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Repost: Art or Science?

January 20th, 2010 | Product Management

This is a repost of a post that I did on the Product Management View.

This post – Ann Handley: Marketing: Science or Art? – reminded me how much this phrase is starting to annoy me. My high-level thought is…. unless you have paint or crayons it is a science. :) Largely, I come across this phrase when discussing the exercise to prioritize requirements, features and problems but it creeps up in other discussions as well. According to Wikipedia, science refers to any systematic methodology which attempts to collect accurate information about reality and to model this in a way which can be used to make reliable, concrete and quantitative predictions about future events and observations. Using the same source, there is no general agreed-upon definition of art, since defining the boundaries of “art” is subjective, but the impetus for art is often called human creativity. Since building and delivering software or other high-tech products is generally done with the goal of making a dollar and sustaining a business, I sure hope decisioning is not done within the realm of “human creativity” but with quantitative predictions.

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    • Stewart, if you haven't read anything by him already, you might enjoy the work of Jacob Bronowski, who wrote frequently on the ways in which art and science complement each other. Bronowski was a polymath, excelling in both art (an expert on William Blake) and science (mathematics, IIRC). Short version, he doesn't see it as an either/or question.
    • I like this discussion. In my opinion there is a lot of science but like David describes below a bit of art as well. There is a lot of theory and thinking that goes into designing a good marketing plan but it's hard to get to a great marketing plan without some creative thinking.
      April
    • This I agree with, in the context of marketing plans because I suspect there are creative components in that document. But I suspect those creative components are rooted in some data.
    • Looks like Seth was arguing a similar point yesterday...

      http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/01...
    • The Art vs. Science debate should be resolved as a matter of Art and Science.

      We make decisions emotionally and use science to justify those same decisions. We go about doing product management as an art, and justify what we do with science. The science doesn't reach the real, so art fills the gap.

      Typically, dichotomies like these are never Boolean, or force vs. force. Instead, they stand at opposite sides of the room and meet in the middle as determined by the quantity of each of the dichotomous forces, which are hardly ever equal. Each force demonstrates a power law distribution, so the middle of the room is not a borderline, but a borderland, a space potentially as large as the entire room.

      Art and science dance together for the joy, the outcomes, the reality over theory, the execution over practice.
    • David you might enjoy this book: How We Decide ~ Jonah Lehrer
      (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0618620117)
    • Well put David.
    • David,

      That is a magnificent quote - "Art and science dance together for the joy, the outcomes, the reality over theory, the execution over practice".
    • Stewart - While I agree that day-to-day tactical elements of product management are most effective in the hands of 'science'...We often see that the big, disruptive breakthroughs are gut calls, subjective opinion etc...

      Perhaps it's because the whole market has access to and is making decisions based the same quantitative data. In my experience, it's those qualitative skills that separate great PM's from good ones.
    • While I agree with your premise that the big, disruptive breakthroughs are due to taking some risk (i.e. gut calls), I am not sure any of the successful ones are done without without any research.
    • I would say that discontinuous innovation is only so in the absence of market, which in itself is a data point telling how to go about finding a market and that market's data. As soon as I know I don't have a market, I know what to do next, and I stage gate that step against an existing market before we close the first client engagement. It's not art, not in the sense of it must be art in the absence of data. I have a validated framework that finds its own justifying data.
    • Stewart,

      I see your ponit, calling the prioritization of requirements, features and problems an art does not sound right.

      I think the challenge is that at some point, you may not have all the data you need to make a systematic decision. This is where customer research, market trends, experience, and some creativity all come into play to make a decision.

      Maybe we need a new term for this?

      Thanks for the post!

      Josh
    • "This is where customer research, market trends, experience, and some creativity all come into play to make a decision."

      I think even having some research can eliminate the creative aspect.
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