Better call Heisenberg!
Walter White, aka Heisenberg, and James McGill, aka Saul Goodman, are the main characters from “Breaking Bad” and its spin-off series “Better Call Saul”. Hardly any other series has inspired me as much as these two. Their close relationship is evident not only in the script but also in the entire presentation.
Just as in “Breaking Bad” Walter White develops from an average family man to a drug lord named “Heisenberg”, so James McGill transforms from the shadow of the overpowering brother and lawyer to a cunning legal tactician, who eventually acts as Saul Goodman, making legal advice affordable for criminals of all kinds.
Clever instincts and inventiveness lie dormant in both characters. Thus, Walter White immediately recognizes Jesse Pinkman as the blackmailable drug dealer, who would be invaluable in the distribution of his product. Due to his scientific roots, Walter finds it easy to produce crystal meth and to finance his expensive lung cancer therapy through its sale. James McGill is already a tricky fraudster as a young adult, who through fake and arranged collisions between skateboarders hired by him and cars, their unsuspecting drivers, swindle money as compensation in cash at the scene of the accident. A little more mature, he emulates his lawyer brother and completes a distance learning law course unnoticed by him parallel to his work in the post office of his law firm.
What unites both characters, and the reason to publish this article in the “Agile Minds” newsletter, is this irresistible will to make your own product a success. Just as Walter simply can’t stop restoring his Crystal Meth Special in blue with more than 99% purity at a time when he has long since earned enough drug dollars, as imitators circulate inferior plagiarism, so Saul Goodman is simply not to be defeated and is not too bad for anything to bridge the 12 months, in which he had lost his lawyer’s license: Through a dialogue with a stealer, he discovers that prepaid mobile phones as “one-time phones” serve a market for petty criminals and advertises with the slogan “Privacy Sold Here!” under the pseudonym “Better Call Saul!” for his sale of said cheap mobile phones from the trunk of his scrap car.
The respective motivation and the respective product of the two may be questionable, but the passion they bring to the implementation is intoxicating. They do not retreat to their field of expertise and wait like a bystander for success or failure: they intervene in every conceivable and necessary form to serve the market. Neither Heisenberg nor Saul Goodman would have had such great success if they had only retreated to boiling the crystal meth or the duty defense. A stoic insistence on one’s own specialties is not sufficient for product success. What needs to be done must be done. Always with your own vision in mind and the irresistible urge to realize it. Walter White, for example, supports sales himself and is not afraid to do the dirty work if Jesse can no longer do it alone. For this purpose, the pseudonym “Heisenberg” is then created by him and not only satisfies his intellectual vanity, but also serves the secrecy of his actual identity in a naive attempt to keep his private life and especially his family out of his drug business.
James, on the other hand, personally stands in a rather deserted parking lot of a hot dog takeaway at night to sell his cell phones, even though the area is dangerous and ambivalent company in dark corners is potentially just waiting to rob him of his profits. In a jogging suit and with a gold chain, the sight is a wonderful contrast to his other outfit: top-dressed lawyer in suit and collar.
By the way, success for the two is not defined by money collected: Heisenberg’s wife, who is responsible for money laundering and the storage of the accumulated drug money, leads her husband to a rented storage container where she shows him several euro pallets with stacked dollar bills and asks what he does even further. Heisenberg is unimpressed and she realises: For a long time now, it’s no longer about money, but about having the best product on the market and defending it against competition.
In modern product development, it is also important to share a common vision and strive for a clear goal that is known to everyone in the team and even more so, for which everyone is passionate about achieving it. Only in this way can everyone pull together and make the vision a reality. There is no retreat to one’s own comfort zone, no exclusive assumption of work that belongs to one’s own profession and no waiting for the assignment of tasks: If there is no UX specialist on board, the team still has to take over this work, if there is no DevOps professional, someone still has to keep an eye on the CI/CD pipelines and, if necessary, administer them. Independently and on their own responsibility, the entire team recognizes this and actively picks up on grievances and eliminates them. There are no frontend tasks and no backend tasks. There are only completed new extensions, improvements and features that make the product even more valuable to the customer.
It is also the responsibility of the product manager to ensure that this is the case: tirelessly sketch and justify the vision and the path to it clearly for everyone and thus inspire and empower the team. Undiscussed detailed questions that only arise during implementation can be answered quickly for everyone, tasks are tackled together and solved in the best sense of the product. Support for operational measures and tasks becomes a matter of course. If you are looking for a modern product manager who ticks like this, you might want to call Heisenberg.