Why Every PM Needs a Creative Practice
By: Nithya Karthikeyan, Product Manager, Data & AI
Last month, I hung my sketches on the walls of a small café in Malaysia.
It was a modest show. But standing in that space, watching strangers pause in front of something I’d made, I felt something shift. Not pride exactly. More like clarity. This practice I’d built quietly, sketchbook and pen in hand, sitting on kerbs and café chairs across the world whilst traveling – it wasn’t separate from my work as a PM. It was making me better at it.
There’s something about sketching in ink I love and find terrifying in equal measure: every line you put down is a commitment. You have to mean it, or find a way to work with it. It can’t be erased. The longer I’ve sketched, the more I’ve noticed how much my art bleeds into the way I approach product management.
Why is this so? It’s all about the other side of the brain.
The other side of your brain
Most of product management is left-brain work. Structured thinking, data analysis, prioritization, frameworks, stakeholder alignment, roadmap logic. We’re trained to be rigorous, argue from evidence, make decisions we can defend in a room full of engineers and executives.
That rigour is necessary. But it’s not sufficient.
The best product decisions I’ve made didn’t come from a spreadsheet. They came from a moment of reframing: seeing a problem differently, making an unexpected connection, and noticing something everyone else had walked past. That’s the right-brain at work. And like any muscle, if you never exercise it, it weakens.
Creative practices such as sketching, writing, cooking, or music, train your right-brain muscle over time. It forces you to sit with ambiguity and make something from nothing.. Having a creative practice allows you to activate parts of your brain that analytical work simply doesn’t reach: spatial reasoning, intuitive pattern recognition, and the ability to hold a whole system in your head and feel where something is off before you can articulate why. Over time, that capacity starts showing up in your product work as a competitive edge.
I’ve come to think of sketching as cross-training for my brain. The problems I’m solving when I’m drawing have nothing to do with roadmaps or OKRs, but the thinking muscles I’m using are exactly the ones I need when I’m back at my desk.
Image Credit: Michela Buttignol for Verywell Mind
Here’s what this looks like in practice.
Start with a line, not a plan
With ink, there’s a particular kind of courage required at the start of a drawing. You can’t sketch lightly and decide later. The moment the pen touches paper, you’re committed. If you wait until you’re ready and anticipate what your completed look like, you’ll never begin.
Product work is similar. The instinct is to over-plan, to map every edge case, align every stakeholder, and anticipate every objection before a single thing gets built. The best products I’ve worked on started out scrappy: a rough idea, a quick prototype, or a conversation with a user that changed the entire direction. Waiting for certainty is a way of avoiding the discomfort of beginning. The first line, the first build, the first test and the first honest conversation are your permissions to start. Everything else follows from that.
Choose what belongs
A good ink sketch doesn’t include everything you can see. The finished product is what you decide to include: the weight of a doorway, the rhythm of a roofline, the particular slant of a building, and just as importantly, what you leave out. Editing is the craft. A drawing that tries to capture every detail ends up capturing nothing.
This is exactly what product thinking demands. Not every feature, every request, every stakeholder opinion belongs in the roadmap. The PM’s job is to curate, not accumulate. We exist to look at a long list of good ideas and make hard choices about what the product actually needs to be.
Sketching trained my eye to edit. I learned to ask: what is the essential thing here? What would I lose if I took this out? And what’s on the page only because I was afraid to leave it blank? Those are useful questions at a whiteboard too.
Stay a student & enjoy the ride
The artists I admire most, the ones who’ve been drawing for decades, still approach each new scene like there’s something to figure out. They’re not executing a formula. They’re genuinely looking, genuinely trying to solve the visual problem in front of them. The curiosity never goes away. If anything, the more skilled they become, the more they notice what they still don’t know.
That posture: open, curious, unfinished, is one I try to carry into my product work.
I work in Product, Data & AI, a space that evolves faster than any roadmap can capture. Building AI-powered personalisation, a GenAI chatbot, machine learning models and so much more – none of that was something I could have mapped out at the start of my career. I’ve had to keep learning: enough about machine learning to have real conversations with data scientists, enough about GenAI to ask the right questions, enough about the business to know what actually matters to the customer on the other side.
Curiosity is the skill that makes all the other skills possible. The moment I assume I know enough is usually the moment I stop seeing what’s right in front of me.
The canvas is always bigger than the frame
When you’re working on an ink drawing, you’re always constrained by the edges of your page. But the scene you’re drawing, the street, the neighbourhood, the city, goes on far beyond what you can capture. The frame isn’t the world. It’s just where you chose to look today.
As a PM, it’s easy to get heads-down in your domain and lose sight of the larger picture. The competitive shift that’s changing everything is often just outside your field of vision.
Some of my most important product decisions came from deliberately zooming out. From asking: what’s happening at the edges of this frame? What am I not seeing because I’m too close?
The canvas is always bigger than what you can see from inside your sprint cycle. Keeping that in mind, staying oriented to the larger scene is one of the things that separates good PMs from great ones.
Creativity as a wellness practice
Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough: creative practices are good for you, not just professionally, but personally. And in a role as demanding as product management, that matters more than most of us admit.
Product management is high-stakes and always-on. There’s always another decision to make, another fire to manage, another quarter to justify. The mental load accumulates quietly, and if the only input you’re giving your brain is work, you start to notice the edges getting sharper and the thinking getting narrower. You solve new problems the same old ways. You lose the ability to be surprised.
Having something creative to return to, something where there’s no OKR attached, no Slack thread waiting, no one to align, is genuinely restorative. It engages a different mode entirely. When I’m out on a street with my sketchbook, I’m not thinking about product. I’m thinking about shadow and line weight and how to suggest a tree without drawing every leaf. That’s not escapism. That’s recovery.
The sketchbook isn’t time away from the work. It’s what makes the work sustainable.
The bigger picture
There’s a persistent idea that creativity pursuits are something you do in your spare time, separate from the serious, strategic, data-driven work. I’ve stopped believing that.
Creativity is how you hold ambiguity without panicking. It’s how you see a problem from a different angle when the obvious solution isn’t working. It’s how you communicate a vision clearly enough that people genuinely want to build it with you. It’s how you stay curious long enough to keep getting better at something that keeps changing.
Standing in that café in Malaysia, surrounded by ink drawings of streets and buildings and the everyday texture of places I love, I understood something I hadn’t quite put into words before. Making things, even quietly, even imperfectly, even in a sketchbook that almost no one sees, changes how you think. It makes you more attentive, more decisive, more willing to commit to a line and see where it leads.
That’s not a bad way to build a career in tech either.
Pick up whatever pen works for you. See where the line takes you.