Ebi Atawodi: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. There are three pieces if you think about it. So one is what I call empathize. The second is create. So we spend a lot of time talking about create, the middle piece. Another's evangelize. 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 it in a second the tactical way I have done that across Uber, Netflix, and Google in a way that scales. Then the create piece where it's okay, now we've solved this problem. What does the world look like? That's the vision we've just been talking about. And then finally, evangelize. So I find just especially 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 Vision 2026. 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 were already in progress. We're actually now 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 the stage because you're going to meet a lot of naysayers. 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 a vision that's in a vacuum of 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 me the number of PMs who never go through their products and go through the... unless of course you're the onboarding PM, but actually go through the onboarding flow. Because we're all in this state of using the product. But actually, that first step where I don't have the product, what does that look like? I have multiple variations of accounts on YouTube. I have multiple accounts on Instagram. I have multiple accounts on Tiktok where I'm just using the product just like how does it manifest? What do I like? What's going well? I had this thing with Uber. I had Uber, I had other partner apps, I would look at them and payment services, empathize comes 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 landscape's 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. ng 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 cycle, research is ahead, and then UX, and then you go into building, it's like in that phase. And so I find too many people lean into and, "Let's go test it, let's go do some research." It's like, dude, you're a human. Look at the products. Would you use that? You built 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? Do you think about that? Oh, I open up my phone. I love Spotify. I also love YouTube Music, but I really love Spotify for my music. I've used it for years and I'm like, okay, what is it about this new thing that just rolled that 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 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. So it's like a living set of problems. And they could be qualitative, they could be quantitative, they could be tech debt. They should be tech debt. These are just known problems with the product that everyone was aware of?…

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