Crafting A Compelling Product Vision (Ebi Atawodi) | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024

Ebi Atawodi (Director of Product at YouTube) shares how a powerful quote on purpose during the pandemic inspired a mission to help people harness storytelling. She talks about approaches to developing a product vision, tackling imposter syndrome, and the importance of empathy and collaboration in product development. Recorded live at Lenny and Friends Summit on October 24th in San Francisco

• 0:10Speaker 0

  So it's the middle of the pandemic, and I come across this very grim but very interesting quote. And it basically said the greatest tragedy in life is not death. The greatest tragedy in life is a life without purpose. And I think about that purpose, and I thought about what I wanted to show up in the world and why I was here and put on this world. And it hit me that my why is I want to help people harness the power of storytelling. Earlier this year, I was reading this book, very dystopian sci-fi futuristic novel. I'm not gonna spoil it, it's amazing, go read it. And it's set in the year 2024. It was written a while back. It's pretty accurate. And it had this quote, and I was like, this this is why purpose is so important. It unifies us, it focuses our dreams, guides our plans, strengthens our efforts, purpose defines us, shapes us, and offers us greatness.

• 1:03Speaker 0

  And we're all PMs. I mean, this is the thing that we're trying to do in our product teams. About a year ago, um, Lenny reached out to me to come talk. I had the biggest imposter syndrome. I'm like, what the hell am I gonna talk about for 45 minutes? It ended up being an hour and 30 minutes or more, and really we were talking about this purpose and vision. And since then, um he sort of forwards me emails that people send and the comments that are coming through. And there's this kind of idea that it's this like very difficult thing, and a lot of people sort of saying, you know, how do you bring this to life? And so we thought, let's follow that podcast with a playbook. I joined YouTube right in the middle of the pandemic. I just come from Netflix, and actually, my boss was just my performer boss is just on stage, Eunice.

• 1:54Speaker 0

  And when I join any company, I sort of say to myself, as any leader, as any uh person of influence, you don't have the answers. In fact, thinking you do is the biggest mistake. So what I do is I go through this journey of conversations, and that leads to comprehension, and then out of that comprehension will come my conviction. And so one of the simple hacks that I used when we sort of got together and said we need to figure out what the story is for our product, which is YouTube Studio, the way a lot of people tell stories all around the world. There was a simple um hack we use on the day one, which is 10 things I should know. So invite lots of folks, your marketing people, your um gap, product council, product managers, UXR, and one after the other, just tell me 10 things I should know.

• 2:42Speaker 0

  And it forced people to sort of stack rank what was important to them. And so out of that sort of 10 things I should know, we locked ourselves in a room and came up with this vision, and we called the purpose of that vision expression meets connection, which is how do you allow people all around the world to tell their stories? YouTube's mission is give everyone a voice. I love waking up every day to that mission because giving everyone a voice is such a powerful thing. And when you spend more than a third of your life at work, it's nice for that thing to be aligned with your purpose. And so we said, let's give everyone a voice through expression, but no one comes to shout into the void, it's all about connection. And so that vision manifested as, you know, this product statement that we had, and that product statement sort of grounded in this notion of the product is a creative partner.

• 3:38Speaker 0

  We brought that to life in themes, evergreen themes. We said if we deliver these five things and keep those in mind for our product as a creative partner, then actually, you know, you will have an amazing product. And then we brought the vision to life with Sophia. So Sophia is Gen Z. Um, she is wearing a vegan leather jacket, of course. Um, in my day we called it PVC. And um she doesn't think of herself as a creator, right? No one really starts out saying, I'm a creator. But the fun fact is if you ask the average kid today, Gen Alpha Gen Z, what do you want to be when you grow old? They all say, creator. And a couple of years ago, it was YouTuber. So we said, let's ground our story in Sophia and go through her journey. And this sort of manifested as this document, Google has short links, so it's like Go slash Studio 2026.

• 4:28Speaker 0

  And it was this four-year journey of getting to how do we recognize her along the way? How do we make sure that community's key and it's not just a view or a subscriber, there's a human on the other side. And we had three strategic pillars. People think strict strategies is very hard thing. Strategy is literally saying no to a bunch of things that are great ideas. It's never actually saying no to you know bad ideas. Like you already weed those out. And it was we'll focus first on reaching everybody, helping everyone find their voice. Once we've done that, we'll go into refining your voice. How do you get closer to your story? And then once you've got there and you're succeeding as you found your voice, how do we make sure it's sustainable?

• 5:14Speaker 0

  How do we make sure you don't burn out? And that literally, that was our strategy. There were four marquee products. It's a big deck, it's like 42 slides, but there are really these four marquee products. And we said, well, if we bring these things to life, there'll be the temples of making Sophia reach that journey. What was interesting was the moment we put the deck out, everybody was like, oh my god, it's Google. Insert meme here. Um, it's gonna take forever, it's never gonna come to life. Um, the system will grind you down. And I fundamentally believe in this quote, which is if no one really hate no one hates it, no one really loves it. So actually, I look and I provoke for the people who dislike an opinion, because actually that's a beacon of, okay, I've I've touched something.

• 6:02Speaker 0

  And I'm very proud to say this year, um, I've given a lot of talks about vision, but it's the first time I'm actually able to talk about the vision that me and my team came up with at YouTube. All four products are now live. And they're on their journey to realizing that sustain your voice for Sophia. But sort of going from that, I want to sort of level set. When we talk about vision, I said earlier, people think it's this sort of ethereal thing. So I believe there are four elements of a product vision. The first one is it's imaginative yet realistic. It shouldn't feel like it's completely unattainable, but you feel like it's something that gets you, you know, super excited and inspired, it gets the people going. The movie buffs know where that's from.

• 6:48Speaker 0

  Um, and then it's lofty and constraint-free. The moment you start to think about the technologies of today, or you start to sort of um whittle it down to something very simple, you've actually lost the purpose of a lofty vision. And then finally, it's long term, and that means different things at different levels. At my level, I believe I should be thinking three, four, five years out, and not just for products, for my own life as well. And so the simple way to sort of think about this is if the purpose is this thing that drives you, and it's the why. If you said, for example, I want to show that I'm capable of surmounting a very difficult challenge, the why, and so therefore I will climb Mount Everest, the mission, and get there alive.

• 7:34Speaker 0

  Great mission. When you get there, the vision at the top, what you see as you describe it, the Himalayas, the clouds, that's the vision. It's really that simple. And so one of the first things I want to sort of demystify is we've got, oh my god, it takes forever. And I was talking to a PM recently, and he was going on about oh my god, you know, we're doing all of this stuff, and I'm not as excited. Um, you know, I wish we had a vision. I said, okay, what stopped you from booking out three days and going out and creating a vision. And he just stared at me, you know, dear in the headlights. Um, fun fact, we'll talk about him in a second. He has actually delivered on that vision. You only need three days on a bunch of passionate people.

• 8:19Speaker 0

  And so I'm gonna talk about three PMs because when I talk about vision, people think, oh, at this level, you know, I'm I get a lot of pings, I'm in the org, I'm an IC, how do I influence vision? So I want to talk about three L5 PMs. These are like senior product managers, so L8 at Google is like a GPM, and L3 is straight out of university, so that helps you calibrate. And Katrine, Chris, and Lilan, and elements from the playbook that they use to bring the vision to life for their teams. But a very important tenet is you cannot, and you should not do this alone. Humans are social beings. We exist in community, and actually we're stronger, despite what people will say or people think, we're so much stronger when we do things together.

• 9:05Speaker 0

  So I talk about these three PMs, but behind those three PMs, or with those three PMs are product teams with UX designers, UXR, engineering leads who were hand in hand with them bringing these visions to life. So the playbook has three parts empathize, envision, and evangelize. And I sometimes joke that you spend almost half the time coming up with the empathic. Empathize and envision as you do evangelizing. The most painful thing I've seen is to come up with this great idea and it's stuck in a document. And so we'll go through each of these one by one, the first being empathize. One of the playbooks, um, when I was at Uber, I was converting from being general manager into a product manager. And Yuki, who was actually on stage, um, did my conversion interview to being a product manager.

• 9:53Speaker 0

  And I remember getting on a call with him, and I said, dude, I'm trying to get these people to see this problem. Like they don't get it. Like, how do I, how do I get them to bet on this thing? And he was like, Oh, you have you have to show them the Frankenstein. And that's literally what you know, Lilan did here. And the Frankenstein is this sort of image that shows the badness. So you've got this screen, this is what YouTube Studio used to look like for content. It was very VOD, we call it VOD, even though vertical videos are also VOD. But you would come on and it was just you know, videos and live, and then we added podcasts, and then we added playlists, and then we added posts, and then we added all these things and lots more badges, and it just became very difficult for users to actually navigate the experience.

• 10:44Speaker 0

  Also, if you were uh a creator that used vertical video, you would open that screen and it would be blank because it defaults to the VOD experience. So she showed that badness, and then here you have Anne Katrine, the main app is the YouTube app you watch your videos on, and what she did was she basically just showed this really messy IA information architecture. And you could, you got it, you're like, okay, we need to fix this. Like it's all over the map. The second thing in sort of empathizing is like grounding all of the the sort of work you've done understanding the problem into a single big data headline. And it's it's hard, it's not gonna be easy. But if I bumped into you to you into in in the Lyft, when I was at Uber, I had a headline which was 10% of uh rides or eats or experiences on Uber fail because of a payment issue.

• 11:35Speaker 0

  When you're an 80 billion dollar company, you're like, oh, wow. And so what is that one big data headline? Take some time to find it, but in Anne Katrine's case, she had this headline, which was last year, 42% of creators were in the main app. They never downloaded YouTube Studio. This year, 60% are in the main app, and that number keeps growing. And everyone got that. So we set out on this goal to sort of meet creators where they were. And then the final here is Chris, he had this sort of what's out there. One of my favorite interview questions is to ask, tell me about a product that you recently discovered that you were super passionate about. You say, I work for Google, but it's an instant failure. You say Google Maps or Gmail or Facebook.

• 12:21Speaker 0

  It just tells me you're not curious, and you don't, you're not really keeping a pulse of what's going on out there. And I I really love going into product hunt and just seeing what's new and what's fresh. And the reason is humans don't exist in a vacuum. So what Chris did, they spent like a massive chunk of their first day just tearing down lots of apps. Apps that have nothing to do with YouTube Studio, but had something interesting that they could draw from. So you've got the empathize part, you now understand, you know, you brought this vision, the the problem to life, and you understand what the user problem is. The next part is this envision and making sure that you make it a little bit more visceral. So I love this quote because I go to the gym, today was leg day.

• 13:09Speaker 0

  I went to the gym, and I've been sort of wobbling the whole day. And I think about when you go to the gym and you sort of like my my trainer will say the last three reps need to burn. Like it needs to feel like you can't do it anymore. And by the way, if your last three reps are not burning, then you're doing it wrong. You need to up the weights. Um, and I and that's that's how I think about it. It needs to be uncomfortable. Like I love ideas that sort of I'm dreaming about them, problems where I'm like, it it sort of consumes me, but it also sort of scares me. Like I'm excited about it, but I'm a little bit scared of like making it come to life. And that's really like, don't be afraid of that. That really has to happen. The second nugget here is the elevator pitch.

• 13:56Speaker 0

  And you saw this earlier. It really is six elements. And you can put this in a Google sheet, coda, whatever. I print it out, and I give everyone on the team a piece of paper. It's best when they're not on their screens, and everybody fills it in. And I've done this so many times, and I cannot tell you how many times a team is about to start a project, and they have a different answer to the user need. They have a different answer to the differentiator. I kid you not, I've had a different answer to the name of the product. So this is how it sort of comes to life. Um, this is what Anne Katrine had for what we call Studio Mini, which is a version of Studio in the main app, and you can see here how it's grounded in the user, the need, the key benefit, and it's present.

• 14:43Speaker 0

  So you write this as though it exists already. Here is another example for a platform vision. And you know, the platform PMs need love too. And so the MDE, what we call the MD is the metadata editor, that's where you put your title, your thumbnail, your description. But again, they wrote this statement of like, how do we unlock the full potential of the content? And then the final one is this bringing the job to be done to life. So I really hate user stories. Like as a user tells me nothing about the context, the emotions, the feeling, the goals of the user. I love jobs to be done, because it tells me exactly what they're trying to do, where they are, what the goal is, and you understand the context. What they basically did was going through, grounding it actually in the overall team's um strategy of Anya, this surfer who goes through her journey of finding her voice and how the product is able to meet her where she is, give her highlights, show the content, mostly vertical videos at the beginning, and then when she goes into refining her voice, as she starts to reach a larger number of subscribers, she's looking at multiple formats, she's trying longer videos, she's looking at she's going through live, and then you know, that manifests in this sort of experience where we're now helping them with creative a creative block with insights.

• 16:06Speaker 0

  And what I particularly love about this, and what Lilan did here is the the two products you see on the screen actually had nothing to do with her. She was redesigning this content uh page and actually incorporated another team's idea and went to that team and said, This is how I think this should come to life. And that's that really is true influence. And then finally, Anya goes to sustain her voice, and at this point, we're helping her dub her content. And again, that's another team, and it's just this beautiful um conversation starter with these different partner teams. And then finally is the concept car. The concept car, if you've ever looked at like a Mercedes concept car, or you if you're into cars, or any of these sort of concept vehicles, it's really the full car.

• 16:54Speaker 0

  It's not just the steering wheel or the engine, it's the full thing, right? Even though you might just be changing one element. And so, you know, this example here is really the the team hooked up the entire app, and it was this complete prototype with a short link that teams could go play with, and it was in all their newsletters, and it just brought it to life. You can use it for research as well, and it's a little bit different from a prototype. So it's not just one screen that we're testing, it's the entire experience with notifications and an onboarding flow, etc. So now you've got um your your, you know, you've got you've empathized, you've got the vision, and like I said, the most important part is actually evangelizing that uh vision.

• 17:40Speaker 0

  I was talking to a PM recently, we were doing a retro. I love retros. We're saying, you know, what's the learning from this experience? And he said something he was like, I realize the real solution is always upstream. And you heard this today in the talk with Yuki, my UX partner put this together on top of the double diamond, and it's really this notion of like solving the right problem and solving the problem right. At Uber, we had these five stages that I've carried with me. Because I'll sometimes go into review, and you heard this in the presentation earlier, you'll find a team comes in, they're showing a concept, and I'm thinking, oh God, who's gonna tell them? This problem is not worth solving. And so it's so important that you carry your stakeholders along.

• 18:27Speaker 0

  And just the really simple thing at the beginning of every slide when you come to present what we call uh product guidance or any of the review meetings, you put the color of where you are. So are you at the stage where you're defining the problem? Are you at the stage where you're coming up with concepts? Are you at the stage where solutionizing, etc., etc.? And then I can calibrate my feedback. And then once you've got that and you've got the vision, you can also road show. And again, there are these three concentric circles. You first tell the team and get all the feedback from your team, then you go to the stakeholders who are gonna help you bring this thing to life, and then you go to leadership and you have this sort of connected story.

• 19:13Speaker 0

  And like I said, people may not love it. That's okay, because if nobody hates it, then nobody truly loves it. And once you've got all that, one of the most important things is the moment you have that green light to go forth and bring your vision to life. The mistake I see people make is that the thing that they came up with, they spend like nine months trying to get the first thing out the door instead of breaking it into chunks, right? And so, for example, Lilan, she was going to design this content hub, and she said, I'm just going to fix the search component and make it multi format. And that will show me the direction of where we're going. And as soon as you start having those quick wins, you start to build equity and trust to finish the vision.

• 20:00Speaker 0

  As you go through all of this, you just have to remember that the vision might be this lofty thing, and you can be very stubborn about it. But actually, what comes to life will be a lot of flexibility and details. And I love this quote that really captures that. A couple of years ago, my team at Uber put together a vision. And they had this story using the bring the job to be job to be done to life, where Dev had gone through his day, woken up, had his morning coffee, and ordered Uber through an Alexa. We didn't, there was no partnership with Amazon. It was completely make-believe. The whole idea was would we have a payments experience that would support that? A couple of years later, last year actually, I'm no longer at the company, I saw this announcement.

• 20:46Speaker 0

  And I thought, holy cow, wow. It is so powerful to imagine something in your head and to bring it to life and convince people and then put it in the hands hands of users. And like I said, we had these four marquee products. They're now all live in the hands of customers. It's the beginning of a journey. And sometimes it's a long journey. It took 13 months from the vision that Lil and Hard for the content hub to get the first version of the product out to life. It took 18 months to because we had to hook up a bunch of things to get the idea of moments and bringing that to life. But this was a very one I'm very proud of. It took Chris 71 days from the exec review to launching a Geneai product that gave creators ideas and inspiration for their next video.

• 21:33Speaker 0

  And I'll leave you with this. I have just talked about product vision. It takes a big chunk of your life. But I actually bring this into my life vision. And I say to myself, life is short. But for every second that I'm on this planet, I want to make sure that it was completely aligned with my purpose. And I did my absolute best to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, what's the point of being here? And so I'm just, I'm gonna leave you with that. I want you to go back and think not just about your products, but the vision for your life, the why of why you are here, because when we walk in our purpose, everything feels aligned. Thank you.