Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)

Ebi Atawodi is Director of Product Management for the Creator Experience at YouTube, former Head of Product at Uber, and a former Director of Product (Payments and EMEA) at Netflix. Known for crafting a strong, unified vision, Ebi empowers her teams to achieve outsized outcomes. In today’s episode, we go deep into vision and strategy, including: • The four key elements of a good vision statement • Three ways to determine your mission • The four pillars of great product management • How writing helps you gain clarity • How culture influences product • Tips on how to structure a strategy session • Advice on building team culture and improving work relationships • What’s coming soon at YouTube — Brought to you by Sidebar—Accelerate your career by surrounding yourself with extraordinary peers: https://www.sidebar.com/lenny?utm_source=lennys&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=waitlist&utm_content=accelerate | Jira Product Discovery—Atlassian’s new prioritization and roadmapping tool built for product teams: https://atlassian.com/lenny/?utm_source=lennypodcast&utm_medium=paid-audio&utm_campaign=fy24q1-jpd-imc | Wix Studio—The web creation platform built for agencies: https://www.wix.com/studio?utm_source=Lennyspodcast&utm_medium=Podcastad&utm_campaign=SL Find the transcript and references at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/crafting-a-compelling-product-vision Where to find Ebi Atawodi: • X: https://twitter.com/ebiatawodi • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebiatawodi • YouTube mixes: https://www.youtube.com/@EbiAtawodi/videos Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Ebi’s background (04:31) Four key elements of a product vision (08:14) Examples of lofty but attainable visions (11:43) Vision vs. mission (13:23) Examples of visions and missions from notable companies (15:00) A simple framework for outlining a vision (20:51) Other methods for outlining a vision (23:29) The impact of writing clear headlines (26:41) Using mockups to frame your vision (28:24) A step-by-step approach to developing a vision (32:58) Ebi’s “10 Things” document (37:47) A quick summary of Ebi’s tips (40:56) How to use the “10 Things” doc in a strategy session (43:11) The three concentric circles of evangelizing (47:48) The cadence of developing a vision and bringing it to life (49:26) Visions vs. micro visions (52:58) First steps in developing a vision (55:12) Infrastructure is the product (56:39) Clarity and conviction, the main jobs of PMs (59:58) Ebi’s narrative doc (1:04:59) Conviction, its role in the job, and how to build it (1:08:20) How to build company culture (1:17:06) The monolithic culture at Uber (1:19:09) The culture Ebi embeds in her teams (1:23:58) How to evaluate your relationship with your engineering manager (1:26:02) What’s new at YouTube (1:29:22) Ebi’s closing thoughts (1:30:45) Lightning round Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I do not believe in being liked. I believe in being loved, right? And that's a very, very different thing. When I said this once at a meeting, people were like,

• 0:11Speaker 00

  right? But it took me a while and 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 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. They know I care about them. So when the feedback is coming like raw, they know that it's in their best interest because I've shown enough times

• 0:55Speaker 00

  that I genuinely care about the person behind the raw.

• 1:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, my guest is Abi Atawoody. Abi is Director of Product Management at YouTube, overseeing the creator experience. Previously, she was Director of Product Management at Netflix and Head of Product for Uber Wallet, Checkout, Pay and Financial Products at Uber. Abi shares the most tactical advice I've ever heard on how to develop a vision for your product, along with a bunch of very concrete ways to communicate your vision to your teammates and to executives. We also dig into the craft of product management and how to get better at it, along with what Abi's learned about creating a strong product culture on your team and across the company. Abi is such a wonderful human and clearly an amazing product leader, and I'm excited for you to get to learn from her.

• 1:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  With that, I bring you Abi Atawoody after a short word from our sponsors.

• 1:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  This episode is brought to you by Sidebar. Are you looking to land your next big career move or start your own thing? One of the most effective ways to create a big leap in your career and something that worked really well for me a few years ago is to create a personal board of directors, a trusted peer group where you can discuss challenges you're having, get career advice and just kind of gut check how you're thinking about your work, your career and your life. This has been a big trajectory changer for me, but it's hard to build this trusted group. With Sidebar, senior leaders are matched with highly vetted, private, supportive peer groups to lean on for unbiased opinions, diverse perspectives and raw feedback. Everyone has their own zone of genius, so together, we're better prepared to navigate professional pitfalls,

• 2:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  leading to more responsibility, faster promotions, and bigger impact. Guided by world-class programming and facilitation, Sidebar enables you to get focused, tactical feedback at every step of your journey. If you're a listener of this podcast, you're likely already driven and committed to growth. A Sidebar Personal Board of Directors is the missing piece to catalyze that journey. Why spend a decade finding your people when you can meet them at Sidebar today? Jump the growing waitlist of thousands of leaders from top tech companies by visiting sidebar.com/Lenny to learn more. That's sidebar.com/Lenny.

• 3:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  You fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day-to-day reality is a little different than you imagine. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers, and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates, and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing Jira Product Discovery, the new prioritization and roadmapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With Jira Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds, and it's all built on Jira, where your engineering team's already working,

• 3:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers. Sales, support, leadership, even Greg from finance. Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback, and insights in Jira Product Discovery for free. No catch, and it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never-ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try it for free at atlassian.com/Lenny. That's atlassian.com/Lenny.

• 4:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  AB, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 4:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's my pleasure. First, I just want to give a big thank you to Andre Albuquerque, who is the founder of One Month PM, who actually posted on LinkedIn about how much of a fan of yours he is and that I need to have you on this podcast. And so here we are. I want to start by talking about vision. Every product manager I've ever worked with and managed, vision has always been this development area for every single one. It's always this like, you need to get better at crafting a vision, telling your story. It's also this very powerful tool that product managers have to align teams to be more successful in the products they're building. And you have a really neat way of thinking about a framework for developing a vision and then telling the story. What are elements of a good vision for a product or even a company?

• 5:21Speaker 00

  I think the first piece is that you absolutely need to have one, to start by saying that. Regardless of what level you are in the company, so people say, oh, I'm just a junior PM or whatever level, there is some micro macro vision that you need to have because it's essentially, if you go on a plane and the pilot was like, I don't really know where we're going, but I'm a really good pilot. The company needs to fly 400 flights this year, so I'm trying to make that happen. But trust me, we'll get there. There might be churigas, I'm not sure. You know, you probably would be thinking twice about staying on that flight, right? What happens is you get on there, it's like, our destination is Miami.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  I'm dreaming of beaches and it's going to be 24 degrees when we get there. And he always paints or she paints this image of the destination and that's the vision. Not to be confused with the mission, which is we want to fly people where they're going safe, right? That's not, it's like a picture. So that's the start. I want to just delineate between vision and everything else that people think a vision is. So really, I think there are a couple of key elements. The first one is it needs to be lofty. So it needs to be something that feels, it almost. Scares you in an exciting way, right? Like, oh, my God, this is something I can get up every morning and, ooh, we did that. God damn. But at the same time, it needs to be realistic and attainable.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  So it cannot feel so pie in the sky that it feels so out of reach, right? And of course, there are leaders who and people who have really, really big visions and they see beyond the rest of us. But that's not most people. Most people, it needs to feel, you know, within reach. And then I think the key thing is it needs to kind of be in a vacuum from the limitations of today. Because the whole point of going to the future and saying, I time traveled five years out is to say, okay, I've come back to tell you what we need to fix in order to get there. Or I've come back to tell you what we need to put in place now so that we will get there. Right? And so you have this kind of three components.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  And if those come together and they are grounded, of course, in a problem that people are excited about, you've got your vision. Now, the how and how that vision manifests really depends on what you want to do. There are simple ones you can do, there are big ones you can do, but those are like the core pieces in my mind.

• 7:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Can you just summarize them again? And are there some examples you can share of here's like a really good version that it hits on these? And then if you have another example of a bad vision, that would be really helpful.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, so four things. So it has to be lofty, has to be realistic. It has to be devoid of the any tech or limitations of today. And it has to be grounded in a very clear and potent problem. User problem.

• 8:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. And then, yeah, are there any examples either from places you worked or visions?

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 8:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  What I particularly love, so a lot of my product thinking and my product chops and craft, I really owe to Uber. So when I think about things, there's, there's something really magical there. And one of our values at the time was making magic. So I use the word magic all the time. But so mission.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Push a button, get a ride. Transportation as reliable as running water. I used to be in Nigeria. That tagline did not scale because water was not that reliable in Nigeria. So they went for a slightly more inclusive version, which is reliable transport sanitation everywhere and for everyone. Right? So that's the mission. That doesn't really tell me what the image looks like when I get there. Right? But that's like, when I wake up every day, I'm like, why do I work in this company? It's that. Make transportation reliable everywhere for everyone. And I'll talk maybe later about like, how that came to, we're able to use that to actually challenge the then CEO, Travis Kalanick. The vision was a world where you get to this continuous trip so that you do not need parking.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Because cities, 25% of the average city is parking spaces. Like, you're in San Francisco, you'll see buildings, just floors, just for parking. Right? You'll have like, basements just for parking. In a world where we have housing problems, we have ridiculous prices for rents. Just imagine if you could free up all of those spaces for all kinds of things, right? Homes, restaurants, you name it, parties, you know, warehouse parties especially, they're the best. That was the vision. You kind of see it, right? You're like, oh, I could see a world. I mean, I live in Amsterdam, I have a bicycle. I can see, I can see it. Every other day, they're getting rid of cars and actually converting the parking lots

• 10:11Speaker 00

  on the street into communal gardens. Right? So it's not, it's not crazy, it's attainable. But now doing that for the whole world, what does that look like? And that's how things like Uber Pull came in, where in a world where the average car has 1.5 people in it, we can maximize that. And then we can get this connected trip where the car is just moving. And then maybe the car is autonomous, so you don't actually have to drive that car. And so it just doesn't need to stop. Right? I guess it needs to charge at some point, but.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  That's, that's, and that's it. I think that's a really good vision. I think one that's lofty. And I, I, I dance between whether it's attainable or not, is Elon Musk saying, you know, we're going to get to Mars. He believes it. He believes it so much that sometimes I'm like, I guess we're going to Mars, you know? But then there was the other one of, we want a car that's electric and we want that car to be beautiful. So that we will get to a car that's accessible to everyone. And that's kind of followed through. So, yeah, I mean, the beauty, beautiful things about visions is that it helps you decide, is that the work? Like, do I care about this problem? Is it something I want to do? And then you can take it or leave it.

• 11:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think with the lofty slash attainable balance, I think that Elon Musk is an interesting example where it may feel impossible, but as an inspirational leader, you almost convince people that it is possible through your confidence and your being in the details, helping people see like, maybe there's a path. So I think there's an interesting opportunity there to be a leader.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 11:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  You've mentioned this kind of difference between mission and vision a couple of times. It'd be cool, maybe just to, can you summarize that again? Just like, what is the difference between vision and mission in your mind?

• 11:53Speaker 00

  I'll use an analogy. Let's say we want to go hike. We want to go up to Mount Everest. The vision would be, once we're up there, me describing the picture of what we're going to see. We're going to get there, we're going to look around, it'll be the Himalayas, be beautiful, you'll be above the clouds, probably out of breath. You know, that's the vision. It's like, I fast forward into the future, I hold time, and I'm in that place. And I'm describing the picture, right? And so 20, a car, a city without parking, you can see that, right? And we've all watched sci-fi movies, you can see Mars, red planet. So that's the vision.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  And then the mission is, the purpose of why we're doing that, like, we're going to do this to demonstrate that we're able to do it. And making sure that we both get there together. It's a very simplistic one, but I'm just giving, that's the purpose. We're doing it because we want to prove to ourselves that we can summit Mount Everest, which I will not be doing anytime soon.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  But, you know, and, you know, we're doing it to prove to ourselves something that we can do it and we're capable. And we will do that by making sure that we look out for each other. Because you can get to Mount Everest and not have all the people with you. Right? That's actually a team bonding challenge that I've done once upon a time. It's actually very, very, very intriguing. So that's your vision. And then the mission is like the purpose and some set of guiding principles as to what will allow you to achieve that vision.

• 13:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's really handy. So, simple way to think about it, I'm just taking notes as you're talking and I totally agree with this. The mission is essentially the why and why you exist and the purpose for your team slash company. And the vision, like the word vision is, almost tells you what it is. It's like what it looks like when you get there. It's awesome. So that's exactly how I think about it. Actually, I have this post that I'll link to in the show notes that talks through mission and vision strategy. I'll give another, a bunch more examples real quick. Just, okay, I pulled it up as you're chatting, just for folks to have more examples. So, a couple of mission examples, real quick. At TED, their mission is to spread ideas. They're around to spread ideas. Stripe's mission, increase the GDP of the internet. IKEA's mission, create a better everyday life for many, for the many people. So I think it is exactly what you're talking about.

• 14:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  They're like, the purpose, why do we exist? And then visions, so Microsoft's vision, a computer on every desk and in every home. Very much like, what does it look like when we've achieved it? Tesla, create the most compelling car company of the 21st century. It's kind of in between, but I think that's close. Lyft, a world where cities feel small again, where transportation and tech bring people together instead of apart. How sweet.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  So that's one where I get, it's like, it's very warm and fuzzy and I love it. Maybe this is my Uber. But like, you can see a desk, a computer on every desk. That's what I mean by it has to be realistic.

• 14:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. Yeah, awesome. So what is a vision like concretely in as a as a document in your experience? So we've talked about vision so far mostly as like this tagline, like a sentence. Is that usually all you need when you're thinking about a vision you experienced? Do you often suggest going further into like doc deck storyboard, some along those lines?

• 15:06Speaker 00

  So I have a very simplistic framework. I actually don't know who put it together at Uber. But I I see as well, one of the most powerful skills of a product manager storytelling, right? Because you look at generation after generation after generation, what people pass on is stories. They're not numbers, they're not stats, it's stories. And actually, when you blend stories with numbers, so if you do numbers alone or numbers with stories or stories alone, the gap is so wide in stories alone. So it's not metrics blended with stories, it's a story, just a pure story. Right? This doesn't mean don't be a little. So one of the very simplistic tools that I've used,

• 15:49Speaker 00

  and I I use it as well right now at Google, when my team ships a product, they'll put the vision in there to remind what the vision was that they set out to do, right? And it's once upon a time, write the problem, and then write something, and then write something. And then one day, something happened, and as a result, the state of the world where we're trying to be. It's it's very simplistic, but in its simplicity is the magic because you're like, you know, I'm a PM, I'm trying to solve problems. Uh, the once upon a time, where were we, right? Like, what is the thing that is that we're trying to solve?

• 16:33Speaker 00

  So I'll give you a simplistic one. I know the team didn't do this for shorts, but like the shorts team at YouTube. Once upon a time, you know, YouTube was fun and people had cat videos and zoo and all of that. And then one day it became this really polished thing and a lot of people were producing really polished, very one hour content. And then because of that, you know, a lot of people felt maybe I couldn't create because I can't tell a one hour story. And because of that, you know, people decided, okay, I'm just going to watch and consume and not create. And then one day, we launched shorts. 60 seconds and because of that, anyone can now express themselves again and bring back the joy and magic of YouTube. So it's like, you know, it's very simplistic. I'm just using

• 17:16Speaker 00

  that into the teams who built this. I know this is not your vision. I'm just giving a story. But I remember this when we did it for Uber as well. We were talking about, you know, the loyalty for drivers and someone had this framework. And I thought, holy cow, this is it. So that's a very simplistic version. You can go one step up. The one I like to do, and I know that Amazon does this a lot, but is I write a news, I write a news article. I'll write the headline. Because if the vision has come to pass, right, and it's gone well, someone's gonna be writing, hopefully, some, you know, some sexy headline about the thing that you've built. So I go to the future and I write the headline I want to see. And I write

• 17:57Speaker 00

  the subtitle, just that. And I'll actually use the, you know, the omoket into the page of like TechCrunch or Verb or something, just so it looks realistic. And I'll put that in the deck, just to kind of like, this is where we want to be. And then if I really want to go deep, then I'll write the rest of the article. Right? So that's a very simplistic one. That's like another version. One that I use, and I show that in a lot of my talks is, I was trying to tell a story when I was at Uber. And I was like, you know, okay, words are amazing, but a picture tells a thousand words, right? So I wrote out the thing and I worked with my design partner at the time. And he literally took out a pencil and drew the future. And the vision I was trying to show was this world where you could walk into

• 18:42Speaker 00

  any store, any bodega, mom and pop shop, wherever you are in the world, and actually top up your Uber balance. Right? So even if you don't have a credit card and you have cash, you can also experience this cashless, seamless, you know, Uber experience. And that can scale all over the world. And he literally drew a bodega, it looked like a kiosk, like the ones in Nigeria, in my country, you have a good sign for. And then he drew that and he had the person with cash and a receipt, just showing like your top up was successful.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  And we built that product. It did not exactly in that way, but we built that product. Sorry for another day, but like, or maybe for later, but that's, it took four years to build it. But that image got people so excited about, oh, it's possible. I can see that.

• 19:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  This is awesome. So essentially, these are three ways to communicate your vision. The first is this kind of Mad Libs approach, which is really simple. So the framework. And is there something we can link people to that we talk further, kind of have this template? Okay, cool. Okay, cool. So in the show notes, you'll find a little template that you can plug in play here. But the idea is, once upon a time, blank, and then blank, and because of that blank. And one day, something happened. And that's essentially the, the vision is like, what happened? Like the big change that you're gonna create.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  And then, as a result of the thing that happened, how did you leave people feeling? What did you change in the world? What's the dent in the universe that you made?

• 20:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  Can you just share this, uh, this Mad Libs real quick again? Just like, what are the, what's the framework real quick?

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Once upon a time, the thing that happened.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Then one day, and you could actually put the date in 2026. Right? And because of that, and because of that. And I usually like to end it with, and finally, this was the last thing you left the world with.

• 20:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  Hmm. Beautiful. It's interesting. It kind of follows the, um, the hero's journey a little bit where it's like, here's today's world. And then here's a problem that you ran into and this challenge you had to overcome. And then here's how we defeated the foe. And then here we are back in our default world again. Okay, so that's one path. The other path is to write kind of the backwards, working backwards approach, write an article. I think the press releases, like to me, it's like dumb to write a press release. No one reads press releases anymore. So I like that you think of it as a TechCrunch article.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there something you remember where you did that actually with a product? Like you wrote an article of a product you were launching?

• 21:08Speaker 00

  At Uber, we, we were drooping about cars. Then it was like, well, push a button, get a ride. It could be push a button, go anywhere. And so one of the things I started talking about, and this is the beauty of Uber. It allows you to kind of challenge the status quo. I started pushing this idea of if we need to have this more multimodal trip, where I could take a, you know, ride a bicycle or scooter, then I get to the train station, buy my ticket, scan in, then from there I go into an Uber maybe, then I come out and at the other end, and I get a scooter, whatever that is, it's this connected, single trip. And the reason I was doing that was I was a platform PM. And surprise, surprise, I always say platform PMs, you have to be

• 21:53Speaker 00

  an order of magnitude, even more like stronger, I think, at like vision setting. Because you have to build the foundations of stuff you don't even know is coming. So I would do these exercises with my partner teams to kind of figure out, even if they don't know it, like force a vision out of them, just to see, is this, is this where we're going? Because then as somebody building the commerce infrastructure for Uber, I need to know what I need to build if that is a scenario that's actually going to happen. And we were also thinking about this world where you could like tap to pay with your Uber phone. So there were all these crazy ideas and I wrote a headline of, you know, Uber really wants to replace your, you know, like wants to replace your, I put it as like your Clipper card in San Francisco.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Cause I wanted my San Francisco buddies to kind of relate to what I was saying. So Uber is now replacing your Clipper card. All you need is your phone and the app. And I wrote it out and, you know, we didn't go and build that product, but we built the payments and commerce infrastructure for the team that did. And we were very involved at the beginning when it was getting kicked off of, how does this look in a world where, you know, you can use Uber to pay for transport? You can do that today. So yeah, that's a real life example.

• 23:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  And that was an article that you ended up writing of what the announcement would look like? Or is that using this? Okay, awesome.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  It was a, it was the article framework. So it was like, it was literally the New York Times headline, even had their logo. And, um, and then I had the subtitle and later on, over time, I wrote the actual article, like the whole thing. But I started first with that, just to kind of provoke a response.

• 23:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  And what did you see as the impact of having that? Like, what kind of benefits did you see having this article that you could pass around? Do you have any memories of like, wow, that was really helpful here?

• 23:36Speaker 00

  It's two things. So you'll hear me say product management is clarity and conviction. And in writing the headline, you have to focus. Headline is not like, it's not a PRD, right? It's a headline. So when I've done this, like, what is the impact of this going to be? What's the feeling I'm leaving with? And it forces you to get to that clarity of, okay, we solved this problem. This is actually going to be the painkiller that we're solving. And then we translate that painkiller into they have a headache, they no longer have a headache. Do you know what I mean? So I think it breaks clarity. So for me as the PM, I'm like, this is why I'm saying this is important. Then you have the subtitles. So they'll usually have a headline and then like a sub bit. You've just launched a way to something, something. And you have to write that as well.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Like, what is the thing we're launching? And is that realistic? And then using that to kind of socialize the idea to say, this actually could work. Right? And I didn't go all in to lip. Somebody else went and did it, but we had already thought about it and baked that into our platform vision of we need to be able to support these different kinds of ways to pay. There's another interesting one. Now you're going to go to the third one, which is, you know, write the story. Write the article that someone else will write or visualize it. Right? And to visualize it, two things have actually happened. One, a year and a half ago, in a strategy session I was running at YouTube,

• 25:03Speaker 00

  I actually took a screenshot of the Google Play Store. I mean, I use an iPhone, but I work at Google, so I was trying to be, you know, so took the Google Play Store. And then I, you know, and then I created rounded rectangles, just blank rectangles for panels. And then I printed that out and I gave everyone a sheet. And I said, if we realize these, we solve these problems. Right, we solve all these problems that we've identified. What would be the screenshots? You know, when you go on the App Store, it has like the, you know, make money or express yourself or what, what, what are we trying to say? And what is like the mock? The hero mock, the marquee mock that we're showing. And then again, it forces people to think, oh goodness, we can't show everything.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  So it's got to be three or four things, the land, the big rocks that will solve this problem. Right? So everyone did theirs and then we talked about it. And what was interesting is you'll find two or three that everyone comes up with. If you've done a good job of telling a story around the problems. And it's like, it's quite beautiful to see. So that's a very simplistic visualization. It's not like a beautiful sketch or video.

• 26:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  I really like that as just a reminder that when you're even the article approach of like announcing the thing. Instead of the traditional press release or even like a tech ranch article, it's where will people find out about the thing you've built and then use that as a way to frame what you've done? So in your case, it's like the App Store, they're going to see this update in the App Store. Let's just see what that would look like as we announce it in the App Store. Could end up being a tweet, could end up being podcast. You know, there's all these different channels. So I think that's gives people more ways of telling the story. If it's not going to be like a press release. Okay. And then, yeah, you talked about this third approach of the design, like mocking up essentially the vision. I always feel like if you have a designer helping you craft your vision, it's such unfair advantage.

• 26:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  So definitely try to get a rope a designer in to help you tell the story. Cause just one, does one design is gonna, like you said, worth a thousand words, as they say.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  The thing though is it's such, I feel like it's an easy cop out to be like, oh, but my design, design team doesn't have resources. So I'm like, no, that's not an excuse. Start drawing it with your hands in the App Store. Right? Like still tell the story. Cause the story, you should be able to tell this, like, I'm obsessed with Steve Jobs. You should, you know, you, you tell the story without slides. Right? So that mocking it up is just so you can actually bring that narrative and tell that story. And so do an App Store or, you know, sketch it out or use little rectangles to show like low fidelity mocks. Like do not use, I don't have a designer to be the excuse why you don't bring it to life. Right.

• 27:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  And often the designer sees it and like, this sucks, I'm gonna make it better.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Exactly. So that's exactly what I did. I sketched this thing once and I gave it to a designer. It was literally post-it notes and they were like, okay, I see where you're going and it's exciting. I have some cycles. I'll spin it up. They spun up a lo-fi one, loved it and like, actually, I'm just gonna make it pretty. And they made it pretty and we got it. I mean, now I'm a director, so I can, I have a bit more agency with resources. But I was like a L4 PM, like, you know, not even a senior PM when I did my first vision exercise.

• 28:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, this is awesome, because I think it's really vague, this idea of I need to develop a vision. And I think you've shared some incredibly tactical, clear steps you can take. I also want to take, talk about how to actually develop the vision. I think you have kind of this step-by-step approach. Is that right? Okay, awesome. So before we get to that, just like, again, reminding people what we just talked about, which is just like, here's all these ways of framing your vision. And there's a lot of ways to do it, you know, it's not like you need to make a beautiful deck that you can just write it out. You could write a press release, you could write a tweet, or you could get a designer help you mock it up, or just mock it up yourself. Awesome. Okay, so let's talk about your suggestions of how to actually go about developing and figuring out the vision for your product.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  You know, there are three pieces, if you think about it. So one is what I call empathize. The second is create. So we spent a lot of time talking about create, the middle piece. And then there's evangelize, right? And so I empathize with the customer, the problem, I put myself in their shoes. I really get a visual understanding of what those problems are. Well, I'll talk about in a second, the tactical way I have done that across Uber, Netflix and Google, in a way that scales. Then the create piece where it's, okay, now we solve this problem, what does the world look like? That's the vision we've just been talking about. And then finally, evangelize.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  So I find, just especially sort of as you get more senior, the life cycle of a product or group of products gets wider and wider and wider. And so I set out a vision, for example, at each year. Last year, that was called, you know, vision twenty twenty six, right? And only this year, a year and a half later, we now have a stage where it's actually going into the planning cycle. We've actually finished all the things we're already in progress. We're actually now, you know, funding some of the big rocks that get us there. So there's a bit of patience that comes with it. And I think some people just say, give up when they get to the stage because you're gonna meet a lot of naysayers. Like, oh, that, you know, that one person's like, but, you know, there's no way the engineering is ever going to solve.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Like, there's always gonna be those people, right? Which is why I said, you need to come up with a vision that's that's in a vacuum of like the technical limitations, because the limitations of today might not be the limitations of tomorrow. So going back to the emphasized, um, uh, one of my, my, uh, peers at work uses this word. He says, you need to do understand work. And what is understand work? It's crazy to me, the number of PMs who never go through their products and go through the onboarding, of course, the onboarding PM, but actually go through the onboarding flow. Because we're all in this state of using the product, but actually that first step where I do have the product, like, what does that look like?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  I have multiple variations of accounts on YouTube. I have multiple like accounts on Instagram, you know, where I have multiple accounts on TikTok, where I'm like, just using the product, just like, how does it manifest? What do I like? What's going well? I had the same with Uber. I had Uber, I had other partner apps. I would look at them in payment services. Empathys would come very easily if you dog food or, and then cat food. Dog food, meaning using your own product, absolutely a must. Cat food, using your competitors or other people in the landscape's products. So that's one piece. The other piece is obviously research.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  But I, research is an interesting word because you, you, I think you use research, I think research is rich when it's giving you foundational problems that are a couple of cycles out, obviously depending on, you know, uh, the level of research you're doing. But your researcher, if you think about the product lifecycle, research is like ahead and then UX, right? And then you go into building. It's like in that phase. And so I, I find too many people lean into and let's go test it. Let's go do some research. It's like, dude. Like, you're a human. Look at the products. Like, would you use that? Like, you build some intuition from just exposing yourself to really good products.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  Every time you pick up your phone, what is it about the app that you love? Like, do you think about that? Oh, I love, like, open up my phone. I love Spotify. I also love YouTube Music, but I really love Spotify, right? For my music, I've used it for years. And I'm like, okay. What is it? Like, what is it about this new thing they just launched that I love? And I try to articulate that. So there's that piece. But then the tactical thing that I, I almost make every PM on my team do. I call it top 10 things you should know. It's a living document. So in my org right now, you know, I've got quite a number of PMs. And for each of those PMs in this living Google Doc, it's like go slash Studio Problems.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  They literally put 10 things, like 10 problems you should know. And you revise it. Every quarter, you update it. And they're staggering. Right? So it's like a living set of problems. And they could be qualitative. It could be quantitative, right? They could be tech debt. They should be tech debt.

• 33:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  So these are just known problems with the product that everyone was aware of?

• 33:31Speaker 00

  Correct. And you, you keep, you kind of farm for the problems. So you keep that doc going. And so I first started this at Uber on the money team, and I called it money problems. More money, more problems. Because I do fundamentally believe we should bring joy into everything we try to do, you know, so have fun with it. So more money, more problems. And essentially, it was in partnership with my data scientist partners. He, you know, he had a team of product analysts and data scientists. And they would pair up with my PMs. And we would have the UX team, the UXR team, the data team, and the product managers and engineering get together and actually look at their problems. So that living document means that for me, if I go around at least my minus one,

• 34:16Speaker 00

  not just for me, but my engineer, engineering partners minus ones, and my design partners minus ones. And we chat them and say, what are the top five problems for Studio? They should all have the same answer.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  This is I've done my job, right? Because then we all know the problems. You can debate them, you can discuss them. You can have sessions where you revise and review them. But we do that and then we go into a room. And for example, I literally printed them on cards. And I put them on tables, scattered the groups and have people kind of vote, discuss and vote the ones that is the most painful, right? Because then you see the whole thing. So that's the empathize bit. I'm spending a lot of time on this because I can't tell you how many times the clarity of the problem, going back to clarity and conviction, is missing. And that problem is kind of like the North Star. Everything's going on, but there's a North Star that doesn't move.

• 35:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  Before you move on, there's so much there I just want to touch on that are really interesting insights. One is just this point you're making of when you're trying to develop a vision or thinking about the next step. You should be way ahead of that. Like you have this doc that you've been working on inconsistently updated. And it's there way ahead of time. It's not like, cool, next year's coming up. Let's start from scratch and figure out what the vision is long term. Two is there's this quote that I think Patrick Collison tweeted that I always think about in these discussions where a lot of people think of user research. It's like user research. Often people think of user research, you do user research and that tells you what to do. And he made this point, no, it should be user research, updates your mental model of your customer and what they need and the problems they're having, this doc that you're writing.

• 35:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  And then that mental model informs what to build. And so I think that's a big difference and it connects with what you also said of you should trust your gut and judgment. A lot of people discount as a PM, like I should have no opinions. I'm just going to listen to what data and research is telling me and I'm not going to inform, I'm not going to try to bias the team. But something I've learned more and more over time is just you should really trust your gut and your instincts, exactly like you said.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  If I could put all the research into Bard or ChatGPT and it could spit out a PRD, then you haven't done your job. So basically, that's the, I, I, I maybe panicked my team. I came in, I'm like, listen, Gen AI, everybody's like talking about all the stuff that you do with like creating content. But what I want you to think about is like, what is the value and you break that an AI, I can't just put into an AI right now and say, tell me the big thing based on this research that is, that exists. So I've never heard that a quote from Patrick Collison, but.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  I agree. It's spot on, right? And I think this is where, you know, when you think about the qualities of a product manager, I think there are four pillars. Product sense, leadership, execution prowess, and technical ability, right? And it's not product, you know, uh, logic. It's product sense. It's a feeling, right? It's a sense of what is right and that the exposure to products and the curiosity will refine that sense over time. And I think that's the thing that people undervalue a lot. It's like you start program managing and just like spitting out what engineering said we can't do and UX said they could do. And like you become this, that's not the job. The job is clarity and bringing this kind of context really to the, the, the set of

• 37:39Speaker 00

  problems that are being solved and you're curating them together. Right? That's the key there. It's like you're curating those problems together.

• 37:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  And one of the challenges I find as a PM is convincing people of your gut instinct of why this is right. And, but I think that loops back to the power of vision and helping everyone align like here's why we exist and here's where we're going. And here's what I'm sensing is probably an opportunity. Okay. So just to summarize some of the tips you've shared on this empathize step. One is basically user research, but I think even more importantly, use it to inform the, your understanding of the problem the users are running into and their needs and things like that. What else did you talk about? Oh, use the product, like actually be a user of the products. And in your case, it'd be like upload YouTube videos. Yeah.

• 38:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there anything else? Are you, okay, there's this doc that you shared. That's awesome. So just basically a running document of known problems people, our users have with our product.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Correct. And as you, when you start getting to the strategic lens, so you have a set of problems. What I sometimes will do is, especially if you're, for example, a platform PM, but PMs generally have lots of stakeholders. There'll be a marketing team that's asking for something or an operations team that's like, "Our market needs this." I'll sometimes bring them in at the beginning of the strategy session and give them a template, 10 things you should know. So you use my framework to give me 10 problems. Because if you say "come present," they'll do like 50 slides, like, "No, that's just 10 things you should know," and stack rank them. So I've put the work on you now to give me some color. I hear from marketing, comms, support, right, uh, research, content strategy.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  I actually had that in my last strategy session where, like, it was the most mind-blowing, 10 things you should know. One of them was like, "The average reading age of an American is 10 years old," right? And so you start to think of, "Oh, my God, all the text we have. Maybe we should use images or video or whatever." So bringing this sort of multifaceted view of the problems, and then you do the work of like sandpapering down to the core thing, and then you have the final 10. So that would be the tactical, like, if you want to take it to a more strategic lens, that's how I'd run this. The first day of my strategy session is usually insights. I'll usually do three days, insights, strategy, then big rocks. And the insights piece is this, where we go like deep into the problems,

• 40:05Speaker 00

  and I use this template of 10 things you should know. And then we come out with 10 things, a final list of 10 things you should know, like a consolidated list.

• 40:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  I really like this additional tip you just shared of, as you're trying to develop a vision for a team, is bring in stakeholders and use this framework to help them crystallize, "Here's the most important things to me from the product and things that I think are big opportunities." And then essentially, now you've got buy-in from stakeholders of, "Hey, at least they've heard me and they understand, and then here's what they came up with." And then I can be like, "No, but what about this thing?" But at least it gives you a way to bring everyone together and understand how the process is going. Okay, so this, uh... Week of work you just shared. So can you just talk a bit more about this? Like, is this you leading the team through an exercise to develop a vision and a strategy?

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Correct, correct.

• 40:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  Got it. And so you said the first three days are aligning and fully understanding and immersing yourself in insights?

• 41:02Speaker 00

  I usually have strategy sessions of three days. I have tried to do it in two days. That is the absolute limit because I think you need to create white space for just the magic to happen. But I usually use a framework that's, it's literally what I call the narrative structure. So when we get into the conviction part, right, the clarity of the problems to solve, the conviction is the narrative. The freeing of that conviction is insights, strategy, big rocks. So the insights day is just focused on understand work. These five problems, actually using the app, doing tear downs of other apps. It's just like a day of, you know, understanding. So, you know, in the Google design sprintals, they ask the experts, in a way, I'm giving the experts a template.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  That's what I'm doing, basically. And then the second day is where we now go into like the strategy, like of all the problems we've seen, the 10, which are the ones we want to focus on in which order, right?

• 41:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  And who's in these meetings?

• 42:01Speaker 00

  I always have four folks. So it would be, depending on the level of the strategy, you'd be a product, my engineering partner, my design partner, and research.

• 42:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Got it. Okay, so it's the leaders of the team.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  The leaders of the team. And depending on the org, I'll bring in data science. If it's because at Google, we have more shared data science resource. So I'll usually invite them as one of the partners, right? Come tell 10 things you should know. So they'll say, you know, we need to do more instrumentation or whatever. But you hit on a fantastic point, which I was going to connect later, which is when you get to the evangelized stage, humans love to know you heard them. So imagine it's like you did all the work of bringing them together to say, hey, tell me 10 things. You've asked the questions. You've come back and said, here's the strategy that we're going to focus on, and here's the vision, right? And that lost stage where you evangelize becomes so much easier because it's like, how did you arrive at this vision?

• 43:00Speaker 00

  That goes away, or like, but you guys didn't solve in that. It's like, we hurt you. And then we parse them into these 10. And everybody agreed with these 10. And therefore, that's why we came up with this vision.

• 43:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  So let's, let's segue to the evangelize step, which I think I always talk about. I always think about the Seinfeld meme of when he's trying to get a car reservation. Uh, or he shows up and they don't have his car and they're like, we have your reservation. We just don't have your car. And he's like, that's the most important part of the reservation. You take the reservation, but you don't keep the reservation. That's the most important part. So I think to me, it's always like, you have this vision. You have amazing roadmap strategy, but if no one even knows it or hears it, that's the most important part. So I think it's super important to understand this. So I'd love to hear your advice and just how to successfully evangelize and share this vision that you've come up with.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  In terms of evangelizing, I think about three concentric circles, right? So the core of your vision is your team. And I want to make sure my team understands the vision. Because I'm basically saying, get on this boat. We're sailing to the vision of the Bermuda, you know, uh, the Bermuda or like, you know, some island. And I described this beautiful island, they have to be bought in and like have conviction, but they want to get there to actually sail on that boat together. And so the team is the big, the biggest part, and it's the whole team. It's not like just the PMs know the vision or just the designers know the vision. I will literally first start with, you know, each of the folks that were in the room. We will basically bring our teams together and present it out.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  So for example, the one we did last year, we presented to what we call studio leads, which are essentially the triads for each of the product teams. PM, engineering and design for each of the product teams. And just presented it out. And I had multiple, we had the first one, then I had one in my PM weekly, presented it again. Then he folks still any questions, because people are still, it's like percolating. It's like the tea bag, it's like, it's oozing out. They're trying to understand it and they're trying to stress test it. And what I also do is I write the output of the workshop. So I'll always write the output, like, these are the insights we came up with. Here's the once upon a time framework. Here's the strategy. Here are the big rocks and a vision is coming, right?

• 45:18Speaker 00

  And then we'll do the vision and say, that's, but this is the vision of where we're going if we do all these things. And that will be a living document, comments, open for comments, right? No edit, not view only comments, because you want anyone to leave comments out there and just feel they have a say. You don't have to respond to all of them. You don't have to resolve all of them. But just, you know, if you put rocks in a, in a washing machine or the, they polish each other. So I actually like, I like this friction. I always like, I go into the forest, I cut a piece of wood and our job together is to like polish it down to the beautiful Danish furniture. So like, it's okay to have that friction. So do that for a bit. And then once the team has kind of gotten to a place, I, I'm not trying to get anyone to a hundred percent certainty. I'm trying to get you just on the right.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  They'll come, right? Then, you know, I kind of go to this sort of next layer, which is the stakeholders. Those people that came in and their teams, their managers, go to them and sort of get them bought in to the vision as well. They'll also bring perspectives, right? Uh, you're missing this piece. We have a lot of engineering, uh, you know, support tickets will blow up if you do this thing, right? What does that look like? We have, you guys haven't solved the, what the thing we need to do today. You're talking about something five years out. You're going to get all the variations of feedback. That's okay. The core is that people are bought into that story. And it's okay to have all their, and then finally, uh, you know, once you've got the feedback from stakeholders, you then go to leadership and leadership really as high as possible.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  So when I was at Uber and I was like an L five, L six, I had visions going all the way. I mean, I had a fantastic leader. He put me on stage and all hands to present the vision and we were like one wallet, all Uber experiences. And then we had this vision of a world where, you know, Uber eats, it could be trains, it could be whatever. And you have this one Uber wallet that can be useful for all of them. And we had mocks of what that looked like. So go as big as possible, like go big, like let people tell you to pull back. Let your manager use a lasso and pull you back, like go as much as possible. So then I go to leadership and then I have leadership amplifying that story as much as possible. So those are the, that are three concentric circles. Core team, the people who will actually build this thing.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Stakeholders, the people that need to be bought in for this thing to be successful, because they play a part. And then, and, and adjacent teams, because as we're building this thing, it might mean that we tell you no for one of your requests or something, right? And then finally in leadership, it's hard.

• 47:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  It sounds like a lot of work and a lot of time. Do you do this for yearly planning? Do you do this for future, you know, 2026 vision? Do you do this for quarterly plans? What's kind of like the scale of vision that you invest this time into?

• 48:05Speaker 00

  So we go back to the four packs of the vision we set aloft. A vision, if a vision is something that's coming next year, write a newsletter. Write the newsletter, the headline article version or do the mock. Like when you're really getting into a vision, you're talking about something that almost feels attainable, but realistic. So it's a long term thing, right? And so you do the work and you take that time because you know that the rewards, when you get everyone rowing in the same direction, will mean a lot more velocity. And the ripple, I talked about evangelizing within the company, it's everything. When I start talking to a candidate, I say, hey, my team's mission is expression meets connection.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  Our vision is this, then they already, their eyes are like, you can see the twinkle, right? And so the ripple effect of this thing is just broad and, you know, big. My Eng partner was just hiring for a role and in the job description, he opened it first with our team mission. And it was like, we have these short links at Google, so I go slash, you know, studio vision. And, you know, people just, people get excited just seeing it. So it's really this evergreen thing that is, we're talking four and five years. It's not the next six months, right? Because next six months, do the tweet.

• 49:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, awesome. I think that's very clarifying. And so is this something you encourage your PMs to do is just like, always be working on this vision for the next, say, five years? Invest this time kind of in the background as you're, you know, shipping things every day, every quarter, to make sure people understand where it's going long term. And then it's like this one-off exercise that maybe you repeat every year or two.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  I think if you have to repeat the vision every year, you have not created a good vision, you haven't done the work. So, you know, I'll give you an example of the one at Uber. What we kept doing was, we would bring more fidelity to actually parts of the vision, right? So we had a low fidelity mark, then we'll hire, then at one point, we did a sizzle reel and actually had like, if this thing is live. But we're not creating multiple visions. Remember all the things you read? The desk on every table. It's not like every year it's changing, or going to Mars. It's not every year. It's something that, it's more, you literally rinse and repeat. So the vision means something that is evergreen and lasts,

• 50:26Speaker 00

  in my mind, at least three years. However, at the sort of, you know, and I'm talking about PMs from L4 all the way to L7, and my team, which is kind of like from a junior PM, senior PM, all the way to GPMs in my org, all have a variation of a vision. That's a three-year thing. Now, when they're going into like a sort of micro vision, so that's kind of like a macro vision, where maybe it's solving a small problem, right? Then they'll just do a mock of what that thing looks like next year. And then in that mock, they'll present like, this is the mock of what we think it should look like. That is a vision. It's a micro vision, but it is a vision. So they'll do that. And that's the thing they used to say, hey, leadership, this is the problem statement, here's what

• 51:08Speaker 00

  we think, how might we solve this big problem, and here's what we think it looks like when we ship it. That's a, that's a vision. So that's, you know, what I'm talking about is this macro vision, but you absolutely can have the micro ones along the way.

• 51:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. That is really helpful. By the way, I really like that phrase, "how might we?" I find that extremely useful in communicating, like almost a vision, basically, just like, how might we solve this problem? Just that phrase alone is really, there's this concept, one of the PMs I worked with used called fertile questions. When you ask someone a fertile, a question that leads to discussion, and a really good way to create a fertile question is, how might we get more people to engage with YouTube analytics?

• 51:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 51:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  Leads to a lot of good brainstorm medias. So, good, good micro tip right there that we included.

• 51:55Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 52:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  And extend the capabilities even further with hundreds of APIs and integrations. You know what else? The workflows just make sense. There's the built-in AI tools, the on-canvas collaborating, a centralized workspace, the reuse of assets across sites, the seamless client handover. And that's not all. Find out more at wix.com/studio. So I want to move on to craft, but before we do that, is there anything else that you think would be helpful for folks to leave with in terms of getting better at vision? Say someone's like got a development opportunity of like get better at vision. Which of these things you've shared do you think would be maybe something they could start working on? Is it craft this five-year vision?

• 53:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is it pick one of these three ways to communicate it? Is it change the way they're empathizing to inform the vision?

• 53:28Speaker 00

  I'll give a 1.5. I think it's number one, it baffles me and it makes, you know, I'm somebody who came into product. I didn't, I don't have a sort of product management career. I came into product and I've done that now at Uber and Netflix and Google. And it still baffles me the number of people where when I say, tell me the top problems that keep you up at night. And then I rambling. I'm like, what are we talking about? Like, why are we rambling? This is literally the thing that you come to work. This is the thing that should excite you. So like, I cannot overemphasize this importance of like.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  You know, top 10 things you should know, but you don't even know. Start with 10. I start with 10. And actually, I always end up with top three. So in every deck, I'll have three things, like three numbers or four numbers. We just got a new chief product officer at YouTube, right? Because Neil no ahead and say, oh, the CEO. When I did my presentation to her, the opening sign is four things you should know. With these four numbers and four insights. And so it's like she walks away with that information now. So it's like, that is probably the most, like, it needs to be visceral and crisp and clear. And then from that, just for yourself, have fun with it. Take out a post-it note and sketch. If you were to solve this problem, what it looks like, just start there, right? Just start there.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  And then if you can at least convince yourself, I don't so much care about the deck. The deck helps absolutely. Or the pictures in the box. If you can tell the story of like, this is a problem. And this is the world I see. Imagine a world that enough, that in itself is already you evangelizing the vision.

• 55:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. That is so helpful. So essentially make this list of the most biggest problems that your users have with your product. And I think you also include like infrastructure, tech debt issues, maybe internal problems too. Awesome. I just want to know this list for every company now. I'm just like, what are their biggest problems? I wonder what they're struggling with.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  Right?

• 55:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay.

• 55:29Speaker 00

  And by the way, the infrastructure piece, I know it's a nugget on the sign, but infrastructure is the product. Period. Like, people like, oh, tech debt. I'm like, yes, the product debt. You can't, I cannot build a skyscraper on a shaky foundation. So it is your problem too. It's not for the engineer to like be barging on the door about, oh, there's a problem. So that's the other one I'll just call out. That in itself is a problem as well.

• 55:57Lenny Rachitsky?

  You're speaking to the heart of every engineer listening.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  I know.

• 56:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. And then the other tip was sketch the solution. Just like do a post-it, draw it out, see how it feels. I think just like, people don't realize just the power of, oh, I have to actually think about what this will look like. And I just kind of paint this very fuzzy picture of what it might be. Amazing. I feel like this is the most tactical and practical piece of a segment of advice on how to get better at vision. I'm so excited to get this out and for folks to have things that they actually do to get better at vision. I wish, I feel like this could be the whole podcast, but you have more awesome stuff to share. So I want to keep going. We're going to keep you here, extract as much content as we can out of your brain.

• 56:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  So you touched on this phrase that you like to use for describing what is the craft of product management, kind of like succinctly describing the craft of product management. And I know there's like many layers deep in this concept, but just to start, what is this kind of phrase and framework you think of to describe what is product management craft? What is the job of PM basically?

• 56:59Speaker 00

  So I use, I sort of say clarity and conviction. And that's what product management is. It's like you bring clarity and you have conviction, right? And so you find a lot of time, we've just talked about a number of things, all of those things, what they're doing is bringing clarity and that clarity especially is to the problem. So, you know, even when, I'll just give you a little tactical thing I noticed, there's some PMs who will send an email and I read the email, I'm like, what do you want me to do? Like, is this an FYI? Are you saying

• 57:38Speaker 00

  there's a problem? Do you want me to, you know, help? Like, so just even as something as simple as that, I'm just giving, right, as PMs, it's like we're constantly influencing, right? By bringing clarity. So the clarity, all the stuff we just talked about, coming up with a list of problems, you know, greedy, trying to understand what customers care about, all you're doing is bringing clarity. So that when you're in a room and someone is going off and doing, actually, we don't need that research. I feel like we all know that that's a problem. Like, we don't need that research. Let's, instead of doing foundational research, we're doing, you know, let's do UX validation where the time comes. Like, that's the kind of clarity

• 58:18Speaker 00

  you can break, that saves cycles. So that's the clarity piece. And if you think about what, when you think about what clarity is, You define clarity, it's this transparency, it's the simplicity of understanding. 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, 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 gonna do it, and what we're gonna do. And I spend time talking, I can spend time talking about all those, but we talked about the workshop to do that.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  And I, I actually have, uh, and my EM, my, one of my old EMs, um, who you've actually had on the podcast, talks about this a lot. I'm, I made every P, like people have fancy decks, that's great. 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. Cause if 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 the ice, it'll splash and it's messy. And that's how an endless roadmap looks to me.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  So it's like three, four, or five things that anyone can remember that are the biggest things. If we land this, it gets us closer to solving the problems. Then every other little thing is around, you can kind of fill that around. That's the sand around the big rocks.

• 59:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  And so let's just actually double click on this little framework that you're sharing of insight, strategy, big rocks. This is essentially what you ask your teams to share as their strategy, as their plan, essentially, like the high-level plan, it's not yet a roadmap.

• 1:00:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Strategy, I guess, is, do you think of this just like as vision and strategy as this document?

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  This is not 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, narrative of why we exist. So if you were a company, and I always use these, I feel like we can solve a lot of problems in life if we found a parallel in, in the world. And the parallel I just look for is like, if this was a startup. Right? And you wanted to tell people why you exist and why they should invest in you, which is kind of what you're doing as a PM. What is the big problem you solve as a company? What's the strategy? And what are the things you're going to deliver that would end up in your 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.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  It's just a narrative. And I think one of the simplest things a 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 and a PM of this will be like, oh, I want to set them a 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, let me know if 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. And that's the one that you refresh periodically. So that you can refresh every quarter and you can refresh every six months because you're kind of adjusting to what's happening in the world, what the problems are.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  So that's the narrative.

• 1:01:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  One last question there, just so folks get a sense of where this fits into all their work. Does this come before defining the vision and then the roadmap? Like, where does this fit in terms of vision and roadmap in terms of the process?

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  So again, the document is evergreen and updated. But I'm a big fan of evergreen documents because you create this mental thing where everybody just knows, you know, 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 for 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.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  So typically, the narrative will happen before, like as you go into planning. So it's just my team right now, which has gone through a planning cycle. Now, I already had a vision for the, for the 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 our area. They had a set of problems, they had their strategy approach, we call it, and then they have the big rocks. And everyone wrote the two pager, right? So we wrote this two-page document and then they circulated around their partners, their engineering teams got feedback. And that's what they then used to then build out the roadmap. Then they built out the roadmap and said, okay, based on that, this is what the roadmap looks like

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  of unpacking those big rocks a little bit more. And usually what the rule we gave was like, if you have more than three engineers on it, less than three engineers on the problem, consolidate. More than three, it needs a line, right? So then you have the roadmap, it's just a Google sheet with listed things and the resources assigned to it. And that's when we start to see, okay, where are you blocked? 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 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.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  Like I did, I've once done one a day, the sketches I talked about. We literally locked ourselves in a room. We had at Uber, we had no meeting Wednesday. Google, we have no, YouTube, we have 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 then made it pretty. And that was the vision. The vision, I remember seeing so many docs at Uber with literally slides from my doc, right? Saying, you know, we agree with this vision and so therefore we're going to build this thing for our team to support it. And that's great, like you're influencing, right? And I'm seeing it right now at YouTube as well, where teams are like, oh, I've seen that vision and they'll refer to it.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  I saw your, you know, studio vision and on slide five, when you talked about this, this is what we did with it. So that's, that's the. That's how I would do it.

• 1:04:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, man. I feel like there's so many directions I want to go. You have so many nuggets of wisdom, but I'm gonna get back on track. So you have this framework of what a great PM is, clarity. Let's talk about conviction. What does that actually look like?

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  We already spoke about conviction. So conviction is the vision.

• 1:05:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Hmm. Where you basically very succinctly tell, here's where we're going and here's why we're doing this.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  Feeling. So 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, you know, I feel like this is the right thing to do. And that's what we're seeing, right? When 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.

• 1:05:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  So this is specifically the craft or product management. If you want to get better at the craft of building great products, these are the two areas I imagine you point your PMs to get more clear on things and then have more conviction. Is it like more conviction? Is it clear conviction? How do you think of like the skill of getting better at conviction?

• 1:06:09Speaker 00

  If you have conviction and it's all clear, then you don't have conviction. Quite frankly.

• 1:06:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  Like, if you're like, I kind of think, you know, maybe we should, you know, there are like five things we should solve. Well, 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 have five, which is the one you're gonna build? Right? I do all these kind of draconian things that just force clarity. Right? And so then the conviction will come out and it's like, yeah, but I'm uncomfortable. Like, okay, so the thing that's making you uncomfortable, go spend time, go spend your research, go spend your, you know, cycles on getting higher certainty on that conviction. Rather than like 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.

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  Like, nobody does anything well by peanut buttering resources, spreading them thin. So that's the conviction. It's like, it's also things 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 there'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. And 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 do 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're you need by help mitigating or help solving. Because it's too easy to come to me and be like, oh, here's A and B. You do the work and tell me which one to pick. No way.

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  No, that's not going to make you a better PM. Go figure out why you can't stand by A. Right?

• 1:07:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  So the core to conviction is like, pick, pick what you think is right. That seems like the core of it is like being clarity is being very clear about what you've learned and where you think things are going. And then conviction is pick your battle. Here's where we think we need to invest.

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  Right. Let me use, I like the word battle. Clarity is saying that you are committed to actually fighting this war in the first place. Right? Like there are lots of other things you can fight. 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.

• 1:08:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  Great. Okay. So you gave a talk on product culture and how the company culture informs and it changes the way the product is built. So you worked at three very different cultures that I'm aware of. Uber, Netflix and Google, all very different companies. I guess maybe just as a broad question, what did you see about the culture of the company due to change the way product is built?

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  You think about what Uber has done in the world and you think about where, where, where we are now, where it's almost, it's almost so natural to bring out your phone and the car 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 forward it 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, to, to work. And it was a super, like a super. Hands on, zoom out, zoom in. We say boardroom to streets, right? You could roll up your sleeves and go in the streets and then go to boardroom. Operations team that really went into the fabric of a city and tried to convert that mission

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  into what the manifestation is in the, in the, you know, in the city. And I started at Uber as a GM before I became a PM. So I firsthand experienced that. I got my job, there were like seven cars on the road 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 did that look like when drivers don't have a mobile phone, they didn't have car, all 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. Right? And the magic that just came out of that, 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.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  Like setting up these playbooks, trying things, 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. There was a culture. And the culture never went 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, to, 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.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  So I always say, what are the things that, what are the good behaviors that you reward? And the bad behaviors that you condone? And if you're not going back to revisit that, then the culture just kind of moves on. And then the company's 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.

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  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 Kalanick was like against cash. By the way, I think up until he left Uber, he was against cash. But he was, he believed in data and he believed in principal confrontation. He was like, go test it out. And we tested it out and it did well. And that's why cash exists on Uber. Right? Because the culture enabled that. So I've talked about like how it evolves and also, you know, the badge of Uber. You go to Netflix where it started as a monolithic culture. It was like, it came out of, oh, we went through this experience where we had to lay, you know, lay, cut the org

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  down and we left these sets of people and they were even, 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 freedom of responsibility, of, you know, highly aligned, loosely coupled, a few of these sort of tenants at Netflix. But I saw in my time, my very short time at Netflix, when I left Netflix to go to YouTube, I saw the culture evolve, like in a very short space of time. There was a very high degree of intentionality to evolving the culture, like, what does it mean to entertain the world?

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  Let's evolve, let's discuss, let's change. And so, again, going into the product, when I joined 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.

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  Do we want to entertain the world or do we want to entertain some people in some places? Sounds familiar, right?

• 1:13:41Speaker 00

  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 the 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 I'm... Remember when we talked about conviction earlier, we said, how do you get the firmness in your conviction?

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  I saw people do that work, be like, okay, I'm at ninety-five percent, can I get to ninety-nine percent? What would I need to do that? And because the buck stops with you, right? In a world where people can sign up to multimillion dollar deals, so like without any approval. Like it's actually quite liberating, but it's the liberation is 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 no advertising on Netflix, right? That's a culture that allows the product to sort of evolve and change tenants.

• 1:15:07Speaker 00

  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 says, hey, how's the water? And they're like, good, and then they swim along and they go, what's water?

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  That's a little bit of what you get and it's like, you know, we have this, you know, respect the user, respect the opportunity, respect each other. And that's all you get. That's it. That's it. Like, what is Googly? You know it when you see it, but what is Googly? And so it allows for when, you know, you have this, what I call the, 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 actually hear people say, oh, they came from search, because they have, they have a culture in search, which if you say you're going to deliver two basis points, you're delivering two basis points, right? And there's a different culture in assistant, where it's like, oh, experiment and try

• 1:16:12Speaker 00

  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 North 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, you know, all of those things. So essentially, what you then end up with is these microcultures. But then there is this looser 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

• 1:16:56Speaker 00

  building something very human, you know, give everyone a voice, show them the world on YouTube, right? And you were able to do that because the culture allows that flex.

• 1:17:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  When you think of Uber versus Lyft, and then there's like Airbnb versus, there's this company, Wimdu, that was their, one of their main competitors, those, these German guys. Like, it's interesting, in the case of Uber, they're like, very aggressive, versus Lyft was like, nice brand. But in the case of Airbnb, Airbnb was like, the very nice culture and brand. And Wimdu was like, extremely aggressive, just like, very hardcore. And it's interesting, in some markets, maybe you win going really hard and aggressive and just like, like another Uber value, I think, was find your red line.

• 1:17:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:17:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  Just like find your limit and get there and that's where you're gonna work. And then in hospitality, maybe there's an advantage to being in Airbnb or it's like more warm and fuzzy. So that's interesting that like depending on the market, maybe a different culture has a more, a bigger opportunity to win. Never thought of it that way before.

• 1:17:53Speaker 00

  What I saw that was interesting about Uber was there was a core that was very monolithic about, you know, this is the culture. And you hired people from all work, you know, walks of life that, you know, 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, you know, customer obsessed was another value. So if you're 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.

• 1:18:33Speaker 00

  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 ride sharing at that kind of scale. It's very region by region. And I think it's because of that.

• 1:18:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think one of the other interesting things about culture is every team also has its own culture. And part of a PM and a PM leader's job is to create that culture and create good vibes and kind of be the, who's, a recent guest put it, you're like the emotional center of the team. Is there anything you do on your teams to create that culture to make sure everyone's feeling good and excited and, you know, create good vibes?

• 1:19:16Speaker 00

  I've 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 got a joke, I'm like bam, like, so Bam got together and created a cult. Like we discussed the 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 in 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, I was employee number 1024, you know, like it's a very different Uber.

• 1:20:01Speaker 00

  As the culture was sort of going out and 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. It's pivoted in the right way now, but it kind of swung the other way. I actually had my, uh, 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.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  Speaking of Airbnb, but yeah, owner, not a renter. And how would you act if this house was yours versus when you rent? Right? And so it's that buck 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 I'm in too many conversations where I'm like, who is on the hook for this decision? Like, who cares if this decision is made? It's not like six people with consensus. Like, who is the person? And I'm very big on people on countless, especially at Google, like a lot of people like, well, but they're five of us. 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, make the decision. Right? So it's like the rapid model where you end up with the decider.

• 1:21:29Speaker 00

  And then I think one for me, and this is just something I'm very passionate about. I'm a, you know, I'm a, I'm a black woman. Uh, I think a lot about how I show up in the workspace. And for me, something that's so crucial is I think vulnerability is your strength. Right? And so we're all human. We're all fantastically flawed in many ways. And so I really, really fundamentally believe in this whole, who's the human behind the role? And how's that human doing? And I, and I don't optimize for being liked to be very, and it sounds very harsh. I do not believe in being liked. That's A B. I believe in being loved. Right? And that's a very, very different thing. And it's when I said this once in a meeting, people were like.

• 1:22:15Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:22:18Speaker 00

  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? Very big 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. You know, Matil, my engineering partner, or Brian, my engineering partner, whoever those are. They know I care about them.

• 1:22:58Speaker 00

  So when the feedback is coming like raw, they know that it's in their best interest because I've shown enough times that I genuinely care about the person behind the role. I feel like that brings the most powerful thing a team has. You'll see teams just tactically, they'll write a 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 it 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 big and people will just help you shape it. Right? Because we all care about each other.

• 1:23:41Speaker 00

  So that's the, that's the, you know, it's, it's very, I know fuzzy and whatnot, but I, 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 role and they have goals and aspirations. And if you care and love them, the rest of it will follow.

• 1:23:57Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow. I love this. You shared a trick for getting a sense of if you have a good relationship with your EM. Kind of along these lines, can you share that with us? This was before we started recording.

• 1:24:08Speaker 00

  I did, I did. And it came from when I first got into product management, I was a kind of like a PM in training. We call them PM trial. And my engineering manager was an associate EM, sort of EM in trial. And we hated each other. We absolutely hated each other. And now we love, you know, there was love in the end and he, you know, 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? It's the day they showed up on the world. It's the most important day for them. It's the day they showed up on the world. Do you know their birthday? Do you know their work anniversary? Do you know why they're doing the job they're doing?

• 1:24:53Speaker 00

  Or what they want to be? Are they trying to be a VP? Are they trying to go go to startup? What is it? And so if you go to this, this, this sort of human element of like, trying to actually bond with a 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? You sleep eight hours. The remaining time is 16 hours. And you work to eight hours if you're lucky, right? You work 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, you know, you like each other. You love each other even better.

• 1:25:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  Maybe I wish I got to work with you. You're awesome.

• 1:25:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  By the way, this EM you're talking about is Gergay Oroz, who was on the podcast, who's the author of Pragmatic Engineer. People may be aware of him already. So how about that?

• 1:25:46Speaker 00

  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'd start writing it. I'm like, great, you're an awesome writer. So.

• 1:25:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  Look at him now. Uh, maybe as just the last topic, uh, I'd love to hear any cool stuff happening on YouTube. Stuff that you, I think you just launched some AI stuff. There's A B testing stuff that's coming out. Just like, what should people know about new YouTube features? Especially people like me that aren't publishing stuff on YouTube.

• 1:26:15Speaker 00

  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 of the world. It's really this YouTube is for creators, big and 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 we are the creative partner. And I do, you know, 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. We're not.

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  We're not like making the thing, you're making the thing, but we are partner in it. We're the ones giving you insights, we're the ones, you know, helping you with like testing things that might work. And if we can make your life easier, then you could just go do the fun stuff of telling your stories, right? So there are a couple of exciting things coming. So one of them is AI inspiration, which we launched and made on YouTube. And when you talk to creators and 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.

• 1:27:38Speaker 00

  And sometimes they'll do work by looking at tweets or watching other YouTube creators or, you know, listening to other things. And so imagine a world where we can actually use AI to like generate ideas 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, you know, future world where I'd love to, you know, see you using that. It's gonna, it's gonna 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.

• 1:28:23Speaker 00

  So creators spend a lot of time on thumbnails, a lot of time.

• 1:28:30Speaker 00

  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 rolled out even to a bigger set of creators yesterday, actually. By the time this comes out, probably, you know, you might have it in your hands already. And so you're able to basically put two thumbnails, you know, up to three, two, three or, you know, thumbnails, and the system will actually A/B test them and see which one actually works versus you sort of designing a thumbnail and then swapping it out. So that's another exciting area.

• 1:29:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Dreams coming true. I can't wait to try that. It feels like it's like the edit button for Twitter where it's like, come on, why don't we have this? And here it is. That's awesome. Yeah, I've been trying to do some more testing on that stuff. And there's all these clunky tools people have built that are like hacky on top of YouTube to try to do this for you. So I'm really excited to try that. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else you want to leave listeners with? Anything else you wanted to touch on or share?

• 1:29:26Speaker 00

  I think one of the questions I get a lot of the time is like, how can I be a PM? How can I, you know, convert into product management? And I just want to say, like, I'm this Nigerian girl. I don't have an MBA. 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.

• 1:30:07Speaker 00

  So already 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 is this constant training of your product sense. So when the opportunity comes, you don't get lucky, right? But you get, it's opportunity meets preparation. You're already prepared.

• 1:30:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that. By the way, I think you're the third Nigerian guest on this podcast. There's something in the water, Nigeria, that's creating a lot of great product leaders.

• 1:30:39Speaker 00

  Right. I mean, it's, they say, you're a Nigerian friend. We keep it real.

• 1:30:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  Well, with that, we've reached a very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  Ready.

• 1:30:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  All right. What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people?

• 1:30:53Speaker 00

  All right. Really, really love this book called Forty Laws of Power. I know it sounds very Machiavellian. Beautiful book. Another book that is my absolute, one of my absolute favorites is The Gone of Small Things. It's a beautifully written, really like wonderful book. And more recently, a book that keeps popping up in my mind

• 1:31:22Speaker 00

  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 there are patterns in certain things. Right? And that's, yeah. I mean, it's been coming up lately quite a lot. I'm a voracious reader, by the way. Find me on Goodreads. I read a lot.

• 1:31:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, that's amazing. We will find that. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?

• 1:31:48Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, The Bear. Just The Bear. Go watch it. It feels like being a PM, honestly. The Bear is the show. I think it's on Star or Disney.

• 1:31:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  Hulu.

• 1:31:59Speaker 00

  Hulu, that's the one in the US, yes. And it's uh, uh, it's about a chef. It's just, it's so well done. Uh, beautiful cinematography, but also you feel the heat in that kitchen. You feel it.

• 1:32:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's very stressful to watch that show.

• 1:32:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Second season's less stressful, at least.

• 1:32:17Speaker 00

  Wait, do you know the season is less stressful because the restaurant is closed? That's called cinematography. I think this goes down and it picks up when the restaurant's open again.

• 1:32:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, yeah, that last.

• 1:32:29Speaker 00

  It's great.

• 1:32:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. Interestingly, The Bear has been the most recurring recommended show on this podcast recently. There's like a phase of, there's a phase of Last of Us, there's a phase of White Lotus, and now it's The Bear. So we'll see. We'll see what comes next.

• 1:32:43Speaker 00

  David, I want to be contrary now. I'm trying to think of something else.

• 1:32:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  I've been a huge fan of this new show on HBO called Scavengers Reign. If folks haven't seen that, it's incredible. It's animated and sci-fi-ish, and it's just like, wow, can't wait to watch more. Anyway, that's my answer. That's not about me. Let's keep going. What's a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you're interviewing?

• 1:33:05Speaker 00

  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 live 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?

• 1:33:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. I love it. That's an awesome one. What is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you love, whether it's physical or digital?

• 1:33:51Speaker 00

  There's a product I'm using a lot now, very simplistic. It's a product called Sleep Cycle. And it basically allows you set an alarm, but a progressive music alarm to wake you up. Cause I don't want that jarring like err, err 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 than everybody. When I'm in certain countries, I snore more than everybody.

• 1:34:28Speaker 00

  It's really cool out.

• 1:34:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  It feels like we have a Nana to watch our kid. It's like a camera that's watching him sleep all day. And I feel like I need that for me because it tells you when he was woken up, how long he's been sleeping. That's awesome. It's called Sleep Cycle. Okay. We'll link to that in the show notes. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to or share with friends or find useful? Just either in day, in your day life or in work?

• 1:34:51Speaker 00

  Um, let me, I'm going to pull it up. It's a poem called Invictus. 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, uh, this quote. I want to read the last part. It's worth reading, uh, 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. Uh, thing, right? My X dot com, whatever we're calling it now. Uh, here it is. It's such a powerful reminder of freedom of responsibility.

• 1:35:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  And also I think I like, I love this touches on something you also shared earlier, just like agency over your fate, like you are responsible, even though you may not be responsible for what happened. You're responsible for what you're going to do about it. And I think that for being a great PM, that's such an important thing. Like it's so easy just to complain and like, oh, we don't have our resources. We keep changing plans, we're losing engineers, but the more you feel like you are in control and you're responsible for what's going on, the better and things end up going.

• 1:36:07Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:36:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  And that's a beautiful way of putting it. Amazing. And we'll link to that poem. Final question, before we start recording, you told me you do DJing on the side, or I don't know, maybe full time, I don't know. I guess, one, where can folks find your DJ sets if you put them out? And then, two, I guess, any advice for someone that wants to start getting into DJ-ness? What could they do to start going down that path to learn how to do it?

• 1:36:30Speaker 00

  It goes back to this, I'm the master of my fate, I'm the captain of my soul. One thing I love, and one of the things that's brought me to YouTube, is just the power 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.

• 1:37:14Speaker 00

  And so, I have my mixtapes on YouTube, so if you look for my name, AB Atawodi, my handle is always AB Atawodi, my name and my surname. You'll see all kinds of videos, but you will also see my mixtapes. And I name each mixtape after a sauce. So one was called Sriracha, the last one was called Mango Chutney.

• 1:37:34Speaker 00

  And there's one coming up soon, that I'm calling Jerk.

• 1:37:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. And then, yeah, I guess, is your advice, then just watch YouTube? Like, go look for people teaching you how to DJ on YouTube?

• 1:37:45Speaker 00

  Go watch people, and I cannot underestimate the power of those 10,000 hours, right? To become an expert. So just DJ. Like, I got this really cheap controller, it cost me 300 bucks, but you can actually do it on an iPad. And even when I'm on flights, I'll like, 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.

• 1:38:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  So cool. AB, I'm in the AB Fan Club. Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions, where can folks find you online if they want to follow up on anything? And how can listeners be useful to you?

• 1:38:35Speaker 00

  I'm on pretty much every social platform. My handle is Abi Atalwady, my name. Work stuff, 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.

• 1:39:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  Remind me to breathe. Amazing. What a beautiful way to end it. Abi, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:39:19Speaker 00

  You.

• 1:39:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Bye, everyone.

• 1:39:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.