YouSaid · the spoken record

Ebi Atawodi

lines on the record: 107
first: 2023-12-03
most recent: 2023-12-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“On pretty much every social platform, my handle is AB Atawoody, my name. Workstuff, LinkedIn, Twitter. Instagram, all of it. And this is maybe a bigger one. I think We will all be more useful to ourselves if we actually spend a lot more time being a bit more present and mindful. Like the world will be a better place if people just went into themselves and sort of were a bit more mindful. I'm very big into meditation, so I think that's why I ask for everyone, be more mindful.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Watch people and I cannot underestimate the power of those 10,000 hours to become an expert. So just DJ, like I got this really cheap controller. It cost me 300 bucks. But you can Do a full mix on my iPad with the app? I use this app called DJ Pro AI, and it's like, you know, I don't know, 30 bucks or something. And I just DJ because I'm training, right? I'm just training. And it's for me, then I'll come home and I'll do it with the actual controller and record it and put it on YouTube for fun.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mixtape after a sauce. So one was called Sriracha, the last one was called mango chutney. And there's one coming up soon that I'm calling jerk.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes back to this I'm the master of my fate, I'm a captain of my soul. One thing I love and one of the things that's brought me to YouTube is just the chower of what you can learn and learning through YouTube. And so I used to DJ initially 15 years ago when it was still vinyl. And then I quit. So I was like, it's either I do design at the time because I started as an engineer, then I was a designer. Either I do design or I do DJing. And I stopped. And then a year ago My burning man camp was like, we need a DJ. So I needed to go DJ at Burning Man. And so I went on YouTube and I just followed all these DJ creators. The game has changed. I will say that. And so I have my mixapes on YouTube. So if you look for my name A.B. Atowe, my handle is always AB Ataurity. My name and my surname. You'll see all kinds of videos, but you'll also see my mixtapes. And I name each.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to pull it up. It's a poem called Invictors. And I love this quote because he was going through issues with his leg and was actually going to like potentially lose it and then wrote this quote. I want to read the last part. It's worth reading, looking up. It says, it matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul, and the last two lines that I'm the master of my fate, I'm the captain of my soul, is literally my Twitter thing, right, my or X.com, whatever we're calling it now. It's such a powerful reminder of freedom or responsibility.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A prototype I'm using a lot now, very simplistic. So a product's called Sea Cycle. And it basically allows you to set an alarm, but a progressive musical alarm to wake you up because I don't want that jarring like in the morning. It kind of just gets me there. But it also tracks my sleep using the microphone. So it tells me whether I'm coughing or whether I woke up or I'm snoring if I'm like in the wrong position. It also shows stats like when I'm in Nigeria, I snore less than everybody. When I'm in certain countries, I snore more than everybody. Really quiet.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two questions. If there are people that are, what is your leadership philosophy? The amount of leaders who have never thought about that is quite scary. And if you're just pure product chops, tell me your favorite product, product you're most passionate about, and why? And I lip from storytelling. Do you start with a problem? You know, I wake up in the morning. I'm always looking for like the mood. Music is like the backdrop to my life. And I open up Spotify and it just finds exactly what I need to like. I've just told you the problem and the solution, right? So I look for those kind of things. Then I'll ask if you could approve it. What would you do?”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you know the season is less stressful because the restaurant is closed? Cinematography. The piece goes down and it picks up when restaurants open again.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the one in the US, yes, at its about a chef. It's just so well done. Beautiful cinematography, but also you felt that he in that kitchen, you feel it.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my god, the beer. Just the beer, go watch it. It feels like being a PM. Honestly, the beer is the show. I think it's on Star with Disney Hulu.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“really really love this book called 48 laws of power. I know it sounds very machine, beautiful book. Another book that is my absolute, one of my absolute favorites is The God of Small Things. It's so beautifully written, really wonderful book. And more recently, a book that keeps popping up in my mind is Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Such a beautiful book because it just goes back to what we talked about earlier. It helps you see that they're patterns in certain things. And that's, yeah, it's been coming out maybe quite a lot. I'm a voracious reader, by the way. Find me on Goodreads. I read a lot.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This constant training of your product sense. So when the opportunity comes, you don't get lucky, right? But you get opportunity meets preparation.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the questions I get a lot of time is like, how can I be a PM? How can I convert into product management? And I just want to say, I'm this Nigerian girl. I don't have an MDA. I didn't work in consulting. And I'm here, right? And I genuinely think that some of the best product managers come from something else because you have empathy for being on the other side. And so, you know, what I always say to people is like there's a power of 10,000 hours. And you see a lot of stuff I spoke about. There's a lot of this kind of immersing yourself. So already in start product management doing product management before you're a product manager. Open up your favorite apps. What are the top 10 problems you see? In your head, design what the world could look like if you fix them, right? And what you do by doing that.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Able to basically put two thumbnails up to three, two, three, or thumbnails, and the system will actually AB test them and see which one actually works versus you sort of designing a thumbnail and insulting it out. So that's another exciting area.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For you based on what we know your community of subscribers and viewers are watching, right? So that's what I'm very excited about in some future world where I'd love to see you using that. It's going to launch next year. There's already a version of it in YouTube Studio. You can just type in a word. You could be like vision. And then it will give you ideas and other videos and topics and keywords that are being searched. That's one exciting one. Another really exciting one is we launched thumbnail test and compare. So creative a lot of time on thumbnails. And we've been working a lot with creators. We've been very systematic about just getting feedback and getting it out there. It's just roll down even to a bigger set of creators yesterday, actually. By the time this comes out, probably you might have it in your hands, Larry. And so you're.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not making the thing. You're making the thing. But we're a partner in it. We're the ones giving you insights. We're the ones, you know, helping you with testing things that might work. And if we could make your life easier, then you could just go do the fun stuff of telling your stories, right? So the couple of exciting things coming. So one of them is AI inspiration, which we launched at Madeir on YouTube. And when you talk to creators and I sort of, I always ask creators this question, like, tell me your creative process. There's always this big piece that's like the research where they come up with an idea and they're trying to flesh it out. In your case, like maybe it's finding the person and it's like reading about them. This is like pre-work that they do. And sometimes they'll do work by looking at tweets or watching other YouTube creators or listening to other things. And so imagine a world where we can actually use AI to like generate ideas.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'll go to one of the things we talked about, which is this once upon a time vision. One of the visions we have as a team is if you go back to the core of YouTube, which is give everyone a voice share in the world, it's really this YouTube is for creators being small, you know, who want to tell their story however they want to tell it, whether it's a podcast or live or video or short or post. And that we are the creative partner. And I do maybe that's another podcast for another day, but I fundamentally believe in like when products take on some kind of persona, right? And so we're like, okay, YouTube Studio, really, we're the creative partner.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I knew he loved to write. So every time we would do a doc, for example, to leadership, he would start, he would kick it off, even though it was something product centric. He would start writing it. I'm like, great. You're an awesome writer.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you know why they're doing the job they're doing and what they want to be? Are they trying to be a VP? Are they trying to go a startup? What is it? And so if you go to human element of like trying to actually bond with the person, like we'll do fun things where we'll just go to a show together or something or have lunch or dinner. Because if I'm spending half of my waking life at work, right, she sleep eight hours, the remaining time is 16 hours and you work, let's say, eight hours if you're lucky, right? You are eight hours. If I'm spending that time with someone, I kind of want to have fun while I'm doing it. And you'll have fun when you like each other. You love each other even better.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did it, I did it, and it came from when I first got into product management. I was a kind of like a PM in training, PM called MM trial. And my engineering manager was an associate DM, so a EM in trial. And we hated each other. We absolutely hated each other. And now there was love in the end and he's still a very good friend of mine. And it came down to first this I asked this question, do you know your engineering manager's birthday? The day they showed up in the world. It's the most important day for them. It's the day they showed up in the world. Do you know their birthday? Do you know their work anniversary?”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Matilde, my engineering partner, Brian Engineering partner, whoever those are, they know I care about them. So when the feedback is coming, I feel like that brings the most powerful thing a team has. You'll see teams just tactically go right in PRD. They'll send the PRD outside to the world, right? To the other partners. And I'm like, have you spoken to the other PMs on your team? Have they read it? Because actually they might help you write a better PRD. And so in my team now, we have like our email distro, like Gmail allows you to do the plus thing plus PRD and just ship your PRD, like even when it's getting baked and people will just help you shape it, right? Because we all care about each other. So that's the, you know, it's very, I know fuzzy and whatnot, but I do really believe in this thing of if we get back to the core of humanity and like there's a human behind the rule and they have goals and aspirations and if you care and love them the rest of it will follow them.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being liked to be very, and it sounds very harsh, I do not believe in being liked. That's AB. I believe in being loved, right? And that's a very, very different thing. And when I said this once in a meeting, people were like, right? But it took me a while in reading a lot of books to come to a definition of love. And love is the choice to extend yourself for the spiritual growth of oneself or another, right? It's very big and lofty and whatever, but it's you're literally extending yourself for somebody else or yourself, self-love, right? And that's love. And when you're extending yourself, you're not nice. It's not always nice or like. It sometimes is, you know, having hard conversations. It's knowing that, oh, you know, there's a human.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who cares if this decision is made? It's not like six people with consensus. Who was the person? And I'm very big on people uncomfortable, especially Google. Like a lot of people are like, well, but they're five and last. And I'm like, no, no, no. There's one person who owns this decision and that's the person that we're going to empower to get all the context, get all the input to make the decision, right? So it's like the rapid model where you end up with the decider. And then I think one for me, and this is just something I'm very passionate about. you know, I'm a black woman. I think a lot about how I show up in the workspace. And for me, something that's so crucial is I say vulnerability is your strength, right? And so we're all human. We're all fantastically flawed in many ways. And so I'm really, really fundamentally believe in this whole who's the human behind the role. And how's that human doing? And I don't optimize.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It in the right way now, but it kind of swung the other way. I actually had my product marketing partner. His wife worked at Netflix. And so he sends me the Netflix culture memo. And to your point, I created a culture of Netflix within my team at Uber. And so the values that actually I have carried through kind of go back to those. I do believe in this freedom of responsibility. I will give you freedom, but with that comes responsibility. That means the buck stops with you. We had a similar one at Uber, which was owner, not a renter. Speaking of Airbnb. But yeah, owner, not a renter. How would you act if his house was yours versus when you rent, right? And so it's that butt stops with you kind of mentality. Then there's this other one that I, you know, really think about, which is there's an informed captain. And so, and when too many conversations where I'm like, who is on the hook for this decision?”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually spent time with both my VP and my peers, my engineering and design partners. And we have a little acronym called BM because it's Brian A.B. Matild. And I kind of joke, I'm like, bam. So BAM got together and created a cult. We discussed a culture that we wanted to have on the team. Because indeed, it's like, how do you work? And by the way, just fun fact, the reason I ended up with Netflix and got obsessed about Netflix actually was when I was in Uber and we started all this, you know, this evolving beyond this, what we call Uber 1.0. So I'm very Uber 1.0. Like I joined Uber's employee number 1024, you know, like a very different Uber. As a culture was sort of going out in a way, in my mind, losing a little bit of the conviction that the other one had and becoming kind of like a catch-all.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I saw that was interesting about Uber was there was a core that was very monolithic about this is the culture and you hired people from all walks of life that live and breathe that culture. But there was a lot of magic that came out of a culture that also had the city at the core. So celebrate cities was one of the core things. And customer obsessed was another value. So if your customer obsessed and the culture says celebrate cities, then you know what? Maybe when we do ice cream in Nigeria, we're going to put this spin on it. We do Uber ice cream in terms of we're going to put that spin on it. So there's also this element of like I could not nice isn't the word I would use, but it was very accessible to anyone because it met them where they were. The product met them where they were. And I think that opened the roads for like no other company has been able to create ridesharing.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sir, macroculture that allows the flex of the culture so it manifests in different ways. And what that means for the product is you end up with a company like Google, where one side of the business is building something like cloud, another part's building something that's heavily data centric, another part's building something very human, give everyone a voice, show them the world. That's YouTube, right? And you were able to do that because the culture allows that flex.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know it when you see it, but what is going on? And so it allows for when you have this, what I call the microcultures where the culture within YouTube is different from the culture within cloud, is different from the one in photos, different from the one in maps. You'd actually hear people say, oh, they came from search because they have a culture in search, which if you say you're going to deliver two basis point, you're delivering two basis points, right? And there's a different culture and assistant where it's like, oh, experiment and try things and so on. So the culture almost becomes, it almost feels like a city, right? So I'm in Amsterdam and there's a culture in the pipe and there's a culture in Amsterdam Nord where all the hipsters are. And there's a culture in West, right? It's the same in San Francisco. There's a culture like if you're in the mission and you're in all of those things. So essentially what you then end up with is these microcultures, but then there is this loop.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a culture that allows the product to evolve and change tenets. And then you see Google where it's very much just this, you know, I sort of use this story of two little fish swimming in the water. And the old fish goes past them and Hey, how's the water? And they're like, good and then they swim along and they go, what's water? That's a little bit of what you get. And it's like, you know, we have this respect the user, respect the opportunity, respect each other. And that's all you get. That's it. Like, what is Googling?”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whole thing flips on its head. You'd think like it would be chaos. It's actually not. You actually saw people go a lot more methodically around, okay, I need to make sure when we talked about conviction earlier, we said, how do you get the firmness in your conviction? I saw people do that work, be like, okay, I'm at 95%. Can I get to 99%? What would I need to do that? And because the buck stops with you, right? In a world where people can sign up to multi-million dollar deals. like without any approval like it's actually quite liberating but it's the liberation it's frightening right and so and so you saw this and there's an intentionality involving the culture and now going back to sort of subscription video on demand because you would write things down and people kept debating and pushing and pushing there was now advertising on netflix”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to entertain the world, or do we want to entertain some people in some places? Sounds familiar, right? This is like what we also had at Uber. It's like, do we want to offer Uber to the world or is it just some people in some places who have credit cards? And so I saw that conversation go back and forth and the company allowed a structured way of having these debates. So you would typically be encouraged to write down things, write your argument, but ultimately it's Lenny's decision. And it's funny when the buck stops with you how”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Culture, like, what does it mean to entertain the world? Let's evolve, let's discuss, let's change. And so, again, going into the product, when I enjoy Netflix, there was a whole value of the product would not ever be advertising video on demand. It's subscription video on demand because we believe if we, and it was a strong belief, right? It was a belief system. And then over time, there were debates and debates. I was also part of a lot of conversations around access. Like in a world where more people are on their mobile phone, do not have a TV screen, might not have a credit card.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we tested it out, and it did well, and that's why Cash exists on Uber, right? Because the culture enabled that. I've talked about how it evolves and also the badge Uber. You go to Netflix where it started as a monolithic culture. It came out of, oh, we went through this experience where we had to cut the org down and we left these sets of people and they was performing just as well and had the same output and the same joy. Hey, what did we do right here? Let's like distill this down and distill it down into this no rules rules framework of frame of responsibility of highly aligned, loosely coupled, a few of these sort of tenets at Netflix. But I saw in my time, like very short time at Netflix, where I left Netflix to go to YouTube, I saw the culture evolve in a very short space of time, there was a very high degree of intentionality to evolving the”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not going back to revisit that, then the culture just kind of moves on. And then the companies out playing catch up, or it moves on in the way you don't want it to, and then the world is kind of like, oh my God, Uber, delete Uber, which actually happened. I lived it. It's very sad to wake up and know that you're doing the right thing for the world and see that 400,000 people have deleted your app just because of a miscommunication, really. Right. So this is a really big piece of Uber. The spin there on the autonomy was one of the cultural values was principled confrontation and toe stepping, right? And this was codified in the value system. It's like, forget about levels, step on toes if you believe it's the right thing for the business. And I talk all the time about the story of cash where Travis Kalinick was like against cash. By the way, I think up until he left Hover he was against cash. But he believed in data and he believed in principle confrontation. He was like, who tested out?”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, is the reason that Uber exists, and that infrastructure is very much what has allowed a lot of the gig economy actually thrive, like setting up these playbooks, trying themes, learning, sharing with each other was a very big part of the culture. Now, over time, I call this kind of like the monolithic culture that was a culture. And the culture of everyone back and said, hold on, let's revisit this. Does it still serve us? Has the context changed? What are the parts that we need to improve, evolve? Because here's the thing. If you don't intentionally evolve the culture, it will evolve without you. So culture is always going to evolve. That's just the way humans are. And culture are the norms and beliefs, right? And beliefs and norms change. That's how humans are. So I would say one of the things that, what are the good behaviors that you reward and the bad behaviors that you”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had to figure it out. In a country where there's no reliable running water, we want to do reliable transport. So what does that look like when drivers don't have a mobile phone and don't have car all and that? So there's this big piece of operations and what Uber basically did was we're going to work very hard to get the right people in seats. We're going to give them complete autonomy. And the magic that just came out of that.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You think about what Uber has done in the world, and you think about where we are now, where it's almost so natural to bring out your phone and the card turns up with someone you do not know, that you get into and trust them to take you where you're going. Like if you fast forwarded to when my grandmother was alive, she would have thought you were crazy. So just think of all the pieces that had to come together for that to work. And it was a super hands-on zoom out, zoom in. We say boardroom to streets, right? You could roll up your sleeves and go into streets and then go to boardroom operations team that really went into the fabric of a city and tried to convert that mission into what the manifestation is in the city. And I started at Uber as a GM before I became a PM. So I first had experienced that. I got my job. They were like seven cars on the road.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me use, I like the word battle. Clarity is seeing that you are committed to actually fighting this war in the first place, right? There are lots of other things you can find. This is the fight you're fighting in and why. And the conviction is like how and the way you see the world if you win that battle.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You sometimes your team hasn't even done the work between themselves talking. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You need to go through the work. And if you have gotten to a point where you have conviction, but there is some risk, then let's talk about the risk that you need by help mitigating or help solving. Because it's too easy to come to me and be like, oh, here's A&P. You do the work and tell me which one to pick. No way. No, that's not going to make you a better PM. Go figure out why you can't stand by A.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do all these kind of draconian things that just force clarity. And so then the conviction will come out. And it's like, yeah, but I'm uncomfortable. I'm like, okay, so the thing that's making you uncomfortable, go spend time. Go spend your research. Go spend your cycles on getting higher certainty on that conviction rather than chasing for things because we're, I don't want to use the word lazy, but like too scared to pick a lane, right? So don't peanut butter. Like nobody does anything well by peanut buttering resources, spreading them thin. So that's the conviction. It's like, it also thinks like people, you know, I'll sometimes have someone come to me and say we have these two scenarios and there'll be a document and I'll usually be, you know, the typical pros and cons of the options. And I'm like, so let's say we weren't in the room as the leadership team, which is the one the team wants to get behind.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you have conviction and it's not clear, then you don't have conviction, quite frankly. If you're like, I kind of think, you know, maybe we should, you know, the like five things we should solve and like, then you don't have conviction. So I'll sometimes stress test. And I'm like, what if I took away all your resources and you only had five, which is the one you're going to build?”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the definition of conviction is a feeling of what you think the way the world should be. It's a feeling. It is not certainty. It is not absolute. It is not perfect. But it's a feeling of I feel like this is the right thing to do. And that's what we're seeing, right? We talk about product sense. It's you're building this feeling of what you think is right. And so you bring that to life. And so everything we just talked about is literally you converting the conviction from your head into something that people can consume. And that's the conviction. Clarity, narrative, vision, conviction.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In parallel or after say, okay, let's take a week off, right? Spend time in a room and shape the vision, right? Or let's take a day off. Like I did, I've once done one a day. The sketches I talked about. We literally locked ourselves in a room. We had an Uber, we had no meeting Wednesday, Google, we had no meeting Friday. And I said, just block your no meeting Friday the next one. We're going to get in the room. We're going to whiteboard. We literally like post-it notes. And the designer, of course, was like, this thing is ugly. And they made it pretty. And that was the vision. The vision I remember seeing so many docs at Uber with literally slides from my dock, right? Saying, you know, we agree with this vision. And so therefore, we're going to build this thing and our team to support it. And that's great if you're influencing, right? And I'm seeing it right now in YouTube as well, where teams are like, oh, I've seen that vision and they'll refer to it. I saw your, you know.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our area, they had a set of problems, they had their strategy approach, we called it, and then they had the big rocks. And everyone wrote a two-pager, right? So we wrote this two-page document, and then they circled it around their partners, the engineering teams, and got feedback. And that's what they then used to then build out the roadmap. Then they build out the roadmap and said, okay, based on that, this is what the roadmap looks like of unpacking those big rocks a little bit more. And usually the rule we gave was like, if you have more than 3 engineers of it, less than three engineers on a problem, consolidate. More than three, it needs a line, right? So then you have the roadmap. It's just a Google sheet with lists of things and the resources assigned to it. And that's when we start to see, okay, where do you block? You have enough UX, you have enough this. It's a bit more tactical. And then you have your roadmap. But then, you know, after you've done the inside strategy, Big Rocks or the Roadmap, you can”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, again, the document is evergreen and updated. I'm a big fan of evergreen documents because you create this mental thing where everybody just knows link whatever the short link is bit, whatever you use in your company, they remember it and that's the link and that's where I go or they know what the name is to search for the document. It's kind of like how we all know good PM, bad PM. It's like it's lived through the test of time. So I believe in evergreen documents. Update the existing document or do like a versioning of the doc like 2022 version, 2023 version, whatever that is. So typically the narrative will happen before like as you go into planning. So just my team right now, which is gone through a planning cycle. Now I already had a vision for the Florida team, but basically for each team, you know, they took the overarching vision and said, okay, let's now bring that to life for like.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the one that you refresh periodically so that you can refresh every recorder and you can refresh every six months because you're kind of adjusting to what's happening in the world, what the problems are. That's an out.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you wanted to tell people why you exist and why they should invest in you, which is kind of why you're doing this PM. What is a big problem you solve as a company? What's the strategy? What are things you're going to deliver that would end up in the headlines that are coming in the future that you need money for, right? You're telling investors, I'm going to build these things. I need money, right, to do these things. That's what this is. It's just the narrative. And I think one of the simplest things that PM can have is this narrative that when people come to you and be like, hey, you see all these emails, introduction, meet this person in the PM of this, like, oh, I want to send them the time to understand what you do. I'm like, nope, go to go slash my narrative, read it. Then when we set up the time that any of you have questions, and guess what? A lot of calls will fall off just from that. Or when, you know, someone comes into the team and they're like, what are we about onboarding? Here's the narrative, right? So that's the narrative.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smell vision because this is not telling us what the solution, what the world will look like if we solve the problem. That's the vision, right? This is actually bringing clarity to the narrative of why we exist.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clarity comes when you write. And so I made them write two page documents. I will let you go up to four, maybe. But like two-page documents with insights, your strategy, or I use the word approach sometimes, and then the big rocks. And the big rocks are not like a laundry list of 20 things because I asked you to make me a cocktail, you would put ice in first. Then you would pour the drink. You would not put the drink and then put the ice or splash and it's messy and that's how an endless roadmap looks to me. So it's like three, four, five things that anyone can remember that are the biggest things if we land this, it gets us closer to solving the problems than every other little thing is around. You can kind of fill that around. That's the sand around the big rocks.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be. That's what the word is, right? It's removing all, it's sifting out all the stuff that's polluting the core thing. That's how I think of clarity. And the sort of tactical thing that I use to bring that clarity is the framework I talked about, which is the narrative insights, strategy, big rocks. It brings clarity to why we're doing what we're doing, how we're going to do it, and what we're going to do. And I spent time talking and I can spend time talking about all those, but we talked about the workshop to do that. And I actually have in my EM, one of my old EMs, who you've actually had on the podcast, talks about this a lot. I made every PM, like people have fancy decks. That's great.”
2023-12-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source