It is easy to watch Moneyball and conclude this a story about how data changed baseball and the world of professional sport. And it is this story.

However, nestled into Moneyball’s story of plucky data geeks triumphing over bully-boy baseball bros and big business is a story of personal growth, cultural change and organisational transformation.

The one solace I now take from my brief experience on the periphery of the financial services industry, is that as much I didn’t understand how MBS and CDO markets worked, it would appear that none of the analysts or the banks, funds and ratings agencies I was hiring for understood them either!

Like any marketplace product manager, Tyler has to contend with driving engagement and how to activate his customers; typically to stop customers from window shopping and actually buy something!

A product manager’s challenge is to overcome the tensions between of offering value and a great experience to customers (UX) and driving value (money) back into the business employing them. I’m sure many a winemaker like product managers have succeeded at one but not the other.

Homer doesn’t work well with his engineering team, instead he dictates a ‘shopping list’ of feature demands. The end result is ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ of a product comprised of badly stitched together ideas, a ridiculous spaghetti bowl of features and design styles.

Imagine a ‘guild of drug dealers’ if you will, which informally defines a code of conduct and best practice and unflinchingly enforces this code amongst its ‘practitioners.’ Failure to follow the code will result in your expulsion from the guild and the end of your drug dealing career. This being the drug dealer’s guild, letters of expulsion are delivered via gunshot!

You might interpret it as the tale of how the unscrupulous Ray Kroc duped the inventive yet hapless McDonald brothers, Mac and Dick out of their own business.

Instead I would implore you to read it as a love letter. A love letter to product management…