw technical skill. It’s the ability to make judgments, to synthesize ideas across domains, and to decide what matters in context. It’s knowing when something is good enough to ship and when it needs more time, and being able to explain that call to other humans. That kind of discernment is closer to creativity than people realize.

At the end of the night, one student came up to me and said that my journey was one of the most inspiring they’d heard at one of these events. That stopped me, mostly because I don’t think of my path as particularly clean or impressive. I didn’t follow a traditional PM track. I studied economics, not computer science. I worked at Walmart before Adobe. There was no linear roadmap.

But maybe that messiness is the point. Maybe the non-linear parts are what create perspective. And maybe being open about the uncertainty, the detours, and the unfinished thinking is what actually helps people see what’s possible.

I do these talks because I love the energy younger builders bring, especially before they’ve been fully trained on what the “rules” are. But they’re also a reminder that sharing your own story, without sanding off the rough edges, can matter more than you think.

To the rookies: keep connecting strange dots, keep choosing agency, and don’t assume your non-traditional path is something you need to fix. It might be the most valuable thing you’re carrying.

— Akash