Ebi Atawodi: preference

Transcript context

…It's my pleasure. First, I just want to give a big thank you to Andre Albuquerque, who is the founder of One Month PM, 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. The 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, to start by saying that. Regardless of what level you are in the company. So people say, "Oh, I'm just a junior PM." Whatever level, there is some micro macro vision that you need to have. Because essentially if you got 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. So I'm trying to make that happen, but trust me, we'll get there. There might be turbulence, I'm not sure." You probably would be thinking twice about staying on that flight, right? What happens is you get on there, it's like, "Our destination is Miami." Maybe 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 the mission, which is we want to fly people where they're going safe. That's not... It's like a picture. So that's the start. I want to just delineate between vision and everything else that people think 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, this is something I can get up every morning. And if we did that, goddamn. But at the same time, it needs to be realistic and attainable, so it cannot feel so pie 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 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, [inaudible 00:07:15] 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. And how that vision manifests really depends on what you want to do. There're simple ones you can do, they're big ones you can do. But those are the core pieces in my mind. Can you just summarize them again and are some examples you can share if here's a really good vision that it hits on these, and then if you have another example of a bad vision, that would be really helpful?…

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