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

26:03And it's like, it's actually quite beautiful to see. So that's a very simplistic visualization that's not like a beautiful scapular video. I really like that as just a reminder that when you're even the article approach of announcing announcing the thing, instead of the traditional press release or even like a tech run charticle, 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 in the app store.

26:31It could end up being a tweet, it could end up being podcast, you know, there's all these different channels. So I think it's, it gives people more ways of telling the story if it's not going to be like a press release. Okay. And then yeah, you see talked about this third approach if 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 Nropa designer in to help you tell a story because just one, does one design is gonna, like you said, worth a thousand words as they say.

27:01The thing though is it's such a, I feel like it's an easy cop app to be like, oh, good light designed, design team doesn't have resources. So I'm like, no, that's not an excuse. starts drawing it with your hands in the app store. Like still tell the story because the story, you should be able to tell this, I'm obsessed with Steve Jobs. You should, you know, you tell the story without slides, right? So that mocking it up is just so you can actually bring that narrative and tell that story. And so do an app store or 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 why you don't bring it to life, right?

27:43And often the designer sees it and like sucks, I'm gonna make it better. Exactly. So that's exactly what I did. I sketched this thing once and I gave it to a designer. It was literally posted notes and they were like, okay, see where you're going and it's exciting. I asked some cycles, I'll spin it up. They spun up a low -fi one, loved it. And I'm like, actually, I'm just gonna make it pretty. And they made it pretty and we got it. I mean, now I'm a director, so I can, I have a bit more agency with resources, but I was like a L4 PM, 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.

28:24I also want to take talk about how to actually develop the vision. I think you have kind of this step by step approach. Is that right? Okay, awesome. So before we get to that, just like again, reminding people what we just talked about, which is just like, here's all these ways of framing your vision. And there's a lot of ways to do it. You know, it's not like you need to make a beautiful deck that you can just write it out. You can write a press release, you can write a tweet, or you could get a designer, help you, lock it up, or just lock it up yourself. Awesome. Okay, so let's talk about your suggestions of how to actually go about developing and figuring out the vision for your product.

28:59There are three pieces if you think about it. One is what I call empathize. The second is create. We spend a lot of time talking about create, the middle piece, and then this evangelize. 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 tackle way I have done that across Uber and Netflix and Google and weighted scales, then the create piece where it's okay now to solve this problem What is the world of like? That's the vision we've just been talking about and then finally evangelize so I find just Especially it sort of as you get more senior when life cycle of a product or group of products gets wider and wider and wider And so I set out a vision for example at YouTube last year that was called, you know, the Vision 2026, right?

29:55And only this year, a year and a half later, but we now on a stage where it's actually going into the planning cycle, we've actually finished all the things we're writing 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 give up when they get to this stage because you're going to meet a lot of nasi, it was like, all that, you know, that one person's like, But there's no way the engineering is ever going to solve. There's always going to be those people, which is why I said, you need to come up with the vision that's in a vacuum of the technical limitations.

30:29Because 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 does understand work? It's crazy to mean in a number of PMs who never goes through their products and goes through the unbording 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 do have the product, what does that look like? I have multiple variations of accounts on YouTube. I have multiple accounts on Instagram where I have multiple accounts on TikTok.

31:10where 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 Uber, I had other popular apps, I would look at them, main payments, so this is, empathize with, it comes very easily if you dog food, work, and then cat food. Dog food meaning using your own product. Absolutely a must. Cat food using your competitors or other people in the Nance case products. So that's one piece. The other piece is all sea research. research. But I researched an interesting word 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.

31:56But your researcher, if you think about the product life cycle, research is like a head 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 product. So 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 absolute love? Like, do you think about that? Well, I love like open up my phone. I love Spotify. I also love of YouTube music.

32:34But I really love Spotify, right? For my music, I've used it for years. I'm like, OK, what is it? Like, what is it about the same thing they just told to my 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, 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.

33:15And they're stapprent, 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 in there. So these are just known problems with the product that everyone was aware of. And you keep you kind of far and length for the problems. So you keep that dog 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 we should bring joy into everything we try to do. You know, so how fun. And so more money more problems.

33:51And essentially it was in partnership with my data scientist, partners that he, you know, he had a team of product analysts and data scientists. and they would pair up with my PMs, and we would have the UX team, the UXR team, the data team, and the product managers and engineering get together and actually look at their problems. So that living document means that for me, if I go around at least my minus one, not just for me, but my engineering partners minus ones and my design partners minus ones, and we chat them and say what are the top five problems for studio? They should all have the same answer.

34:28This doesn't done my job, right? Because then we all know the problems. You can debate them, you can discuss them, you can have sessions where you revise and review them, but we do that and then we go into a room and for example, let it be 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 are the most painful, right? Because then you see the whole thing. So that's the imponized bit. I'm spending a lot of time on this because I can't tell you how many times the clarity of the problem when met the clarity and conviction is missing.

35:04And that problem is kind of like the Nordstar. Everything's going on, but this Nordstar 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 think about the next step. You should be way ahead of that. like you have this doc that you've been working on and consistently updated and it's there way ahead of time It's not like cool next year's coming up. Let's start from scratch and figure out what the vision is long term Toes there's this quote that I think Patrick call sin 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 use a research and that tells you what to do and he made this point.

35:46No, it should be user research updates your mental model of 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 a data in research, just telling me and I'm not going to end for, I'm not going to try to bias the team, but something I've learned more and more over time is just you should really trust your gut and your instincts exactly like you said.

36:19If I could put all the research into Bard or chat GPT and it could spit out a PR key, then you haven't done your job. So basically that's the quote that I, I, I, maybe panic my team, I came in and I'm like, this is it. 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 that you break that an AI, I call 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 equipped from Patrick Olsen, but I agree. It's blown on. And I think this is where, when you think about the qualities of a product manager, I think there are four pillars, product sense, leadership, execution, promise, and technical epimely.

37:07And it's not product 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 speeding out what engineering said, we can't do when UX said they could do and Mikey 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.

37:47And one of the challenges I find as a PM is convincing people of your gut instinct of why this is right. And but I think that loops back to the power of vision and helping everyone align like here's why we exist and here's where we're going. And here's what I'm sensing is probably an opportunity. Okay, so just to summarize some of the tips you've shared on this empathize step. One is basically user research, but I think even more importantly, use it to inform 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.

38:22Like actually be a user of the products. In your case, it'd be like uploading videos. Yeah. Is there anything else? Okay, there's this doc that you shared that's awesome. So just basically a running document of known problems people are users 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, the PM's 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.

39:02So you use my framework to give me 10 problems. Because if you say, come present, they'll do like 50 slides. Like, no, that's just 10 things you should know and stack rank them. So I put the work on you now to give me some color. I hear from marketing, calm support, research, content strategy. I actually had that in my last strategy session where it was the most mind -blowing 10 things you should know. One of them was like the average reading age of an American is a 10 years old. right? And so you start to think of, oh my God, all the text we have. Maybe we should use images or video or whatever.

39:38So, bringing this sort of multifaceted view of the problems and then you do the work of like sandpapering down to the core thing and then you have the final 10. So that would be the tactical, like, you want to take it to a more strategic lens. That's how it runs, that the first day of my strategy session is usually insights, I would do three days, insights, strategy, then big rocks, and the insights pieces this, where we go like deep into the problems, and I use this template of 10 things you should know, and then we come up with 10 things, a final list of 10 things you should know, like a consolidated list.

40:13I really like this additional tip, you just shared as you're trying to develop a vision for our 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 for stakeholders of, 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.

40:48So can you just talk a bit more about this? Like, what is this? You leading the team through an exercise to develop a vision and a strategy? Correct. Correct. God, so you said the first three days are aligning and fully understanding and immersing yourself in insights? I usually have strategy sessions of three days. I have tried to do anything 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 structures. So when we get into the conviction part, right? The clarity of the problem is dissolved, the conviction is the narrative.

41:23The freeing of that conviction is insights strategy, big rocks. So the insights day is just focused on understand work. These five problems, how are you using the app? Doing tear downs of other apps. It's just like a day of understanding. So in the Google Design Spring, they'll say, ask the experts in a way and they're given the experts a template. That's what I'm doing. me, you know, 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 who's in these meetings?

42:01I always have four folks. So it would be depending on the level of the strategy, the product, my engineering partner, my design partner, and research. Okay, so the leaders of the team. The leaders of the team and depending on the or I'll bring in data science. If it's because a Google we have more shared data science resource, so I usually invite them as one of the partners, right? Come tell them 10 things you should know. So they'll say, you know, we need to do a instrumentation or whatever. But you hit on a fantastic point, which I was gonna connect later, which is when you get to the evangelized stage, humans love to know you heard them.

42:39So imagine it's like, you did all the work of bringing them together to say, hey, tell me 10 things, you must have 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 advantage, that, that last stage where you evangelize 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 for 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 I'm making up with this vision. So let's, let's segue to the evangelized step, which I think I always talk about.

43:15I always think about the Seinfeld meme of when he's trying to get a car reservation where he shows up and then I have a car and they're like, we have your reservation, we just don't have your car. And he's like, that's the most important part of the reservation. You take the reservation, but you don't keep the reservation. That's the most important part. So I think to me, it's always like, you have this vision, you have amazing road map strategy, but if no one even knows it, or here's it, that's the most important part. So I think it's super important to understand this. So I'd love to hear your advice and just had a successfully evangelized and share this vision that you've come up with.

43:50In terms of the evangelizing, I think about three concentric circles, right? So the core view of vision is your team. And I want to make sure my team understands the vision. Because I'm basically saying, get all this boat. We're sailing to the vision of the Bermuda, or like, you know, some island. and I described this beautiful island and they come to me, 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 or the vision where just the design is the vision.

44:28I will literally first start with, each of the folks that were in the room, we will basically bring our teams together and present an out, so for example, the one we did last year, we presented to what we call studio leads, which are essentially the triads for each of the product teams, PM engineering and design for each of the product teams, and just presented it out. And I had multiple, we had the first one, then I had one in my PM weekly, presented it again, then he'd look still any questions, because people would still look like percolating. It's like the tea bag, it's like, it's losing out.

45:02They're trying to understand it, and they're trying to stress test it. And what I also do is I'm right, output of the workshop. It's always right now. These are the things I came out with. Here's the ones upon a time framework. Here's the strategy. Here are the big rocks and the vision is coming. Then we'll do the vision and take, but this is the vision of where we're going through to all these things. That will be a living document, comments, bullpen for comments, no edit, not view only comments. Because you want anyone to leave comments in there and just feel they have a say. You don't have to respond to all of them.

45:36You don't have to resolve all of them. But just, you know, if you put rocks in a washing machine or the, they polish each other. So I actually like, I like this friction. I always go into the forest and cut a piece of wood and our job together is to polish it down to the beautiful Danish literature. So 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 I'm going to go to this next layer, which is the stakeholders. Those people that came in and their teams, their managers, go to them and get them boarded into the vision as well.

46:17They'll also bring perspectives. You're missing this piece. We have a lot of engineering support tickets will blow up if you do this thing. What does that look like? We have you guys having solved 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 brought into that story and it's okay to have all their, 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 at L5 .06, I had visions going all the way.

46:53I mean, I had a fantastic leader. He put me on stage and all hands to present the vision. And we were like, one wallet, all Uber experiences. And then we have this vision of a world where Uber eats. It could be trains, it could be whatever. And you have this one Uber wallet that can be useful for all of them. And we have a maxima of 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 that go to leadership. And then I have leadership and to find that story as much as possible.

47:25So those are the three concentric circles. 14, 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 adjacent teams, because as we're building this thing, it might mean that we tell you know for one of your requests or something, right? And then find it in 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. You do this for quarterly plans. What's kind of like the scale of vision that you invest this time in?

48:05And we go back to the four packs of the vision. We said, a vision if a vision is something that's coming next year right in newsletter. Right. Right. The newsletter, the headlight article version or do the mock. Like when it you're really getting into a vision, you're looking back 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 growing in the same direction will mean a lot more velocity. And the ripple I talked about evangelizing within the company, it's everything.

48:40When I start talking to a candidate, I say, hey, my team's mission is expressing me its connection or a vision as this. Then they already eat their eyes like you can see the twinkle. right? And so the ripple effect of this thing is just broad and big. My end -partner was just hiring for 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's like Goal Slash Studio Vision and people just, people get excited just seeing it. So it's really this evergreen thing that is we're talking foreign five years. It's not the next six months, right?

49:20Is the next month do the tweet?

49:24Okay, awesome. I think that's quite 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, a recorder to make sure people understand where it's going long -term. And then it's like this one -off exercise that may be your feet every year too. I think if you have to repeat the vision every year, you have not created a good name. Nothing done to work. So 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.

50:00Right? So we had a low -dilting block at one point we did a sizzle reel and actually had like, if the sting 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, and I'm talking about PMs from L4 all the way to L7. in 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.

50:44Now when they're going into like a sort of microvision, that's kind of like a macrovision, where they make it insulting and a small problem, right? Then they'll just do a mock of what that thing looks like next year. And then in that mock, they'll present like, this is the mock of what we think it should look like. That is a vision. It's a microvision, but it is a vision. So do that, And that's the thing that used to say, hey, leadership, this is the problem of statement. Here's what we think. How do we solve this big problem? And here's what we think it looks like when we ship it. That's any issue.

51:16So that's the, you know, what I'm talking about is this macro vision, but you absolutely can have them. 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 extremely useful in communicating like almost a vision, basically, just like how might we solve this problem. Just that phrase alone is really, there's this concept one of the PMs I worked with you, it's called fertile questions. When you ask someone a fertile, a question that leads to the discussion in a really good way to create a fertile question is how might we get more people to engage with YouTube analytics?

51:49It leads to a lot of good prints or media. So good, good micro tip right there. This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio. Your agency has just landed a dream client. 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 uniquely out with a revolutionary grid experience and watches elements scale proportionally by default.

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53:09Say someone's like, got a development opportunity of like, get better at vision, which of these things you've shared do you think would be maybe something they could start working on? Is it craft this five -year vision? Is it pick one of these three ways to communicate it? is it changed 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 in Google and it still baffles me the number of people where when I say, tell me the top problems that keep you up at night and then I rambling.

53:54I'm like, what are we talking about? Like, why are we rambling? This is literally the thing that you come to work. This is the thing that should excite you. So, like, I cannot overemphasize this importance of like, you know, top 10 things to show, but you don't even start with 10. I start with 10 and actually, I always end up with top three. So at every deck, I'll have three things like three numbers or four numbers. We just got a new new chief product officer at YouTube, right? Because Neil will know ahead inside of the CEO. When I did my presentation to her, the opening sign is four things you should know.

54:30With these four numbers and four insights. And so it's like she walks away with that information now. So it's like that is probably the most bit like it needs to be this role in 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're going to need to convince yourself, I don't so much care about the deck. The deck helps absolutely, or the pictures of the mocks. 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 it itself is already you were evangelizing the vision.

55:10Amazing. 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 all simply like infrastructure tech dead 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 with. Right. And when we're the infrastructure piece, I know it's a nugget on the side, but infrastructure is the product. period. Like people like O Tech debt, like yes, a product debt. You can, I cannot build a skyscraper on a shaky foundation.

55:48So 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 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. But see how it feels. I think just like people don't realize just the power of, oh, I have to actually think about what this will look like and I'm just going to paint this very fuzzy picture or what it might be. Amazing. I feel like this is the most tactical and practical piece of segment of advice on how to get better vision.

56:23I'm so excited to get this out and for folks to have things that they actually do to get better at vision. I wish, I feel like this could be the whole podcast, but you have more awesome stuff to share. So I want to keep going. or you'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 sinkily describing the craft of product management. And I know there's like many layers deep in this concept, but just to start, what is this kind of phrase and framework you think of to describe what is product management craft?

56:58What is the job of PMB's? 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 number of things, all of those things what they're doing is bringing clarity. And that clarity, especially, is to the problem. So, you know, even when, I'll just give you a little tactical thing I noticed, is there's some PMs who will send an email and I really email them like, what do you want me to do? Is this an FYI? Are you saying there's a problem? Do you want me to help?

57:43So just even if 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, 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. We don't need that research. Instead of doing foundational research, we're doing, let's do US validation where the time comes.

58:17That's the kind of clarity you can brick that saves cycles. So that's the clarity piece. And if you think about what when you think about what clarity is, you define clarity, it's this transparency, it's the simplicity of understanding, that's what the word is, right? It's removing all, it's sifting out all the stuff that's polluting the core thing. That's how I think of clarity. And the sort of tactical thing that I used to bring that clarity is the framework I talked about, which is the narrative insights strategy big It brings clarity to why we're doing what we're doing, how we're gonna do it, and what we're gonna do.

58:57And I spent time talking, and I can spend time talking about all those, but we talked about the workshop to do that. And I actually have, and one of my old EMs, you've actually had all the podcasts, 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 like 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 long list of 20 things because the way I asked you to make me a cocktail, you would put ice in first.

59:37Then you would pour the drink. You would not put the drink and then put the ice. It will splash and it's messy and that's how an endless road map looks to me. So it's like three, four, five things that anyone can remember that are the biggest things if we ladder this, it gets us closer to solving the problems. Then every other little thing is around, you can kind of fill that around. That's the sand around the big rocks. 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 asked your teams to share as they're stradded, as they're planned essentially, like the high level plan.

1:00:09It's not yet a roadmap strategy. I guess, 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 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 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 why you're doing this PM What is a big problem you saw as a company?

1:00:49What's the strategy? What are the things you're gonna deliver that would end up in your the headlines that are coming in the future? That you need money for right? You're telling investors I'm gonna 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 a PM can have is this narrative that when people come to you and be like Hey, you show these emails, introduction, meet this person and the PM of theirs are 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.

1:01:23Then when we set up the time that you know, do you have questions? And guess what? A lot of calls will fall off just from that. Or when 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 your recorder and refresh your re -six months because you're kind of adjusting to what's happening in the world what the problems are. Sense of that. One last question. There are 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?

1:01:55Like, where does this fit in terms of vision and roadmap in terms of the process? So again, the document is evergreen and updated. But I'm a big fan of evergreen documents because you create this mental thing where everybody just knows, link whatever the short thing is, bit whenever you're using your company, they remember it and that's the link and that's where I go. When they know what the name is to search for the document, it's still like how we all know good PM bad PM. It's like it's lived through the test of time. So I believe in every green document update the existing document or do like a versioning of the doc like 2022 version, 2022 version, whatever that is.

1:02:33So typically the narrative will happen before like as you go into planning. So just my team right now, we just got to a planning cycle. I already had a mission for the for a team, but basically for each team, you know, they took the overarching uh vision and said, okay, let's now bring that to life for like our area. They have a set of problems. They have their strategy approach. We call it, then they have the big rocks and everyone wrote the two page right? So we wrote this two page document and then and they circulate around their partners, the engineering teams, and what feedback. And that's what they then used to then build out the roadmap.

1:03:12Then they build out the roadmap and said, okay, based on that, this is what the roadmap looks like. Oh, I'm picking 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 the 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 that resources are signed to it. And that's when we start to see, okay, where are you blocked? You have another UX, you don't know if this is a bit more tactical. And then you have your room out.

1:03:42But then, you know, after you've done the inside strategy, big rocks of the room out, you can imparry or after say, okay, let's take a week off, right? Spend time in a room and shape the fidget, right? Well, let's take a day off. Like I did, I 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 YouTube, we have no meeting Friday. And I said, just block your no meeting Friday the next one. We're gonna get in the room, we're gonna whiteboard. We literally like post it notes. And the designer, of course, was like, this thing is ugly and it made it pretty.

1:04:20And that was the vision. The vision, I remember seeing so many docs at Uber with literally slides from my doc, right? Saying, you know, we agree with this vision. And so then for, we're gonna build this thing for in our team to support it. That's great. If you're influencing, right? And I'm seeing it right now in YouTube as well, where teams are like, oh, I've seen that vision and they'll refer to it. I saw your studio vision. And on slight fine, when you talked about this, this is what we get with it. So that's that's the that's how I would do it. Oh, man. I feel like there's so many directions I want to go.

1:04:55You 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're ready. Speak about conviction. So conviction is the vision. Where you basically, it's 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.

1:05:30And that's what we're seeing right when we talk about product sense. It's your building, there's feeling of what you think is right. And so you bring that to life. And so everything we just talked about is literally you put verdict in 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, imagine you point your PMs to get more clear on things and then is it like more conviction, is it clear conviction?

1:06:06How do you think of the skill of getting better conviction? If you have conviction and it's all clear, then you don't have conviction. That's quite frankly. If you're like, I kind of think, maybe we should, they're like five things we should solve and then you don't have conviction. So I'll sometimes stress this and I'm like, what it went to the way all your resources is in your age of five, which is the one you're going to build. I do all these kind of draconian things that just force clarity. Right? And so then the conviction will come out and say, yeah, but I'm going to come to them like, okay, so the thing that's making you uncomfortable goes spend time, goes spend your research, goes spend your, you know, cycles on getting higher certainty on that conviction, rather than like chasing for things because we're, I don't want to like nobody does anything well by peanut buttering resources spreading them thin.

1:07:00So 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 it'll be a document and it'll be you know the typical pros and cons of the options and I'm like so let's say we weren't in the room as a leadership team which is the one between what's the get me right and I use sometimes the team has even done the work between themselves talking I'm like no no no no no you need to go through the work. And if you have gotten to a point where you have conviction, but there is some risk, then let's talk about the risk that you're, you need by help mitigating or help solving because that's too easy to come to me and be like, Oh, here's a and b, you do the work and tell me which one to pick.

1:07:39No way. No, that's not going to make you a better p .m. Go figure out why you can't stand by eight. Right? So the core to conviction is like pick, pick which you think is right. That seems like the core of it is like being clarity is being very clear about what you've learned and what you think things are going on in conviction is picture battle here's where we think we're you invest. Let me use, I like the word battle. Clavard is saying that you are committed to actually finding this war. I've been in the first place, right? There are lots of other things you can find. This is the fight you're fighting in and why.

1:08:13And the conviction is like how and the way do you see the world if you win that out? Great. Okay. So, you give a talk on product culture and how the company culture informs and it changes the way the product is built. So, you worked at three very different cultures that I'm aware of. Uber, Netflix and Google, all very different companies. I guess maybe just as a broad question, what did you see about the culture of the company due to change the way product is built? 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 card turns up with someone you do not know that you get into and trust them to take you where you're going.

1:08:59If you fast forwarded to when my grandmother was alive, she'd have thought you were crazy. So to 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 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 city. And I started at Uber as a GM, a friday came to 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.

1:09:40In 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, they don't have a car on it? So there's this big piece of the operations and what Uber basically did was we're going to work very hard to get the right people and 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 collect the model of the culture there was a culture And the culture of everyone that can say, hold on, let's revisit this.

1:10:28Does it still serve us? Has the context changed? What are the parts that we need to improve involved? Because here's the thing, if you don't intentionally involve 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 things that, what are the good behaviors that you reward and the bad behaviors that you condone? And if you're not going back to revisit that then the culture just kind of moves on and then the companies that will think catch up or it moves on in the way Don't want it to and then the world is kind of like oh my god Uber, do Uber, which actually happened.

1:11:12I 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. So this is a really big piece of Uber. The spin there on the autonomy was one of the cultural values was principled confrontation and toe stepping. Right? And this is codified in the valley 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 Gallenick 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 computation.

1:11:53He was like, who tested out? 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 that. I call it evolves and also, you know, the bad Uber, you go to Netflix where it started as a monolithic culture. It was like, it came out of, oh, we went through this experience where we had to, you know, they cut the org down and we left these sets of people and they were even there was performing just as well and had the same output and the same joy. Hey, what did we do right here? Let's like distill this down and distill it down to this no rules, rules framework of freedom responsibility, you know, Heidi and Lionel's the couple a few of these sort of tenants had Netflix.

1:12:41But I saw in my time, wait, very short time in 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 are I enjoying 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.

1:13:24I was also part of a lot of conversations around access. Like in a world where more people are on the mobile phone, do not have a TV screen. Why not have a credit card? Do we want to entertain the world? don't do we want to entertain some people in some places. Sounds familiar, right? This is like what we also had in Uber. We want to offer it to the world, or 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 to the degree be encouraged to write down things, write your argument, but ultimately it's many's decision.

1:14:06And it's funny when the buck stops with you. How all the whole thing flips on its head. You'd think like it would be chaos. It's actually not. You actually saw people go a lot more methodically around, okay, I need to make sure I'm, let me 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 it's the liberation is frightening.

1:14:45Right? And so, and so you saw this and as an intentionality involving the culture and now going back to sort of subscription video of demand because you would write things down and people kept beating and pushing and pushing, there was no advertising on Netflix. Right? That's a culture that allows the product to sort of evolve and change tenants. And then you see Google where it's very much just this, you know, I sort of use this story of two little fish swimming in the water. And the old fish goes past them and says, hey, how's the water? and they're like, good, when they swim along and they go, what's water?

1:15:30That's a little bit of what you get. And we have this respect they use, I respect the opportunity, respect each other. And that's all you get, that's it. That's it, like what is Googley? You know it when you see it, but what is Googley? And so it allows for when you have this, is what I call the micro -cultures, where the culture within YouTube is different from the culture within Cloud, is different from the one in photos, different from the one in maps. People, you actually hear people say, oh, they came from search, because they have a culture in search, which if you say you're going to deliver two bases, it's when you're delivering two bases, right?

1:16:09And 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 an Amsterdam and there's a culture in the pipe and there's a culture in Amsterdam, nor where all the hipsters are and there's a culture in West, right? It's the same in San Francisco, there's a culture like if you're in the mission and you're in, you know, all of those things. So essentially what you then end up with is these microcultures, but then there is this looser macroculture that allows the flex of the culture, so in manifests in different ways.

1:16:44And what that means to the product is you end up with a company like Google where one side of the business is building something like cloud and other parts building something that's heavily data -septrically and other parts building something very human, you know, give everyone a voice show that the world ends YouTube, right? And you were able to do that because the culture allows that flex. When you think of Uber versus Lyft and there's like Airbnb versus there's a company WimDew that was one of their main competitors, those these German guys. It's interesting in the case of Uber, they're very aggressive versus Lyft was nice brand.

1:17:19But in the case Airbnb, Airbnb was the very nice culture and brand. And Wimdu was extremely aggressive, just very hardcore. It's interesting in some markets, maybe you win going really hard and aggressive. And just another Uber value, I think, was find your red line. Just find your limit and get there. That's where you're going to work. And then in hospitality, maybe there's a drainage to being in Airbnb or it's like more warm 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.

1:18:00And you hired people from all work, you know, walks of life that, you know, live and breathe that culture. But there was a lot of magic that came out of a culture that also had the city at the core. So Celebrate Cities was one of the core things. And you know, a 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 terms of when we put that spin on it. So it was also this element of like, I could not not a nices in 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.

1:18:43And I think that opened the roads for like no other company has been able to create right sharing at that kind of scale. It's very region by region. And I think it's because of that. I think one or the other interesting things about culture is every team also has its own culture and part of a PM and a PM leader's job is to create that culture and create good vibes and kind of be the who's a recent guest, put it you're like the emotional center of the team. Is there anything you do on your teams to create that culture to make sure everyone's feeling good and excited and you know, create good vibes?

1:19:16So actually spend time with both my VP and my peers, like engineering and design partners. And we have a little acronym called BM because it's Brian A .B. Matilda. And I kind of joke I'm like, bam. like, so bambed up together and created a cult, like we discussed the culture that we wanted to have on the team because indeed it's like how do you work? And by the way, just fun fact, the reason I ended up in Netflix and got obsessed about Netflix actually was when I was at Uber and we started all this, you know, this evolving beyond this, what we called number one point out. So I'm very over 1 .0.

1:19:55Like I joined you as N -2 -1 -1 -24. You know, like it's 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 in 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 I have carried through kind of go back to those. I do believe in this freedom of responsibility.

1:20:36And we'll 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, the 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 for the 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 look for this decision? Like who cares if this decision is made? It's not like six people with consensus.

1:21:10Like who is the person? I'm very big on people on countless people, like a lot of people are like, well, but they're five or less. And I'm like, no, no, there's one person who owns this decision. And that's the person that we're going to empower to get all the context, get all the input, to make the decision, right? So it's like the rapid model where you end up with the 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. space. And for me, something that's so crucial as I think vulnerability is your strength.

1:21:46Right? And so we're all human. We're all fantastically flawed in many ways. And so I'm really, really fundamentally believe in this whole, who's the human behind the role and how's that human doing? And I don't optimize for being liked to be very, and it sounds very harsh. I do not believe in being liked. That's a, I believe in being loved. Right? And that's very, very different thing. And it's what I said this once in a meeting, we're like, right? But it took me a while in reading a lot of books to come to a definition of love. And love is the choice to extend yourself for the spiritual growth of oneself or another.

1:22:31Right? It's very big and lofty in whatever it is. 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, Matilda, Langeon, and partner, Brian, engineering partner, whatever those are. They know what I care about them. So when the feedback is coming, like, raw, they know that it's in their best interest because they've I've shown enough times that I genuinely care about the person behind the role.

1:23:08I feel like that brings the most powerful thing a team has. You'll see teams that just tactically, they'll write a PRD, they'll send the PRD outside to the world, right, to the other partners. And I'm like, have you spoken to the other PMs on your team? Have they read it? Because actually, I might help you write a better PRD. And so in my team now, we have like Art email district, like Gmail allows you to do the plus thing, plus PRD and just ship your PRD, like even when it's getting baked, and people will just help you shape it, right? Because we all care about each other. So that's the, that's the, you know, it's a 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.

1:23:53And if you care and love them, the rest of it will fall. 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 with us before we started recording? I did. I did. And it came from when I first got into program management. I was kind of like a PM in training, PM called the PM trial. And my engineering manager was an associate EM, sort of EM in trial. And we hated each other. We absolutely hated each other. And now we love that. You know, there was love in the end, and he, you know, still a very good friend of mine.

1:24:31And it came down to first this, I asked this question, do you know you engineering managers birthday? It's the day they showed up on the world. It's the most important day for them. It's the day they showed up on the world. 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 build with the person, I will do fun things where we'll just go to a show together or something, or have lunch or dinner, because if I'm spending a half of my weekend life at work, she's sleeping hours.

1:25:17The remaining time is 16 hours, and you work to eight hours if you're lucky, right? You are eight hours. 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. You better. Maybe I wish I got to work with you. You're awesome. By the way, this, you know, 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, you would start moving kick it off, even though it was something for an eccentric.

1:25:54You'd start writing it in like great. You're an awesome writer. So look at them now. Where? Maybe it's just the last topic. I'd love to hear any cool stuff happening on YouTube. Stuff you, I think you just launched them AI stuff. There's a B -test thing stuff that's coming out. Just like what should people know about new YouTube features? Especially people like me that aren't publishing stuff on YouTube. Well, I'm going to one of the things we talked about, which is this once upon a time vision. One of the visions we have as a team is if you go back to the core of YouTube, which is give everyone a voice show in the world, it's reading this.

1:26:29YouTube is the creators being small, you know, who want to tell this story however they want to tell it whether it's a podcast or live or video or short or post and the we are the creative partner. I do, you know, maybe that's another podcast for another day. And I fundamentally believe in like when products take on some kind of persona, right? And so we're like, okay, YouTube Studio really went into creative partner. We're not, we're not like making the thing, you're making the thing, but we are partnering it. We're the ones giving you insights, we're the ones, you know, helping you with like testing things that might work.

1:27:09And if we could make your line easier, then you could just go to the files that are 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 kind of flesh it out. In your case, like, maybe it's finding the person and it's like reading about them. This is like framework that they do. And sometimes they'll do work by looking at treats or watching other YouTube creators or listening to other things.

1:27:47And 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, 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 of the being searched. That's one exciting one. Another really exciting one is we launched thumbnail test and compare.

1:28:23It's a creative sport 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 and she 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.

1:29:06It 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 always clunky tools people have built that are like hacky on top of YouTube to try to do this for you somewhere 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 to touch on or share? I think one of the questions I get a lot of time is like, How can I be a PM? How can I convert into product management?

1:29:36And I just want to say, I'm this my during -girl, I don't have an MBA, I'm in working 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 product management, product doing product management before you're a product manager. Open up your favorite apps. What are the top 10 problems you see?

1:30:16In your head design, what the world could look like if you fix them, right? And what you do by doing that is this constant training of your product sense. So when the opportunity comes, you don't get lucky, right? But you get this opportunity meets preparation. You're ready 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. That's right. It's a minute. They say, get you a Nigerian friend. We keep it real. Well, with that, we've reached a very exciting lightning round.

1:30:46Are you ready? Ready. All right. What are two or three books you recommended most to other people? I really really love this book called Forty Laws of Power. I know it's that was very Machinilian beautiful book. Another book that is my absolute one of my absolute favorites is the the The God of Small Things. It's so 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 patterns in certain things, right? And that's, yeah.

1:31:35I mean, it's been coming up maybe quite a lot. I'm a voracious reader by the way, find the own good dreams. I read a lot. Oh, that's amazing. We will find that. What is a favorite recent movie or or TV show that you really enjoy. Oh my God, the beer. Just the beer, go watch it. It feels like being a pian. Honestly, the beer is the show. I think it's on Star or Disney. Hulu. Hulu, that's the one in the US. Yes, at its, it's about a chef. It's just, it's so well done. Beautiful cinematography, but also you feel like he hit that kitchen, you feel it. It's very stressful to watch that show. Yes. Second season's less stressful at least.

1:32:17Wait, do you know the season is less stressful because the restaurant is closed. That's a beautiful cinematography. I think these schools down here picks up when restaurants are open again. Oh yeah, that lasted. You're right. Yeah. Interestingly, the bear has been the most recurring recommended show on this podcast recently. There's like a phase of, there's a phase of last of us. There's a phase of white lotus and now it's the bear. So we'll see. We'll see what comes next. I want to be contrary now and try to think of something else. I've been a huge fan of this new show in HBO called Scavengers Rain.

1:32:51If folks haven't seen that, it's incredible. It's animated and sci -fi -ish and it's just like, wow, can't wait to watch more. Anyway, that's my answer. That's not about me. Let's keep going. What's a favorite interview question that you'd like to ask candidates that you're interviewing? Two questions. If there are people that are, what is your leadership philosophy? The amount of leaders who have never thought about that is quite scary. And if you're just pure product chops, tell me your favorite product. Product you're most passionate about. And why? And I look for storytelling. Do you start with a problem?

1:33:24You know, I wake up in the morning and I'm always looking for life and mood. Music is like a backdrop to my life. And I open up Spotify and it just finds exactly what I need to, like, I'm to told you the problem and the solution, right? So I look for those kind of things. Then I'll ask, you could approve it. What would you do? Mm -hmm. I love it. That's an awesome one. What is a favorite product you 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 Seafsike, Cycle. And it basically allows you seven alarm, but a progressive musical alarm to wake you up.

1:34:05Because I don't want that jar 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 in the wrong position. It also shows stats. When I'm in Nigeria, I snore less than everybody. When I'm in some countries, I snore more than everybody. It's so, it's pretty cool out. It feels like we have a man to watch your kid. It's like a camera that's watching him sleep all day. and I feel like any bet for me because it tells you when he was organ up, hell, he's been sleeping. That's awesome.

1:34:39So sleep cycle. Okay. We'll link to that in the show notes. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to or share with friends or find useful just either in day, in your day life or in your work? Let me, I'm going to pull it up. It's a poem called Invictus. And I love this quote because he was going through issues with his leg and was actually going to like potentially use 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 life fate.

1:35:19I am the captain of my soul. And the last two lines that I'm the master of life fate, I'm the captain of my soul is literally my Twitter your thing right away or anx .com, whatever we're calling it now. I don't know. It's such a powerful reminder of freedom of responsibility. And I'll say I think, I love, this touches on something you also shared earlier, just like agency over your fate, like you are responsible, even though you may not be responsible for what happened, you're responsible for what you're going to do about it. And I think that for being a great PM, that's such an important thing.

1:35:54like 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. And that's a beautiful way of putting it. Amazing. And we'll link to that poem. Final question. Before we start recording, you told me you'd do DJing on the side or I don't know, maybe full time. I don't know. I guess one working folks find your DJ sets if you put them out. And then two, I guess any Any advice for someone that wants to start getting into DJ -ness, what could they do to start going down that path to learn how to do it?

1:36:30It goes back to this, I'm the master of my favorite Macaptor in my soul. One thing I love and one of the things that's brought me to YouTube is just the power of what you can learn and learning through YouTube. So I used to DJ and as she 15 years ago when it was still vinyl and then I quit. I was like, it's either I do design at the time, because I started as an engineer that I was a designer. I thought I'd do design or I do DJing, and I stopped. And then a year ago, my Burning Man camp was like, we need a DJ. So I needed to go DJ at Burning Man. And so I went on YouTube and I just followed all these DJ creators.

1:37:11The game has changed. I will say that. And so I have my mix -sync on YouTube. So if you look for my name, Aby Atta, you know, Atta, my handle is always a bit of how it even my surname you'll see all kinds of videos but you also see my mistakes and I name each mix it after a sauce so one's called Sriracha the last one was called mango chutney and there's one coming up soon but I'm calling jerk amazing and then yeah I guess is your device then just watch YouTube like go look for people teaching you ahead of DJ on YouTube and go watch Well, and I cannot underestimate the power of those 10 ,000 hours to become an expert.

1:37:53So just DJ, like I got this really cheap controller, it cost me 300 bucks, but you can actually do it on an iPad. And even when I'm on flights, I'll 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 treating and it's for me. Then I'll come home and I'll do it with the actual controller and record it and put it on YouTube. For fun. So cool. A .B., I'm in the A .B. fan club. Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions, work in folks finding a line if they want to follow up on anything and how can listeners be useful to you?

1:38:35I'm on pretty much every social platform. My handle is A .B. Atownwoody, like my name. work stuff, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all of it. And this is maybe a big one. I think we will all be more useful to ourselves if we actually spend a lot more time being a bit more present and mindful. Like the world will be a better place if people just went into themselves and sort of were a bit more mindful. I'm very big into meditation, so I think that's why I ask for everyone to be more mindful. My name is Abreed. Amazing. What a beautiful way to end it. Abre, thank you so much for being here. You. Bye everyone.

1:39:22Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'sPotcast .com. See you in the next episode!