Ebi Atawodi: recommendation

Transcript context

…So let's segue to the evangelize step, which I think I always talk about. I always think about the Seinfeld meme of when he is trying to get a car reservation where he shows up and they don't have his car and they're like, "We have your reservation, we just don't have your car." And he's like, "That's the most important part of the reservation. You take the reservation, but you don't keep the reservation. That's the most important part." So I think to me it's always like you have this vision, you have amazing roadmap strategy, but if no one even knows it or hears it, that's the most important part. So I think it's super important to understand this. So I'd love to hear your advice on just how to successfully evangelize and share this vision that you've come up with. In terms of evangelizing, I think about three concentric circles. So the core of your vision is your team. And I want to make sure my team understands the vision because I'm basically saying, "Get on this boat, we're sailing to the vision of the Bermuda or some island," and I describe this beautiful island. They kind of have to be bought in and have conviction that 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 PMs are the vision. We're just the designers are the vision. I will literally first start with each of the folks that were in the room. We will basically bring our teams together and present an app. 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 team, 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, "Hey folks, still any questions?" Because people are still... It's percolating. It's like the tea bag. It's oozing out. They're trying to understand it and they're trying to stress test it. And what I also do is I write the output of the workshop. So I'll always write the output. These are the insights we came out with. Here's the ones upon a time framework. Here's the strategy. Here are the big rocks and a vision is coming. And then we'll do the vision and say, "But this is the vision of where we're going if we do all these things." And that will be a living document, comments, open for comments, 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. You don't have to resolve all of them, but just if you put rocks in a washing machine, they polish each other. I like this friction. I always like, I go into the forest, I cut a piece of wood, and our job together is to polish it down to the beautiful danish furniture. So it's okay to have that friction to 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 a hundred percent certainty, I'm trying to get you just on the ride. They will come, right? Then I kind of go to this 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 brought in to the vision as well. And they'll also bring perspectives, right? 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? You guys haven't 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 that people have bought into that story. 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 that people have bought into that story. And it's okay to have all the... And then finally, 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 L-five, L-six, I had visions going all the way. I mean I had a fantastic leader. He put me on stage at an 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 used for all of them. And we had mocks of what that looked like. So go as big as possible. Go big. Let people tell you to pull back. Let your manager use lasso and pull you back. Go as much as possible. So I go to leadership and then I have leadership, I have 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 adjacent teams because as we're building this thing, it might mean that we tell you no for one of your requests or something, and then finally leadership. It's hard.…

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