I Want My Corners

I work with a lot of product leaders and product managers that have direct access to CEOs, founders, or other leaders that are much more senior than them. One scenario that arises in pretty much all cases at some point is that a founder, executive, whatever makes a request that seems to not make much sense. Either it can’t have much impact, doesn’t match the strategy, whatever. So like good PM’s or product leaders, we try to reason with this person to explain either why it doesn’t make sense, or ask for more clarification as how this matches our strategy or our prioritization framework.

More senior people will use the classic PM trick. Don’t say the idea is bad, or even inquire in a way that implies it. Just show the current prioritization and ask where it fits. Much of the time, people will realize it’s not near as important as the other things you will show them, and solve the short term problem. But that really only solves the symptom.

While we would always like it, it is not always possible to understand the thinking of a founder, executive, etc. We can probe to learn, but either due the other’s impatience, inability to articulate what they feel, or unwillingness to share certain details that will make the decision easier to understand, that understanding eludes us. How this normally translates down the org is “CEO or exec wants this” as a meme-level justification for certain projects, and CEOs and execs hate that. It means the PM hasn’t done their job in understanding the CEO or exec.

But execs also don’t have a duty to explain everything to you, even if that is normally best practice. So I’ve begun using a shorthand to explain these situations to product leaders and PM’s I work with in advising. And I know I can get insufferable in using random song lyrics or movie or TV quotes to relate concepts, but of course I’m going to do that here with a scene from The Wire.

If you haven’t watched The Wire, you should probably stop reading and just do that. But even for those who might have watched in the past, I can set up the scene. Avon Barksdale, a drug lord in West Baltimore and “the boss”, has been locked up for a while. His #2 Stringer Bell has been doing a pretty good job managing the business while he was out, scaling it out of street level violence and running it more like a traditional business that doesn’t need to worry about these now low-level territorial issues with significant legal and safety issues. 

Avon is perplexed when he gets out of jail to see his crew no longer manage his corners where drugs are sold with an iron fist. Stringer tries to explain that Avon’s frustration is misguided, and that the work to regain this less important component of their strategy will lead to war, or significantly negative repercussions on something that is already working well. Stringer first shows loyalty to whatever Avon will decide. “I’m there like I always been.” Classic disagree and commit posturing. But then Stringer lays into how the game has changed, and what they are doing now is working better than the old strategy. After all of that explanation, Avon says he is not a suit-wearing businessman like his #2 has become. He’s “just a gangsta, I suppose”, and then he says, “and I want my corners.”

You are going to run into founders, CEOs, execs that want their “corners”, or seemingly irrational markets, product, features, etc.. And it’s going to be your job to make those things happen. As a former product leader, I think every CEO or founder should be trusted when they ask for a corner. Now, if they’re doing it all the time, it might just be a bad leader, and you should get a new job. But I have learned to respect there is a thought process I can’t always see, an important reason they can’t always share with me that may make this the right call. So, now I just label certain ideas as corners in the strategy to teams. I can’t exactly lay out all the reasons this makes sense to do now or agree with the ones I’ve heard, but we’re going to do it anyway, and hope it’s the right thing.