There is something about product management and product thinking that sits uneasily with the act of creation. Creative opportunities are suddenly viewed through an analytical lens, in an effort to min–max the path to revenue. When we wear the product management hat, we shift from creating to judging.

To embody the product mindset as an individual — rather than simply create — requires restraint and conscious control. Trying to create and judge at the same time becomes a self-censoring act: the creator’s mind is occupied not with the work itself, but with how that work will be received. A rigid adherence to this mindset forces things that simply were to be rationalised and justified, ultimately stifling creation.

The stages of creation and judgement must remain separate within an iterative creative process. The creator must give themselves permission to create with intent. We cannot create while also trying to evaluate how we feel about the work; that is a task for a clearer mind tomorrow.

In design practice, this separation is well understood. The tradition of crits (peer critiques), introduced at art school and widely adopted in industry, reinforces the idea that creation and judgement are distinct activities within the creative process.

Software engineering, too, is fundamentally a creative discipline — though we rarely think of it that way. The engineer’s output is not usually regarded as art, as the discipline emphasises correctness: the belief that every problem has an objectively right solution, best expressed through logical argument and structure. Yet the engineer’s real work is to realise a creative idea by encoding it in a rigorously logical form through a programming language — a human-readable abstraction of machine concepts. This is extraordinarily difficult, as anyone who has written software knows. Unsurprisingly, people who succeed at logically encoding creative ideas tend to think logically, inhabit logical world views, and evaluate arguments through a logical frame.

As an industry, we recognise the difficulty of this encoding and celebrate its precision, while overlooking the creative act itself. Here, too, we see parallels between design and engineering. Engineers have their own form of crits — peer review — ostensibly focused on the logical evaluation of software design decisions. Yet how often do we find ourselves debating “clean code”, “DRY”, or other principles which, while grounded in rational thinking, are sometimes invoked for more aesthetic or even quasi-spiritual reasons that resemble conversations about beauty?

As someone with a creative disposition who has acted as designer, developer, and product manager, I have found The Creative Act profoundly soothing. I will continue to give myself permission to wear all of these hats when making things — but also forgive myself for not wearing them all at once.