(seed planted — jan 2026) ←back
The Product Process is a Creative One
Product is a creative process. A lens to look through as we interact with problems we are trying to solve. Everyone’s role on a development team is to contribute an iteration of the end product. Each layer being thoughtfully built creates the holistic experience of the product. To consider the vast interactions and ways of relating to the technology, design, and desired outcomes of a product means there must be a well tended space to consider and play within. Product should not be localized to a single individual, but be a distribution of concern across a team.
Product Management is a Constant Attentional Framing Problem
The benefit of a PM role is in the context afforded horizontally across an organization and beyond into the broader market and user base, as well as vertically in an operator Product Owner (PO) scrum role on a technical team. Since product enables a larger surface area to explore problems across a technical team and business organization, Product Management is an attention problem.
This role comes with agency, and it’s important to not concentrate attention on the wrong means, ends, or aspects of a problem. To diffuse any hierarchical power games that come with the role immediately, or run the risk of losing insight into the horizontality that enables the PM to flow in and out of multiple processes of the product’s development and implementation into a problem space. The antithesis of progress is in a viper grip on control.
Given the wide scope potential of the position, there’s a multitude of ways to contribute. From detailed implementation technicalities to the wider scope of the way the product will be consumed by the user and perceived in the market. The craft of product sense is less in memorizing a set of frameworks or approaches, and more in the value and vision a PM brings to the collective. There are many aspects of this field that allow for creativity in the role, as an individual often has to adapt to the abstractions of a technical team.
Maria Popova writes of networked knowlege and combinatorial creativity, and it combines both of these aspects into a simple diagram on how to conceptualize the role of Product Manager flowing between these two states:
