pm-operating-system

A personal operating system for product managers (or anyone doing knowledge work), built on Claude and a plain folder of markdown notes. Not a note-taking template. A working system: daily and weekly rituals, a decision stress-test, and a linking discipline that turns scattered notes into something that actually gets used.

Full story on why this exists: Field Note 03 — a task on my list slipped six times before my system finally forced an honest answer

What this actually is

Most personal-productivity templates are a folder structure and a hope. This is different in one specific way: it has rules that force decisions, not just rules that organize information. The one that matters most — if something slips three times, the system won't let you carry it a fourth silently. It has to be named: finish it, kill it, or hand it off.

That rule, and the four rituals below, are the only parts of this worth adopting. The folder names are yours to change.

The part that's actually product work, not admin

The rituals below (morning briefing, evening close, weekly review) run your life. They're useful but they're not the interesting part. The interesting part is work/ — a customer call gets logged, feedback themes get rolled up across calls, and once a theme crosses 2+ calls it becomes a PRD candidate, cited back to the calls that justified it. Claude is expected to catch second-order effects while doing this, not wait to be asked.