Product management as told through The Wire quotes
What the 3,239,423 LinkedIn posts and Twitter threads did not tell you
How do you know if someone is a product manager?
They’ll tell you.
Somewhere during my 15 year, start-stop, hippity-hop thing that I did to put money into my bank account, which some people have generously referred to as ‘my career’ (my father is not one of them), I had become a product manager.
See, I told you.
I’ve come to the conclusion that what I did as a product manager, as much as anything else, came close to being an ideal role for me:
Gave me the feeling that I was doing something with technology, reducing the regret of not having become a coder or a YouTube gadget reviewer
Surprisingly involved a large amount of writing, my true love; the pretense extending to even calling product requirements stories. Some of my best received, self-published works have been the 6-pagers I wrote and printed in Amazon.
Made me feel less like a manager that went to a B-school and more like a creator, thus preserving the last shred of my self-worth.
So, what is product management?
One would think we all know it right? You cannot open LinkedIn or Twitter and not see long posts from product managers. Like VCs and Journalists, PMs like to talk about themselves and what they do.
A lot.
But do we really know what it is? Probably not, because you still cannot explain it to your parents.
But whenever I have been deficient of wisdom, I have looked to the world’s best TV show to address my questions. After all, The Wire, is about product management.
So, here I am, using some of most fun quotes from The Wire to explain product management to you.
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You cannot lose if you do not play. - Marla Daniels (Season 1)
The best product managers know this. More often than not, the best thing to do to your product is nothing. See WhatsApp, for instance. Also, just because everyone is jumping into a game doesn’t mean you need to. See Apple and how many times they mentioned the word AI in their recent WWDC. Answer is zero.
A man must have a code. - Bunk Moreland (Season 1)
A product manager, on the other hand, must have code. As soon as possible. Ideally yesterday, all tested and deployed. And it should work without bugs.
Maybe we won. - Herc (Season 1)
When you’ve launched something after spending two quarters and you see really tiny adoption and a tenth of your projected profit trickling in and you find some nice metrics to highlight when reviewing the success with the title above.
All in the game… - Traditional West Baltimore (Season 1)
Whether you are selling dope or selling digital dopamine, things tend to go belly up more often than not. If you’ve cost the company a few thousands, move on claiming you learnt a lot. If it’s in the millions, better to become a digital nomad and shill thought leadership on what you learnt from the multi million failure.
They can chew you up, but they gotta spit you out. - McNulty (Season 2)
Remember this when your feature launch is delayed, as it inevitably always is, and you have to explain why it would take 30% more time for this to eventually go live to ‘leadership’. Getting chewed is item number one in a product manager’s job description. So, be like a gum - resilient, flexible, flavourless over time and eventually stuck beneath the grimy seat of some public seat.
It don’t matter that some fool say he different… - D’Angelo (Season 2)
…is what the devs in the team tell each other when a new product manager comes over, promising that now things are going to change.
I need to get clean. - Sabotka
Product managers going on sabbaticals.
Why you gotta go and fuck with the program? - Fruit (Season 3)
Occasionally inspiration strikes an over enthusiastic new product manager and he / she attempts to change the way the team does things. “Hey, I was thinking why don’t we….” is the way it starts. As a result, processes change, more questions are being asked and old skeletons come tumbling out of the closet. Why?
Call it a crisis of leadership. - Prop Joe (Season 3)
When you’ve pitched an idea and it is rejected as being too out there, expensive or not really the best time and you’ve got to slum it on some inane incremental thing that adds definite value.
I love the first day, man. Everybody all friendly an' shit - Namond Brice (Season 4)
New product managers walking into a whole new project, idea or company. Battle scarred PMs know better than to let the first day sparkles instill a false sense of utopia.
We got our thing, but it’s just part of the big thing. - Zenobia
When you have to explain to your devs why the product you launched successfully is now being deprioritized despite nothing having changed. Blame the machinations of the big machine we are all part of. Org priorities. Company focus change. And when things are really desperate, “It’s the economy man”
The bigger the lie, the more they believe - Bunk (Season 5)
Ask Adam Neumann. Or Elizabeth Holmes. Pitch the world. Realistic is for 1x PMs. 10x PMs go for radical things. When in doubt, always double down. In the age of disruption, a 5% chance to make $100 million is better than a 50% chance to make $5 million.
Deserve got nuthin' to do with it. - Snoop (Season 5)
It’s a jungle out there. No one is going to give you their money just because you’ve built the world’s best feature or product. Because Jio will offer the same for free. Same is true for career or growth.
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And finally, I will leave you with The Wire quote that you can pretty much use anytime you fuck something up
"All in the game, yo."
Could be Worse,
Tyag
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