Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)

Episode Date: December 3, 2023

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 | Jira Product Discovery—Atlassian’s new prioritization and roadmapping tool built for product teams | Wix Studio—The web creation platform built for agencies—Find the transcript 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—Referenced:• Andre Albuquerque on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andre-albuquerque• TED’s mission: https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization• Stripe’s operating principles: https://stripe.com/jobs/culture• Microsoft’s vision and mission: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/about• Tesla’s mission statement: https://www.tesla.com/blog/mission-tesla• Lyft’s mission on Comparably: https://www.comparably.com/companies/lyft/mission• Ebi’s playbooks and templates: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tU3jpbq_xHcF4x1bdANCVBsO6rbQ8h1HqvdQfwGW4MA/edit• Working Backwards Press Release Template and Example: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/working-backwards-press-release-template-example-ian-mcallister/• Patrick Collison on X: https://twitter.com/patrickc• Seinfeld meme: https://seinfeldmemes.com/you-know-how-to-take-the-reservation/• Travis Kalanick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/traviskalanick/• Wimdu: https://www.wimdu.com/• Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/leaving-big-tech-to-build-the-1-technology-newsletter-gergely-orosz-the-pragmatic-engineer/• The 48 Laws of Power: https://www.amazon.com/48-Laws-Power-Robert-Greene/dp/0140280197• The God of Small Things: https://www.amazon.com/God-Small-Things-Novel/dp/0812979656/• Outliers: The Story of Success: https://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930• All About Love: https://www.amazon.com/All-About-Love-New-Visions/dp/0060959479• The Bear on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/the-bear-05eb6a8e-90ed-4947-8c0b-e6536cbddd5f• Scavengers Reign on Max: https://www.max.com/shows/scavengers-reign/50c8ce6d-088c-42d9-9147-d1b19b1289d4• Sleep Cycle: https://www.sleepcycle.com/• Nanit: https://www.nanit.com/• “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51642/invictus• Burning Man: https://burningman.org/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

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 one, it's in a meeting, people were like, right? But it took me a while in reading a lot of books to come to a definition of love. And love is the choice to extend yourself for the spiritual growth of one self or another, right? It's very big and lofty and whatever.

But it's you're literally extending yourself. for somebody else or yourself, self-love, right? And that's love. And when you're extending yourself, you're not nice. It's not always nice or like. It sometimes is, you know, having hard conversations. It's knowing that, oh, you know, there's a human. 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 that I genuinely care about the person behind the role. Today, my guest is A.B. Atawudi. A.B. 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. A.B. 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 A.B.'s learned about creating a strong product culture on your team and across the company. A.B. is such a wonderful human and clearly an amazing product leader, and I'm excited for you to get to learn from her. With that, I bring you Aby Attawodi after a short word from our sponsors. 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, 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 could meet them at Sidebar today? Jump the growing waitlist of thousands of leaders from top tech companies by visiting sidebar.com slash Lenny to learn more. That's sidebar.com slash Lenny. 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 Saturday, and it's all built on Jira, where your engineering team is already working, 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 GiroProduct discovery. Try it for free at atlacian.com slash Lenny. That's atlassian.com slash Lenny.

AB, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. First, I just want to give a big thank you to Andre Albuquerque, who is the founder of one month p.m. 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? I think the first piece is that you absolutely need to have one. It's 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. to make that happen, but trust me, we'll get there. There might be turgulums. I'm not sure. You know, you probably would be thinking twice about staying on that flight, right? What happens if you get on there is like, our destination is Miami. 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 a mission, which is, we want to find 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 revision and everything else that people think of 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, God, God, God, God, God, like, oh, my God, God, But at the same time, it needs to be realistic and attainable. So it cannot feel so high in the sky that it feels so out of reach, right? And of course, there are leaders 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'm 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. 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.

They're simple ones you can do. They're big ones you can do. But those are like the core pieces in my mind. Can you just summarize them again? And are there some examples you can share? If 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. Yeah.

So four things. So it has to be lofty. It 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. Awesome.

And then, yeah, are there any examples either from places you've worked or visions? Absolutely. Yeah. 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, I say, there's something really magical there. And one of our values at the time was making magic. So I used the word magic all the time.

But so mission, 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. So that's the mission. That does somebody 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 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. 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 them spaces for all kinds of

things right homes restaurants you name it parties you know warehouse parties especially they have the best that was the vision and you kind of see it right you're like oh i could see a world i mean i live in amazon i have a bicycle i can see i can see it every um other day they're getting rid of cars and actually converting the parking locks 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 UberPol 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. So that's it. I think that's a really good vision. I think one that's lofty and 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. We leave that so much that sometimes I'm like, I guess we're going to Mars, you know. But then there was the other one of, oh, 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 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. I think with the lofty slash attainable balance, I think 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 you're 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. Yeah, absolutely. 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?

I'll use an analogy. Let's say we wanted to go hike. We wanted to go up to Mount Everest. The vision would be once we're up there, me to just. describing the picture of what we're going to see. We're going to get there. We're going to look around. We'll be the Hamilias. 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 a city without parking. You can see that, right? And we've all watched sci-finding movies. You can see Mars, Red Planet.

So that's the vision. and then the mission is the purpose of why we're doing that. 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. But, 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 hear of that. cap 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, very intricate and interesting. 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. That's really handy. So simple way to think about it, I would just take a 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. 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 a bunch more examples real quick. Just, 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 increased the GDP of the internet. IKEA's mission created a better everyday life for the many people. So I think that's exactly what you're talking about. 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 it 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. 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.

Yeah, yeah. You can see a desk, a computer on every desk. That's what I mean by it has to be realistic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So what is a vision like concretely in, is 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, your experience, do you often suggest going further into like a dock, deck, storyboards, some along those lines? So I have a very simplistic framework. I actually don't know who put it together at Uber, but I say 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 in

stories. They're not numbers, they're not stats and 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 able to. So one of the very simplistic tools that I've used, and 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 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 as the magic because you're like you know I'm a PM I'm trying to solve problems the once upon a time where were we right like what is the thing that we're trying to solve. 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, 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 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 have 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 article.

I'll write the headline. Because if the vision has come to past, right, and it's gone well, someone's going to be writing, hopefully, some sexy headline about the thing that you've built. So I go to the future and I write the headline I won't see. and I write the subtitle, just that. And I'll actually use the, you know, the old market into the page of like TechCrunch or Verve or something

so it looks realistic and I'll put that in the deck. Just the 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. 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 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, over experience, and that can scale all over the world. And he literally drew a bodega who looked like a kiosk, like the ones in Nigeria, in my country, you have a site, though. And then he drew that, and he had the person with cash and a receipt just showing like your top-up was successful. 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 what it took four. years to build it, but that image got people so excited about, oh, it's possible. I can see that. This is awesome. So essentially, these are three ways to communicate your vision. The first is this kind of MadLib's approach, which is really simple. So the framework, and is there something we can link people to you that where you talk further or 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 vision is like what happened, like the big change that you're going to create. 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? Can you just share this Madlibs real quick again, just like what's the framework real quick? once upon a time the thing that happened

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 beautiful it's interesting it kind of follows the 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've 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 dumb to write a press release. No one reads press releases anymore. So I like that you think of it as a tech crunch article.

Yes. Is there something you remember where you did that actually with a product? Like you wrote an article of a product you were launching? At Uber, we were joking about cars. Then it was like, well, push a bunch of, 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 allowed you 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, rent a bicycle

or a scooter that I get to the train station by my ticket, scan in. Then from there, I go into an Uber maybe that I come out and at the other end and I get a scooter. Whatever that is, 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 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 say, 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 once replace your, I put it as like your clip a card in San Francisco because I wanted my San Francisco buddies to kind of relate to what I was saying. So Uber is now replacing your clip a card. All you need is your phone at 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 the world where, you know, you can use your Uber to pay for transport.

You can do that today. So, yeah, that's a real-life example. And that was an article that you ended up writing of what the announcement would look like or is that using this? Okay, awesome. It was the article framework. It was like it was literally the New York Times, almost headline, even had their logo, and then I had the subtitle,

and later on over time I wrote the actual article, the whole thing. But I started first with that just to kind of provoke a response. 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? 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'll leave people with? And it forces you to get to that clarity of, okay, if 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 name along to have a headache.

You know what I mean? So I think it breaks clarity. So for me, as the PM, I'm like, this is a problem. like, this is why I'm saying this is important. Then you have the subtitled, so they'll usually have the headline with the a little bit. You just launched away to something, something, and you have to write that as well. 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 on to build it. Somebody else went and did it, but we had already thought about it and bit 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 about 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 that actually happened. One, a year and a half ago,

in a strategy session I was running at YouTube, 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 I took the Google face store and then I have, you know, and then I created rounded rectangles, just blank rectangles, four 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 are we trying to say and what is like the mock, the, the hero mock, the marquee

mock that we're showing. And again, it forces people to, oh, goodness, we can't show everything. So it's got to be three or four things that 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 sucks you quite beautiful to see. So that's a very simplistic visualization that's not like a beautiful sketch or a video.

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 crunch 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 announced 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 gives people more ways of telling this 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 an unfair advantage. So definitely try to get a rope a designer in to help you tell a story because just one design is going to, like you said, worth a thousand words, as they say. The thing, though, is it's such, I feel like it's an easy copat to be like, oh, but my 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.

Because the story, you should be able to tell this. Like, I'm obsessed with Steve Jobs. You should, you know, he'd 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 for I don't bring it to life. Right. And often the designer season sucks.

I'm going to make it better. 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 I'm like, actually, I'm just going to make it pretty. Then they made it pretty. And we got it. I mean, now I'm a director. So I have a bit more agency with research. But I was like a L4 PM, like, you know, not even a senior PM when I did my first vision exercise. 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 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 can write a press release. You can write a tweet or you could get a designer help you mock it up or just muck 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. You know, there are three pieces if you think about it. So one is what I call empathize. The second is creates.

we spent a lot of time talking about create the middle piece, and then this 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. I'll talk about in a second the tactical way I have done that across Uber and Netflix and Google in a way that scales. Then the create piece where it's,

okay, now we've solved this problem. What does the world look like? That's the vision we've just been talking about. And then finally evangelized. So I find just especially it sort of as you get more senior, the life cycle of a product or a group of products gets wider and wider and wider. And so I set out a vision, for example, at YouTube last year that was called, you know, Vision 2026, right? And only this year, a year and a half later, are we now at 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 like give up when they get to the stage because you're going to meet a lot of nacea. It was like, oh, that, you know, that one person's like, but, you know, there's no way the engineering is ever going to solve. Like, there's always going to be those people, right, which is why I said you need to come up with the vision 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 empathize. one of my peers at work uses this word.

He says, you need to do understand work. And what is understand work? It's crazy to mean the number of PMs who never goes through their products and goes through the onboard, unless of course you're the onboarding PM, but actually goes through the onboarding flow. Because we're all in this state of using the product, but actually that first step where I don't have the product,

like, what does that look like? I have multiple variations of accounts on YouTube. YouTube. I have multiple accounts on Instagram, you know, where I do just 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 to say with Uber. I had other partner apps. I would look at them in payments. So this is empathize that would come very easily if you dog food and then cat food. Dog food meaning using your own product. Absolutely a must. Cat food using your competitors or other people in the landscapes products.

So that's one piece. The other piece is obviously research. But research is an interesting one because 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 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 find too many people lean into you 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. Every time you pick up your phone, what is it about the apps 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 the same thing

they just roll until I love? And I try to articulate that. So there's that piece, but then the tactical thing that 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, they literally put 10 things, like 10 problems you should know. And you revise it. Every quarter, you update it. And they're separate, right?

So it's like a living set of problems. And they could be qualitative. They could be quantitative, right? They could be tech debt. They should be tech debt. So these are just known problems with the product that everyone was aware of. Correct. And you keep, you kind of farm into the problems.

So you keep that job 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 had a team of product analysts and data scientists,

and they would pair up with my PRMs. 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, not just for me, but my engineering partners minus ones and my design partner is minus ones, and we tap them and say, what are the top five problems for studio? They should all have the same answer. This doesn't have 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, at Uber and literally printed them on cards, and I put them on tables, scattered the groups and had people kind of discuss and vote the ones that is

the most painful, right? Because then you see the whole thing. So that's the empathized bit. I'm spending a lot 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 the North Star that doesn't move. 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 dock that you've been working on and consistently update. 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 Hollison 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, the stock that you're writing, 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 if I could put all the research into Bard or chat GPT and it could spit out of PRD than you haven't done your job. So basically, that's the... I maybe panicked my team.

I came in, I'm like, to say, Jenny, I 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 at you break that an AI, I call it just put into an AI right now and say, tell me the big thing

based on this research that exists. So I've never heard that quote from Patrick Carlson, but... 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, 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 set of problems that are being solved. And you're curing them together, right? That's the key there. It's like you're curating those problems together. And one of the challenges I find as a PM is convincing people of your gut, instinct of why this is right. 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 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. In your case, it'd be like, upload YouTube videos. Yeah. Is there anything else? Okay, there's this doc that you shared that's awesome. So it's basically a running document of known problems. People, are users have with our product. 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,

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. 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, calm, support, right, research. content strategy. 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 were like the average reading age of an American is a 10 years old. 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. If you want to take it to a more strategic lens, that's how I'd run the, that the first day of my strategy session is usually insights. I usually do three days. Insights, strategy, the big rocks. And the insights piece is this where we go like deep into the problems. 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. 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 could be like, no, but what about this thing? But at least gives you a way to bring everyone together and understand how the process is going. Okay, so this 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? Correct, correct. Got it. And so you said the first three days are aligning and fully understanding and immersing yourself and insights?

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 is the problems to solve, the conviction is the narrative.

The framing 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 teardowns of other apps. It's just like a day of, you know, understanding, So, you know, in the Google Design Sprint, they'll say, ask the experts. In a way, I'm giving the experts a template. That's what I'm doing, basically.

And then the second day is where we now go into, like, the strategy. Like all the problems we've seen, the 10, which are the ones we want to focus on in which order, right? And who's in these meetings? I always have four folks. So it would be, depending on the level of the strategy, usually be a product, my engineering partner, my design partner, and research. Got it. Okay, so it's the leaders of the team.

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 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 all the 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 last stage where you evangelized becomes so much easier because it's like, how did you arrive at this vision? That goes away.

Or like, but you guys didn't solve in that. It's like we hurt you. And then we parsed them into these 10. And everybody agreed with these 10. And therefore, that's why. and they came up with this. So let's segue to the Evangelized 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,

where he shows up and then I 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 an amazing roadmap strategy, but if no one even knows it or here's a,

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. In terms of the 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 at least he's saying, get on this boat. We're sailing to the vision of the Bermuda or like, you know, the Bermuda or like, you know, some island, and I described this beautiful island. They kind of 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 biggest part, and it's the whole team. It's not like just the PM's the division 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. So, for example, the one we did last year, we presented to what we call Studio Leeds, 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 have the first one, then I had one in my PM weekly, presented it again, then he fuchs still any questions,

because people are still, it's like percolating. It's like the teaback. It's like it's losing out. They're trying to understand it and they're trying to stress test it. And what I also do is I'm right the output of the workshop. So I'll always. right now. These are the insights we came out with. Here's the once upon a time framework. Here's the strategy. Here are the big rocks. And a vision is coming, right? And then we'll do the vision and say, but this is the vision of where we're going and 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 washing machine, 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'm not trying to get anyone to 100% certainty. I'm trying to get you just on the right. 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 and their managers go to them and sort of get them

board into the vision as well. They'll also bring perspectives, right? You're missing this piece. We have a lot of engineering, you know, support tickets will blow up if you do this thing, right? What does that look like? You have you haven't solved the one, 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 a pain to have all there. And then finally, you know, once you've got the feedback from stakeholders, you then go to leadership. And leadership really as high as possible. So when I was at Uber and I was like an L5, L6, I had visions going all the way.

I mean, I had a fantastic leader. He put me on stage on 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, Uber eats. It could be trains. It could be whatever. And you have this one Uber wall that can be used for all of them. And we had mocks of what that look 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 I go to leadership and then I have leadership

and to find that story as much as possible. So those are the three concentric circles. Core team, the people who will actually build this thing, stakeholders, the people that need to be bought in for this thing to be successful because they play a part. And then, 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, leadership. It's hard. 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.

So we go back to the four parts of the vision we said lofty. 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 always 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. 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 endge partner was just hiring for a role. And in the job description, she opened it first with our team mission. And it was like, we have these short links at Google slash 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 the next six months, do the tweet. 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. I think if you have to repeat the vision every year, you have not created a good thing. I 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 at Ohio. 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 you literally rinse and repeat. So the vision means something that is evergreen and 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 online 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 microvision that's kind of a macrovision 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 mark they'll present like this is the mark of what we think it should look like, that is a vision.

It's a microvision, but it is a vision. So do that. And that's the thing they used to say, hey, leadership, this is the problem statement. Here's what 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 mini 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. Awesome. That is really helpful. By the way, I really like that phrase, how might we? I find that extreme. useful in communicating, like almost a vision, basically, just like how might we solve this problem? Just that phrase alone is a really, there's this concept, one of the PMS I worked with you is called fertile questions when you ask someone a fertile, a question that leads to the discussion.

And a really good way to create a fertile question is how might we get more people to engage with YouTube analytics? It leads a lot of good brainstorm ideas. So a good micro tip right there that we included. This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio. Your agency has just landed a dream client, and you already have big ideas for the website. But do you have the tools to bring your ambitious vision to life? Let me tell you about Wix Studio, the new platform that lets agencies deliver exceptional client sites with maximum efficiency. How?

First, let's talk about advanced design capabilities. With Wix Studio, you can build unique layouts with a revolutionary grid experience and watches elements scale proportionally by default. No code animations add sparks of delight, while adding custom CSS gives total design control. Bring ambitious client projects to life with any industry with a fully integrated suite of business solutions, from e-commerce to events, bookings, and more, and extend the capabilities even further with hundreds of APIs and integrations. You know what else? The workflows just makes 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 wicks.com slash 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 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? Is it pick one of these three ways to communicate it? Is it change the way they're empathizing to inform the vision? I'll give a 1.5.

I think it's number one, it baffles me, and it begs, 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'm 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 over-emphasize this importance of, like, you know, top-10 things you should know, but you don't even 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 will know ahead and say, all the CEO. When I did my presentation to her, the opening sign is four things. things you should know with these four numbers and four, like 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 posted note and sketch. If you were to solve this problem, what it looks like, just start there, right? Just start there. And then if you can at least convince yourself, I don't so much care about

the deck. The deck helps absolutely. Or the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, um, 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. 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, so 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. Right. And when I'm going to, the infrastructure piece, I know it's a nugget on the sign, but

infrastructure is the product. Period. Like, people like, oh, tech debt. Like, yeah, it's the product debt. You can, 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 all this problem. So that's the other one I'll just call out.

That in itself is a problem as well. You're speaking to the heart of every engineer listening. I know. 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 not just kind of paint this very fuzzy picture or 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 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 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. So you touched on this phrase that you like to use for describing what is the craft of product management, kind of like to singly 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 crap?

What is the job of PMBACC? 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 for the problem.

So, you know, even when, I'll just give you a little tactical thing. I know this. 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 there's a problem?

Do you want me to, you know, help? So just even, there's 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. Instead of doing foundational research, we're doing, you know, let's do U.S. validation where the time comes. Like, that's the kind of clarity you can break. Let's save 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 sort of tactical thing that I used to bring that clarity is the framework I talked about, which is the narrative, insights, strategy, big rocks. It brings clarity to why we're doing what we're doing, how we're going to do it and what we're going to do. And I spend time talking, I can spend time talking about all those, but we talked about the workshop to do that.

And I actually have, in my EM, one of my old EMs, who you've actually had on the podcast, talks about this a lot. I made every 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, because 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 put the ice. It'll splash and it's messy and that's how an endless roadmap looks to me. So it's like three, four, five things that anyone can remember that are the biggest things that If we land at 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. 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 plan, essentially, like the high-level plan. It's not yet a roadmap strategy. I guess is, do you think of this just like as vision and strategy as this document?

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 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 is at 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 the headlines that are coming in the future that you need money for, right? You're telling investors, I'm going to build these things. I need money, right, to do these things. That's what this is.

It's just a narrative. And I think one of the simplest things that PM can have is this narrative that when people come to you and be like, hey, you see all these emails, introduction,

meet this person, and the PM of this. We're like, oh, I want to send 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 confess every six months because you're kind of adjusting to what's happening in the world, what the problems are.

So that's the narrative. 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? So again, the document is evergreen and updated. I'm a big fan of evergreen documents because you create this mental thing where everybody just knows, you know, link, whatever the short link is, whatever you use in your company, they remember it and that's the link and that's where I go.

Or do you know what the name is to search for the document. But 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, 2022 version, whatever that is. So typically the narrative will happen before, like as you go into planning. So just my team right now, which has gone through a planning cycle.

Now I already had a vision 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 had the big rocks. And everyone wrote the two-pageer, right? So we wrote this two-page document, and then they circling it around, their partners, the 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 of unpacking those big rocks a little bit more. And usually the rule we gave was like, if you have more than three engineers on it, less than three engineers on a problem, consolidate. More than three, it needs a line, right? So then you have the roadmap. It's just a Google sheet with a list of things and the resources assigned to it. And that's when we start to see, okay, where you block?

You have another U.S. You have a bit more tactical. And then you have your roadmap. But then, you know, after you've done the inside strategy, big rocks and the road now, 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. Like I did, I've once done one in 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 meeting Friday.

And I said, just block your no being Friday the next one. We're going to get in the room. We're going to whiteboard. We literally like post-it notes. The designer, of course, was like, this thing is ugly, and they made it pretty. And that was the vision. And 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 in our team to support it. And that's great. If 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. 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 the, that's how I would do it. Oh, man. I feel like there's so many directions I want to go. You have so many nuggets of wisdom, but I'm going to 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? We already spoke about conviction. So conviction is the vision. Hmm. Where you basically very succinctly tell here's where we're going. And here's why we're doing this. So definition of conviction is a feeling of what you think, the way the world should be.

It's a feeling. It is not certainty. It is not absolute. It is not perfect. But it's a feeling of, you know, I feel like this is the right thing to do. And that's what we're saying right. We talk about product sense. It's your 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. 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, is it like more conviction? Is it like more conviction? How do you think of it like the skill of getting better at conviction? If you have conviction and it's all clear, then you don't have conviction. Yes, quite frankly. Yeah.

If you're like, I kind of think, you know, maybe we should, you know, they're like five things we should solve. And like, then you don't have conviction. So I'll sometimes stress test. And I'm like, what if I took away all your resources and you only have five, which is the one you don't know. 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. I'm like, okay. So the thing that's making you uncomfortable, go spend time. It's go spend your research. go spend your, you know, cycles on getting higher certainty on that conviction, rather than like chasing four things because we're, I don't want to use the word lazy,

but like too scared to pick a lane, right? So don't peanut butter. Like nobody does anything well by peanut buttering resources, spreading them thin. So that's the conviction. It's like, it'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 I'll usually be, you know, the typical pros and cons of the option. 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 then you sometimes see the team hasn't even done the work between themselves talking. I'm like, 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 need by help mitigating or help solving because it's too easy to come to me and be like, oh, here's A&B, you do the work and tell me which you want to pick. No way.

No, that's not going to make you a better. better PM, go figure out why you can't stand by 8, right? So the core of conviction is like pick, pick what you think is right. That seems like the core of it is like clarity is being very clear about what you've learned and why you think things are going. And then conviction is pick your battle. Here's where we think we need to invest. 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? There are lots of other things you can find. This is the fight you're fighting in and why. And the conviction is like how and the way you see the world if you win that battle. 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 do to change the way product is built. You think about what Uber is done in the world, and you think about where we are now, where it's almost so natural to bring out your phone

and the 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 into when my grandmother was alive, she'd have thought you were crazy. So just think of all the pieces that had to come together for that to work. And it was a super, like a super hands-on, zoom out, zoom in. We used to say boardroom to streets, right? You could roll up your season, go into streets and then go to boardroom operations team

that really went into the fabric of the city and tried to convert that mission into what the manifestation is in the, you know, in the city. And I started at Uber as a GM before I became a PM. So I first had experienced that. I got my job. 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 if that looked like when drivers don't have a mobile phone, we don't have a car on 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 is allowed a lot of the gig economy actually thrive, 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 of everyone 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 improve, evolve? Because here's the thing, if you don't intentionally evolve the culture, it will evolve without you. So culture is always going to evolve. That's just the way humans are. And culture are the norms and beliefs, right?

And beliefs and norms change. That's how humans are. So I always say, 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 at Uber. The spin there on the autonomy was, one of the cultural values was principal comprehensive,

and toe-stepping, right? And this is 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 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 how it evolves and also, you know, the bachelor's 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 have to, you know, cut the org down.

And we left these sets of people and they were even, it was performing just as well and had the same output and same joy. Hey, what did we do right here? Let's like distill this down and distill it down to this. no rules rules framework of freedom or responsibility of, you know, highly aligned, loosely coupled, a few of these sort of tenants at Netflix. But I saw in my time, way, very short time on Netflix, so 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?

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 when more people are on their mobile phone, do not. have a TV screen, why I don't have a credit card. Do we want to entertain the world? Do we want to entertain some people in some places? Sounds familiar, right? This is like what we also had at Uber. It's like, do we want to offer Uber to the world? There's 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 remember when we talked about conviction earlier, we said, how do you get the firmness in your conviction? I saw people do that work. Be like, okay, I'm at 95%. Can I get to 99%? What would I need to do that? And because the buck stops with you, right, in a world where people can sign up to multi-million dollar deals. So, like, without any approval, like, it's actually quite liberating, but the liberation is frightening. Right. And so you saw this and there's an intentionality involving the culture and now going back to sort of subscription video on demand because you would write things down and people kept debating and pushing and pushing.

There was now advertising on Netflix. right that's a culture that allows the product to sort of evolve and change tenets and then you see google where it's very much just this you know i sort of use this a 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 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 Googling? You know it when you see it, but what is Google? And so it allows for when, you know, you have this, what I call the microcultures where the culture within YouTube is different from the culture within cloud. It's different from the one-inch photos, different from the one-inch photos, different from the one. on in maps. People, you'd 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 bases points, you're delivering two basis points, right? And there's a different culture in assistant where it's like, oh, experiment and try things and so on. So the culture almost becomes, it almost feels like a city, right? So I'm in Amsterdam and there's a culture in the pipe. And there's a culture in Amsterdam Nord where all the hipsters are. And there's a culture in West, right?

It's the same in San Francisco. There's a culture. like if you're in the mission and you're in, 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 sort of manifests in different ways. And what that means for the product is you end up with a company like Google, where one side of the business is building something like cloud,

another part's building something that's heavily data-centric, another part's building something very human, you know, give everyone a voice of them the world, that's YouTube, right? And you were able to do that because the culture allows that flicks. When you think of Uber versus Lyft, and then there's like Airbnb versus there's company Wimdu, that was 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 they were 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 another Uber value, I think was find your red line. Exactly. Just like find your limit and get there. And that's where you're going to work. And then in hospitality, maybe there's an advantage to being in Airbnb where 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.

What I saw that was interesting about Uber was there was a core and that was very, monolithic about, you know, this is the culture. And you hired people from all 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 a customer obsessed and the culture said 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 San Francisco. We're going to put that spin on it. So there's also this element of like, I could, not nice isn't the word I would use, but it was very accessible to anyone because it met them where they were. The product met them where they were. And I think that opened the roads for, like no other company has been able to create ride sharing at that kind of scale. It's very region by region.

And I think it's because of that. I think one of the other interesting things about culture, 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? So I actually spend time with both my VP and my peers, my engineering and design partners. and we have a little acronym called BEM because it's Brian A.V. Matild And I got a joke, I'm like, bam.

So bam got together and created a cult. 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 with Netflix and got obsessed about Netflix actually was when I was in Uber and we started almost this evolving beyond this,

what we called Uber 1.0. So I'm very Uber 1.0. Like I joined who has employee number 1024, you know, like it's a very different Uber. 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 product marketing partner. His wife worked to Netflix. And so he sends me the Netflix culture memo. And to your point, I created a culture of Netflix within my team at Uber. And so the values that actually I have carried through kind of go back to those. I do believe in this freedom of responsibility. I will give you freedom, but with that comes responsibility.

That means the buck stops with you. We had a similar one at Uber, which was owner, not a renter. Speaking of interview, but yeah, owner, not a renter. How would you act in this house was yours versus when you rent? right? And so it's that butt stops with you kind of mentality. Then there's this other one that I, you know, really think about, which is there's an informed captain. And so 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. People are not comfortable, especially Google. Like a lot of people like, well, but they're five of them last. And I'm like, no, no, no. There's one person who owns this decision. And that's the person that we're going to empower. to get all the context, get all the input, to make the decision, right? So it's like the rapid model where you end up with at the site. And then I think one for me,

and this is just something I'm very passionate about. I'm a black woman. I think a lot about how I show up in the workspace. And for me, something that's so crucial as I say 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 don't optimize for being liked to be very good. 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 when I said this once in a meeting, people were like, right? But it took me a while in reading a lot of books. to come to a definition of love. And love is the choice to extend yourself

for the spiritual growth of one self or another, right? It's very big, lofty, and whatever. But 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 engineering partner, whoever those are, 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 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 go 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, they might help you write a better PRD. And so in my team now, we have like our email distro, like Gmail allows you do the plus thing, plus PRD, and just ship your PRD, like even when it's getting baked. And people will just help you shape it, right, because we all care about each other. So that's the, that's the, you know, it's very, I know, fuzzy and whatnot.

but I do really believe in this thing of if we get back to the core of humanity and like there's a human behind the rule and they have goals and aspirations and if you care and love them, the rest of it will follow. Wow. I love this. You shared a trick for getting a sense if you have a good relationship with your EM kind of along these lines. Can you share that?

But this was before we started recording. I did. I did. And it came from when I first got into product management, I was kind of like a PM training, we called them PM trial. And my engineering manager was an associate DM, so at DM in trial, and we hated each other.

We absolutely hated each other. And now we loved, 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 in 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 or what they want to be? Are they trying to be a VP? Are they trying to go to a startup? What is it?

And so if you go to 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, say, eight hours, if you're lucky, right? But you're 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. Yeah, B, I wish I got to work with you. You're awesome. By the way, this EM you're talking about is Gerge Oros, who was on the podcast, who's the author of pragmatic engineer. People may be aware of him already.

So how about that? And I knew he loved to write. So every time we would do a doc, for example, to leadership, he would start, he would kick it off, even though it was something product-centric. He would start writing it. I'm like, great, you're an awesome writer. Look at him now.

Maybe as is just the last topic. I'd love to hear any cool stuff happening on YouTube. 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 are on publishing stuff on YouTube. Well, I'll go to one of the things we talked about, which is this once upon a time, a 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 show in the world, it's really this. YouTube is for creators being small, you know, who want to tell their story, however they want to tell it, whether it's a podcast or live or video or short or post. And that we are the creative partner. And I do, 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 in the creative partner.

We're not going to, we're not like making the thing. You're making the thing. But we're your 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 could make your life easier, then you could just go do the fun stuff of telling your stories, right?

So the couple of exciting things coming. So one of them is AI inspiration, which we launched it 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. And sometimes a little bit of, 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 going to launch next year. There's already a version of it in YouTube studio. You can just type in a word. You could be like, vision. And then it will give you ideas and other videos and topics and keywords that are being searched. That's one exciting one. Another really exciting one is we launched thumbnail test and compare. So creative start on a lot of time on thumbnails. A lot of time. 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 down 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, Larry. 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 insulting it out. So that's another exciting. area. 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 a very exciting lightning round, is there anything else you want to leave listeners with? Anything else you want it to touch on or share? I think one of the questions I get along with the time is like, how can I be a P.N. How? How? 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. So already start 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 sends. So when the opportunity comes,

you don't get lucky, right? But you get, it's opportunity meets preparation. You're already prepared. I love that. By the way, I think you're the third Nigerian guest on this podcast. There's something in the water in Nigeria that's creating a lot of great product leaders. They say, yeah, you a Nigerian friend. We keep it real.

Well, with that, we've reached a very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Ready. All right. What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people? All right. Really, really love this book called Forty Laws of Power. I know it sounds very McAulian.

Beautiful book. Another book that is my absolute, one of my absolute favorites is the God of Small Things. It's a beautifully written, really, like, wonderful book. And more recently, a book that keeps popping up in my mind is Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Such a beautiful book because it just goes back to what we talked about earlier. It helps you see that there are patterns in certain things, right? And that's, yeah. It's been coming out maybe quite a lot.

I'm a voracious reader, by the way, find me on good reads. I read a lot. Oh, that's amazing. We will find that. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed? Oh, my God, the beer. Just the beer, go watch it. It feels like being a PM.

Honestly, the beer is the show. I think it's on Star or Disney. Hulu. Hulu, that's the one in the U.S., yes. And it's about a chef. It's just so well done, beautiful cinematography, but also you feel the heat in that kitchen. You feel it. It's very stressful to watch that show.

Yes. Second season is less stressful, at least. Do you notice the season is less stressful because the restaurant is closed? That's beautiful cinematography. I think the piece goes down and it picks up when a restaurant's opening. 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 blast 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. I want to be contrary now. I'm trying to think of something else. I've been a huge fan of this new show on HBO called Scavenger's Rain. If folks haven't seen that, it's incredible. It's animated and sci-fi-ish and it's just like, wow, I 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'd like to ask candidates that you're interviewing? Two questions. If there are people of Adiger, 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? 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? There's a product I'm using a lot now. Very simplistic. It's a product called CIF cycle. and it basically allows you set an alarm,

but a progressive music alarm to wake you up because I don't want that jarring like er in the morning. It kind of just gets me there. But it also tracks my sleep using the microphone. So it tells me whether I'm coughing or whether I woke up or I'm snoring if I'm like in the wrong position. It also shows stats. Like when I'm in Nigeria, I snore less than everybody.

When I'm in certain countries, I snore more than everybody. It's pretty cool out. It feels like we have a nana to watch our kids. 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 walking up. How long he's been sleeping? That's awesome. It's called sleep cycle.

Okay, we'll link to that at 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 your day life or in work? Let me, I'm going to pull it up. It's a poem called Invictors. And I love this quote because. he was going through issues with his leg and was actually going to potentially lose it and then wrote this quote. I want to read the last part.

It's worth reading, looking up. It says, it matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments to scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. And the last two lines that I'm the master of my fate, I'm the captain of my soul, is literally my Twitter. thing, right, or X.com, whatever we're calling it now. It's such a powerful reminder of freedom or responsibility. And also I think, like, I love, this touches on something you also shared earlier,

of 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 things end up going. Absolutely. And that's a beautiful way of putting it. Amazing. And we'll link to that poem. Final question. Before we started recording, he 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, too, 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? It goes back to this. I'm the master of my fate. I'm a captain of my soul. One thing I love and one of the things that 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 than 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 following all these DJ creators.

The game has changed. I will say that. And so I have my mix tapes on YouTube. So if you look for my name, AB Atowardy, my handle is always A. A.B. Atowardy. You'll see all kinds of videos. you also see my mixtapes. And I name each mixtape after a sauce.

So one was called syracia. The last one was called mango chutney. And there's one coming up soon that I'm calling jerk. Amazing. And then, yeah, I guess as your advice, then just watch YouTube. Like, go look for people teaching you how to DJ on YouTube. 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. But you can now 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. So cool. 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? I'm on pretty much every social platform. My handle is AB Atowity, like my name. Workstuff, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all of it. And this is maybe a bigger one. I think we will all be more useful. to ourselves if we actually spend a lot more time being a bit more present and mindful. Like the world will be a better place if people just went into themselves

and we're a bit more mindful. I'm very big into meditation. So I think that's why I ask for everyone, be more mindful. Provide me to breathe. Amazing. What a beautiful way to end it. A.B., thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much. 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 Lenny's Podcast.com. See you in the next episode.