I never set out to study architecture engineering. I stumbled into architecture almost by accident. But once I was there, I was hooked.
It was the perfect intersection of engineering and art. I can still see my professor at the chalkboard sketching a design in seconds, narrating an architectural style as if he were pulling it straight out of thin air.
Architecture wasn’t just about lines on paper. In materials engineering, I learned how the right choices could balance insulation, sustainability, and aesthetics. In structural engineering, I discovered the art of the possible: Would this design hold? Could it withstand a flood or an earthquake?
I felt found.
But life had other plans. I had to switch colleges (that story for another day), and the new one didn’t offer architecture. So, I enrolled in computer engineering instead. Studying programming, data structures, databases, software engineering — the whole enchilada.
From there, my career journey carried me from writing backend code, to delivering customizations in professional services, and ultimately to product management — my home for the past two decades. I fell in love with the craft of product management, but my fascination with architecture never disappeared; it lingered quietly in the background.
YES IS MORE
Recently, while trying to clear my head before diving into my latest project — Data I Am (the app and the website) — I picked up a book by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, titled YES IS MORE. I thought it would be an escape, something unrelated to work. Turns out, it was the opposite: an architecture book that spoke directly to my product management soul.
One page stopped me in my tracks:
“Architecture is never triggered by a single event, never conceived by a single mind, and never shaped by a single hand…. We architects don’t control the city — we can only aspire to intervene.”
I read it once as an admirer of architecture. Then I read it again as a product manager. And I realized: the same is true of products.
Slightly reworded, it could have read:
“A product is never triggered by a single event, never conceived by a single mind, and never shaped by a single hand…. We product managers don’t control the product — we can only aspire to intervene.”
That hit me.
The Architecture of Products
In architecture, you balance the technical (Will the structure hold up?) with the artistic (Will people feel inspired, connected, at home here?).
Product management, it turns out, is no different. It’s half engineering and half art. It’s about building consensus — not by simply creating what everyone already agrees on, but by bridging the gap between what people like, what they want, what they think they need, and what they’ll only realize they love once they have it.
Over the last two decades, I’ve had the privilege of designing and launching many products. But as I was shaping Data I Am, the philosophy of YES IS MORE gave me a new lens. Had I not read that book, the design and build of Data I Am app and website would have looked very different. What seemed like an “unrelated” book turned out to be deeply related, reinforcing that products — like buildings — are about creating spaces where people belong, thrive, and say: “This is exactly what I didn’t know I needed.”
YES IS MORE (than architecture)
Bjarke Ingels titled his book YES IS MORE as a playful response to Mies van der Rohe’s mantra “Less Is More” — a phrase we product managers often find ourselves saying, too.
But in product management, YES IS MORE isn’t about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying yes to bold ideas — the ones that connect engineering with art, push boundaries while pulling people in.
That’s why I’ve come to believe:
Software product managers are just building architects in disguise.
We may not shape skylines, but we shape the digital spaces where people live parts of their lives. And just like great architecture, the best products don’t just meet needs — they surprise us with a sense of belonging we didn’t know we were missing.
To learn more about Data I Am visit: https://dataiam.com
