Ebi Atawodi: preference

Transcript context

…One last question 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? Where does this fit in terms of vision and roadmap in terms of the process? So the document is evergreen and updated. I'm a big fan of evergreen documents because you create this mental thing where everybody just knows, 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 they know what the name is to search for the document. It's like how we all know good PM, bad PM. It's lived for the test of time. So I believe in evergreen documents. Update the existing document or do a versioning of the doc, like 2022 version, 2023 version, whatever that is. So typically the narrative will happen before as you go into planning. So just my team right now, we've just gone through a planning cycle. Now I already had a vision for the team, but basically each team, they took the overarching vision and said, "Okay, let's now bring that to life for our area." They had a set of problems, they had their strategy, approach we called it, and then they have the big rocks. And everyone wrote the two pager. So we wrote this two page document. And then they circled around, the partners, the engineering teams and 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 what the rule we gave was, if you have less than three engineers on a problem, consolidate. More than three, it needs [inaudible 01:03:30]. 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 are you blocked? You have enough UX, you have enough this, it's a bit more tactical. And then you have your roadmap. But then after you've done the inside strategy, the big rocks or the roadmap, you can in parallel or after say, "Okay, let's take a week off. Spend time in a room and shape the vision." Or "Let's take a day off." I've once done one a day, the sketches I talked about. We literally locked ourselves in a room. At Uber, we had no meeting Wednesday. Google and YouTube, we have no meeting Friday. And I said, just block your no meeting Friday. The next one we're going to get in the room, we're going to whiteboard. We literally posted notes and the designer of course was like, "This thing is ugly," and then made a pre. And that was the vision. The vision, I remember seeing so many docs at Uber with literally slides from my doc saying, " 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. I feel influencing. 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 studio vision on slide five when you talked about this. This is what we did with it." So 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…

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