The Mathematician Product Manager
Inspired by G.H. Hardy’s, A Mathematician’s apology.
A good product manager is a maker of patterns. If his/her patterns are more permanent than others it is because they are made with ideas.
Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it. Often poetry and prose are various ways of retelling stories. Poverty of ideas seems hardly to affect the beauty of verbal pattern. If you make products like poetry they will fade away since ideas wear less with time than words. A product manager needs to be less of a poet and more of a mathematician as the only material he/she has to work with is ideas. Languages die, mathematical ideas do not.
A good product manager’s patterns must be beautiful. Beauty is the first test, there is no permanent place in the world for ugly products.
A good product manager’s patterns must be like mathematics as most people are so frightened of the nature of the work and the difficulty required that they are ready to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity. The beauty is still easy to appreciate as everyone still appreciates the beauty that is Chess, Puzzles and Board games.
A good product manager’s patterns are significant like theorems. They must have great consequences for the users and must have evidence. Consequences are evidence for great content. The inferiority of products lie not in their consequences but in its content. Right time, wrong market. The market wasn’t big enough. Content not consequences.
