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

**Ebi Atawodi** (0:00)
I do not believe in being liked. I believe in being loved, right? And that's a very, very different thing. When I said this once in a meeting, people were like, yes, 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, right? It's very big and lofty and whatever, but 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 having hard conversations. It's knowing that, oh, there's a human, they know I care about them. So when the feedback is coming, like raw, they know that it's in their best interest because I've shown enough times that I genuinely care about the person behind the role.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:00)
Today, my guest is Ebi Atawodi. Ebi is Director of Product Management at YouTube, overseeing the Creator Experience. Previously, she was Director of Product Management at Netflix and Head of Product for Uber Wallet, Checkout, Pay and Financial Products at Uber. Ebi shares the most tactical advice I've ever heard on how to develop a vision for your product, along with a bunch of very concrete ways to communicate your vision to your teammates and to executives. We also dig into the craft of product management and how to get better at it, along with what Ebi's learned about creating a strong product culture on your team and across the company. Ebi is such a wonderful human and clearly an amazing product leader, and I'm excited for you to get to learn from her. With that, I bring you Ebi Atawodi after a short word from our sponsors.
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You fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day-to-day reality is a little different than you imagine. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates and you're spending your days basically putting out fires.
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Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never-ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try it for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny.
Aby, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Ebi Atawodi** (4:34)
Thank you for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:36)
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.