Is product management fundamentally a science (systematic and repeatable) or an art (creative, judgment-based) discipline?

Gustav Söderström · Oct 12, 2022

Product is 100% science and 0% art; most people call it art mainly for self-preservation, to make their profession look mysteriously hard

Bernard Shaw's 'conspiracy against the laity' — protecting your profession by making it seem hard; many product people have good instincts they can't explain, which merely looks like art

Scope: acknowledges it will upset people; science being right doesn't mean it's easy

60:56 20 Product: Spotify's Gustav Söderström on Why Product is 100% Science and 0% Art, Why You Should Look at the Competition and then Do Something Completely Different & Why Talk is Cheap and Product Teams Should Do More of it; Structuring the Best Debate

Harry Stebbings · Nov 9, 2022

Product is 100% science

45:44 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview

Harry Stebbings · Nov 1, 2023

Product is 99% science

23:26 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer

Hugo Barra · Nov 9, 2022 · hedged

Product is roughly 60% art to 40% science in a new category, and roughly 40% art to 60% science in steady state

Scope: ratios differ by stage of the category

45:35 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview

Noah Desai Weiss · Jun 16, 2023

Product is roughly 80% science and 20% art in a mature feature area, but 75% art and 25% science at an early-stage company or early in a new product's life cycle

Mature areas have enough data and scale that the work is optimization; early on the work is curation, editing, creative approach and vision before scale exists to optimize against

Scope: ratios offered as rough numbers

43:18 20Product: Slack CPO Noah Weiss on How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Scaling Into Enterprise & What Needs to Change with your Product, Team and Processes when Scaling From PLG to Enterprise

David Lieb · Sep 21, 2022

Product is more art than science

Truly great products almost always come from a very small group who love the product and obsess over the customer — often are the customer — and that kind of empathy and obsession can't be reached through experiments alone

12:17 20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb

Kevin Niparko · Sep 29, 2023

Product management is roughly 80% art and 20% science

Scope: a forced numerical estimate

10:50 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio

Tony Fadell · May 11, 2022

Product is neither purely art nor purely science — great products come from combining art, science, and storytelling

Some decisions can never be resolved with data and require an opinion to move forward, while others are genuinely data-driven; and how you communicate the product matters as much as building it

4:43 Blend of art science and storytelling produces great products

Tony Fadell · May 11, 2022

Reliance on gut and opinion does not increase with seniority or experience — teams should oscillate between data and opinion continuously across product versions

Successive versions generate better data from paying customers whose opinions are real because they use and pay for the product, while new directions still require opinion

5:53 Oscillate between data and opinion continuously regardless of seniority

Tony Fadell · May 11, 2022

Correct data can still lead to the wrong product decision if it ignores customers' emotional needs

At Philips all the data said grayscale beat color on cost, weight, size and battery life, yet the market took off with color because the emotion of color outweighed the usability arguments

7:23 Correct data can yield wrong decisions when it ignores customer emotional needs

David Meyer · Nov 1, 2023 · hedged

If understanding the functioning system and having intellectual rigor behind data observation is taken as given, then product is 90% art; for people to whom that rigor isn't natural, product involves much more deliberate science

He assumes systems thinking and data rigor is just how brains work, but that inclination isn't universal

25:51 Product is mostly art once systems thinking and data rigor are assumed as given

Marty Cagan · Dec 7, 2022

Product development is a blend of art and science, but if forced to choose it is more art than science — because the judgment of when to invest in rigorous evidence versus move on directional confidence is itself art

Teams decide daily how much certainty a bet warrants: for high-risk, resource-heavy builds you want statistically significant evidence, for others you only need confidence you're not going the wrong way, and that judgment call isn't scientific

25:53 Deciding the evidence threshold itself is art making product more art than science

David Lieb · Sep 21, 2022

A highly analytical approach narrows the variance of outcomes — it prevents large mistakes but also prevents the big unexpected wins, whereas treating product as art is how you get large upside outcomes

Data tells you what not to do, so you never try the thing nobody else would have found; art means you also accept big downside outcomes

13:29 Analytical rigor narrows outcome variance while art produces big wins and losses

Kevin Niparko · Sep 29, 2023

Discovery and understanding customer needs can be made highly scientific and repeatable, but translating problems into solutions users love, and setting long-term market direction, cannot be reduced to a formula

Solution design sits between design, engineering and product and depends on the technology landscape; long-term direction requires judgment about where competitors are and will move

9:49 Discovery is scientific but solution design and long term direction require judgment not formula

Kevin Niparko · Sep 29, 2023

Product is science early in a career and art later — the playbook and templates teach the craft at the start, but senior product work comes down to creative problem-solving across the organization that doesn't reduce to process

Science is a helpful start, but the ways you get an organization to understand and align on your work are often creative and funny rather than templated

35:20 Product management starts as science and becomes art with seniority

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

Product management can be made roughly 90% science, but the decisive final 10% remains art

Product management is a new discipline that has become gradually more scientific over fifteen years; the science gets you to the start line, but the art is how you win the race

5:53 Product management is roughly ninety percent science but the decisive final ten percent is art