The Most Important PM Lesson I Ever Learned Was Behind a Drum Kit
Source video: Kize Bae - 30 Days Learning Drums
Forget JIRA tickets. Forget OKRs. Forget the PM frameworks that look good in slide decks and dissolve in real life.
The most useful product management lesson I’ve ever encountered was hiding behind a drum kit.
30 Days, One Song, Zero Experience
In early 2021, YouTuber Kize Bae set herself a challenge: learn drums in 30 days. Not “get comfortable with a beat.” Not “explore percussion casually.” Learn a specific song — “Runaway Baby” by Bruno Mars — well enough to perform it. From zero.
Kize’s whole channel is built on this model. She throws herself at skills she’s never attempted — drawing, basketball spinning, Krav Maga — with a public deadline and a camera rolling. The drum challenge was her most ambitious.
She started the way most people do: she bought the kit before she knew how to play it. Day one, she’s sitting behind a drum set she can’t use, watching YouTube tutorials on how to hold sticks. She didn’t wait until she understood the fundamentals. She committed to the instrument first, then figured out how to play it.
The early days were rough. She couldn’t separate her hands. The kick drum was a stranger. Paradiddles — the basic building block of every drum pattern — felt impossible. She was flailing, on camera, publicly. Then she hired an online instructor. Not day one — she tried alone first. She needed to understand what she didn’t know before she could ask for help.
Thirty days. Thirty-five total hours of practice. And at the end, she played “Runaway Baby” — a song with a tempo that punishes hesitation — start to finish.
That video inspired me to pick up the sticks. What I found behind the kit changed how I think about product management more than any book or conference ever has.
She Committed Before She Was Ready
Kize bought the drums before lesson one. She announced the challenge publicly before she could hold a stick correctly. She picked a specific, difficult song before she understood time signatures.
This is terrifying. And it’s exactly what the best product launches look like.
There’s a version of product management that’s all about de-risking: research first, validate the market, align stakeholders, build consensus, THEN commit resources. That process has its place. But the thing it never teaches you is what happens when you commit to something before you’re fully prepared — and then have to figure it out in public.
Kize didn’t have a safety net. The deadline was real. The audience was watching. She couldn’t pivot to an easier song without it being visible. So she got creative under pressure. She found workarounds for sections she couldn’t nail cleanly. She simplified fills that were beyond her skill level without losing the song’s energy. She made the constraints productive rather than paralyzing.
The PM parallel: the best products ship before they’re ready. Not because shipping early is a philosophy — because the deadline, the customer, or the market forces your hand. What matters is what you do in that gap between commitment and capability. Do you freeze, or do you start solving?
She Tried Alone Before Asking for Help
Kize didn’t hire an instructor on day one. She started with free YouTube tutorials, trying to teach herself the basics — grip, posture, simple beats. She struggled. She failed publicly. And then, once she understood the shape of her own ignorance, she brought in an expert.
This order matters.
PMs who immediately escalate to consultants, agencies, or cross-functional experts before understanding the problem themselves are outsourcing their judgment. You don’t need to be the expert. But you need to have sat with the problem long enough to know what questions to ask, what tradeoffs to weigh, and what “good” looks like — even roughly.
Kize’s instructor didn’t replace her effort. The instructor accelerated it. Because Kize had already identified her specific weaknesses — hand separation, kick drum timing, reading the song structure — the instructor could target those gaps precisely instead of starting from generic curriculum.
In product terms: do your own discovery first. Talk to users yourself. Struggle with the data yourself. Then bring in the specialist. The specialist gets better results when you’ve done the foundational work — because you can give them a brief that’s specific, not vague.
She Picked One Song, Not “Learn Drums”
This is the decision that made the whole challenge work. Kize didn’t set out to “become a drummer.” She set out to play “Runaway Baby” by Bruno Mars in 30 days. One song. One deadline. One measurable outcome.
That focus eliminated infinite scope. She didn’t need to learn jazz brushwork. She didn’t need to master double-bass technique. She needed to learn the specific fills, the specific groove, and the specific tempo of one Bruno Mars track. Every practice session had a compass pointing at the same destination.
PMs constantly struggle with this. “Improve onboarding.” “Reduce churn.” “Build an AI feature.” These are themes, not targets. A theme gives you direction. A target gives you constraints. Kize’s target told her exactly which skills to develop and which to ignore — and that clarity made 35 hours of practice enough to perform a song that would normally take months of general study.
The best roadmap items aren’t “improve search.” They’re “reduce time-to-first-result from 4.2 seconds to under 2 seconds for the top 50 queries by volume.” That’s a song you can learn to play.
I still play drums. Not well. Not like Kize at the end of her 30 days. But every time I sit behind the kit, I’m reminded of the same three truths:
Commit before you’re ready — because readiness is a feeling, not a fact.
Try it yourself first — because you can’t lead what you don’t understand.
Pick the song, not the skill — because focus beats aspiration every time.
The best PM lesson I ever learned wasn’t in a boardroom or a book. It was in 35 hours of dropped sticks, missed beats, and one Bruno Mars song that refused to let me fake it.
Pick up the sticks. Pick the song. Start playing.