I do not believe in being liked; I believe in being loved, and that's a very, very different thing. When I mentioned this once in a meeting, people were like, "Right," but it took me a while, reading a lot of books, to come to a definition of love. Love is the choice to extend yourself for the spiritual growth of oneself or another. It's very big and lofty, but you're literally extending yourself for somebody else or for self-love. That's love.

When you're extending yourself, you're not always nice. It's not always pleasant; sometimes it involves having hard conversations. It's knowing that, oh, there's a human there, and they know I care about them. So when the feedback is coming, raw as it may be, they know it's in their best interest because I've shown enough times that I genuinely care about the person behind the role.

Today, my guest is Ab Atoi. Ab is the Director of Product Management at YouTube, overseeing the Creator Experience. Previously, she was the Director of Product Management at Netflix and Head of Product for Uber Wallet, Checkout, Pay, and Financial Products at Uber.

Ab 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 improve at it, along with what Ab has learned about creating a strong product culture on your team and across the company.

Ab is such a wonderful human and clearly an amazing product leader, and I'm excited for you to learn from her. With that, I bring you Ab Atoi after a short word from our sponsors.

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Ab, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast!

Thank you for having me; it's my pleasure.

First, I just want to give a big thank you to Andre Albuquerque, the founder of One Month PM, who actually posted on LinkedIn about how much of a fan he is of yours 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 has always had this development area around vision. It's always been, "You need to get better at crafting a vision and telling your story." It's also a very powerful tool that product managers have to align teams to be more successful in the products they're building.

You have a really neat way of thinking about a framework for developing a vision and then telling the story. What are the 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, people say, "Oh, I'm just a junior PM," or whatever level. There is some micro or macro vision that you need to have because it's essentially like 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." You might be thinking twice about staying on that flight, right?

What happens is you get on there, and 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. The pilot always paints this image of the destination, and that's the vision—not to be confused with a mission, which is, "We want to fly people where they're going safely." That's not it; it's like a picture.

So that's the start. I want to just delineate between vision and everything else that people think a vision is. I think there are a couple of key elements. The first one is it needs to be lofty. It needs to be something that almost scares you in an exciting way, like, "Oh my God, this is something I can get up every morning for." If we did that, God damn! But at the same time, it needs to be realistic and attainable. It cannot feel so pie-in-the-sky that it feels out of reach.

Of course, there are leaders who have really, really big visions and see beyond the rest of us, but that's not most people. Most people need it to feel within reach. The key thing is it needs to be in a vacuum from the limitations of today because the whole point of going to the future and saying, "I'm time-traveling 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."

So you have these three components, and if those come together and are grounded, of course, in a problem that people are excited about, you've got your vision.

Now, the how and how that vision manifests really depends on what you want to do. There are simple ones you can do; there are big ones you can do, but those are the core pieces in my mind.

Can you just summarize them again? Are there some examples you can share? If there's a really good version that hits on these, and if you have another example of a bad vision, that would be really helpful.

So, four things: it has to be lofty, it has to be realistic, it has to be devoid of any tech or limitations of today, and it has to be grounded in a very clear and potent problem.

Awesome. Are there any examples from places you've worked or visions?

Absolutely! What I particularly love—so a lot of my product thinking and my product chops and craft—I really owe to Uber. When I think about things, there's something really magical there. One of our values at the time was making magic, so I used the word magic all the time.

The mission was "Push a button, get a ride. Transportation as reliable as running water." I used to be in Nigeria, and that tagline did not scale because water was not that reliable in Nigeria. So they went for a slightly more inclusive version, which is "Reliable transport and sanitation everywhere for everyone."

That's the mission; it doesn't really tell me what the image looks like when I get there, right? But that's like when I wake up every day, I'm like, "Why do I work in this company?" It's that—make transportation reliable everywhere for everyone.

I'll talk maybe later about how that came to be and how we were able to use that to actually challenge the then-CEO, Travis Kalanick. The vision was a world where you get to this continuous trip so that you do not need parking because cities have 25% of the average city as parking spaces. If you're in San Francisco, you'll see buildings with floors just for parking. You'll have basements just for parking.

In a world where we have housing problems and ridiculous prices for rents, just imagine if you could free up all of those spaces for all kinds of things—homes, restaurants, you name it, parties, you know, warehouse parties especially; they have the best. That was the vision, and you could kind of see it, right? You're like, "Oh, I could see a world." I mean, I live in Amsterdam; I have a bicycle. I can see it every other day. They're getting rid of cars and actually converting the parking lots on the street into communal gardens, right?

So it's not crazy; it's attainable. But now, doing that for the whole world, what does that look like? That's how things like Uber Pool came in, where in a world where the average car has 1.5 people in it, we can maximize that, and then we can get this connected trip where the car is just moving, and maybe the car is autonomous, so you don't actually have to drive that car. It just doesn't need to stop, right? I guess it needs to charge at some point, but that's it.

I think that's a really good vision. I think one that's lofty—and I dance between whether it's attainable or not—is Elon Musk saying, "We're going to get to Mars." He believes it. He believes it so much that sometimes I'm like, "I guess we're going to Mars."

Then there's the other one of, "We want a car that's electric, and we want that car to be beautiful so that we will get to a car that's accessible to everyone." That's kind of followed through.

The beautiful thing about visions is that it helps you decide, "Is that or work? Do I care about this problem? Is it something I want to do?" Then you can take it or leave it.

I think with the lofty-attainable balance, I think Elon Musk is an interesting example where it may feel impossible, but as an inspirational leader, you almost convince people that it is possible through your confidence and your being in the details, helping people see, "Maybe there's a path." So I think there's an interesting opportunity there to be a leader.

Absolutely. You've mentioned this difference between mission and vision a couple of times. It would be cool if you could summarize that again. What is the difference between vision and mission in your mind?

I'll use an analogy. Let's say we wanted to go hike; we wanted to go up to Mount Everest. The vision would be me describing the picture of what we're going to see once we're up there. We're going to get there, look around, and it'll be the Himalayas, beautiful, above the clouds, probably out of breath. That's the vision. It's like I fast-forward into the future, I hold time, and I'm in that place, describing the picture.

So, a car in a city without parking—you can see that, right? We've all watched sci-fi movies; you can see Mars, the red planet. So that's the vision. The mission is the purpose of why we're doing that. We're going to do this to demonstrate that we're able to do it and make sure that we both get there together.

It's a very simplistic one, but I'm just giving that as the purpose. We're doing it because we want to prove to ourselves that we can summit Mount Everest, which I will not be doing anytime soon. But you know, we're doing it to prove to ourselves something or that we can do it. We'll do that by making sure that we look out for each other because you can get to Mount Everest and not have all the people with you, right? That's actually a team bonding challenge that I've done once upon a time. It's actually very intricate and interesting.

So that's your vision, and then the mission is like the purpose and some set of guiding principles that will allow you to achieve that vision.

That's a really handy, simple way to think about it. I'm just taking notes as you're talking, and I totally agree with this. The mission is essentially the why, the purpose for your team or company, and the vision—like the word vision almost tells you what it is—it's like what it looks like when you get there.

That's awesome. I actually have this post that I'll link to in the show notes that talks through mission and vision strategy. I'll give a bunch more examples real quick. Just pulled it up as you're chatting for folks to have more examples.

So a couple of mission examples real quick: at TED, their mission is to spread ideas. They're around to spread ideas. Stripe's mission is to increase the GDP of the internet. Ikea's mission is to create a better everyday life for many people.

So I think that's exactly what you're talking about. They're like the purpose—why do we exist? And then visions: Microsoft's vision is a computer on every desk and in every home—very much like what does it look like when we achieve it? Tesla's vision is to create the most compelling car company of the 21st century.

It's kind of in between, but I think that's close. Lyft's vision is a world where cities feel small again, where transportation and tech bring people together instead of apart. How sweet!

That's one where it's very warm and fuzzy, and I love it. Maybe this is my Uber ex, but you can see a desk, a computer on every desk. That's what I mean by it has to be realistic.

Yeah, yeah, awesome. So what is a vision like concretely as a document in your experience?

So we've talked about vision so far mostly as this tagline, like a sentence. Is that usually all you need when you're thinking about a vision? In your experience, do you often suggest going further into a doc, deck, storyboard, or something along those lines?

I have a very simplistic framework. I actually don't know who put it together at Uber, but I say as well that one of the most powerful skills of a product manager is storytelling. You look at generation after generation after generation; what people pass on as stories are not numbers, they're not stats, they're stories.

When you blend stories with numbers—so if you do numbers alone or numbers with stories or stories alone, the gap is so wide. It's stories alone. So this doesn't mean don't be analytical.

One of the very simplistic tools that I've used, and I use it as well right now at Google, is when my team ships a product, they'll put the vision in there to remind what the vision was they set out to do.

It's "Once Upon a Time," write the problem, and then write something, and then one day something happened, and as a result, the state of the world where we're trying to be. It's very simplistic, but in its simplicity is the magic because you're like, "You know, I'm a PM; I'm trying to solve problems."

"Once Upon a Time, where were we?" What is the thing that we're trying to solve?

I'll give you a simplistic one. I know the team didn't do this for Shorts, but like the Shorts team at YouTube: "Once Upon a Time, YouTube was fun, and people had cat videos and zoo videos, and then one day it became this really polished thing, and a lot of people were producing really polished, very one-hour content. Because of that, a lot of people felt maybe I couldn't create because I can't tell a one-hour story. And because of that, people decided, 'Okay, I'm just going to watch and consume and not create.' Then one day we launched Shorts—60 seconds—and because of that, anyone can now express themselves again and bring back the joy and magic of YouTube."

So it's like, you know, it's very simplistic. I'm just using that to the teams who built this. I know this is not your vision; I'm just giving it a story.

But I remember when we did it for Uber as well. We were talking about loyalty for drivers, and someone had this framework, and I thought, "Holy cow, this is it."

So that's a very simplistic version. You can go one step up. The one I like to do, and I know that Amazon does this a lot, is I write a news article. I'll write the headline because if the vision has come to pass, right, and it's gone well, someone's going to be writing hopefully some sexy headline about the thing that you've built.

So I go to the future and I write the headline I want to see, and I write the subtitle just that. I'll actually mock it into the page of TechCrunch or Verge or something just so it looks realistic, and I'll put that in the deck just to kind of like, "This is where we want to be."

And then if I really want to go deep, then I'll write the rest of the article.

So that's a very simplistic one. Let’s check another version. One that I use and I show in a lot of my talks is I was trying to tell a story when I was at Uber, and I was like, "You know, okay, words are amazing, but a picture tells a thousand words."

So I wrote out the thing, and I worked with my design partner at the time, and he literally took out a pencil and drew the future. The vision I was trying to show was this world where you could walk into any store, any bodega, mom-and-pop shop, wherever you are in the world, and actually top up your Uber balance.

So even if you don't have a credit card and you have cash, you can also experience this cashless, seamless Uber experience, and that can scale all over the world. He literally drew a bodega; it looked like a kiosk, like the ones in my country, Nigeria. You have like a side booth, and then he drew that, and he had the person with cash and a receipt just showing, "Your top-up was successful."

We built that product. It did not happen exactly in that way, but we built that product. Sorry for another day, but like, or maybe for later, but that's the story. It took four years to build it, but that image got people so excited about, "Oh, it's possible. I can see this."

So essentially, these are three ways to communicate your vision. The first is this kind of mad libs approach, which is really simple.

So the framework is: "Once Upon a Time," blank, and then blank, and because of that, blank, and one day something happened, and that's essentially the vision—like what happened, like the big change that you're going to create.

And then as a result of the thing that happened, how did you leave people feeling? What did you change in the world? What's the dent in the universe that you made?

Can you just share this mad libs real quick again? Just like what are the what's the framework real quick?

"Once Upon a Time," the thing that happened, then one day, and you could actually put the date in, 2026, right? And because of that, and because of that, and I usually like to end it with, "And finally, this was the last thing you left the world with."

Beautiful! It's interesting; it kind of follows the hero's journey a little bit where it's like, "Here's today's world, and then here's a problem that you ran into, and this challenge you had to overcome, and then here's how we've defeated the foe, and then here we are back in our default world again."

Okay, so that's one path. The other path is to write kind of the backwards working approach—write an article. I think the press release is like, to me, it's dumb to write a press release; no one reads press releases anymore. So I like that you think of it as a TechCrunch article.

Yes! Is there something you remember where you did that actually with a product, like you wrote an article of a product you were launching at Uber?

We were talking about cars, and it was like, "Well, push a button, get a ride." It could be "Push a button, go anywhere." One of the things I started talking about—and this is the beauty of Uber—it allowed you to challenge the status quo.

I started pushing this idea of if we need to have this more multimodal trip where I could take a bicycle or scooter, then I get to the train station, buy my ticket, scan in, then from there I go into an Uber, maybe then I come out on the other end and I get a scooter. Whatever that is, it's this connected single trip.

The reason I was doing that was I was a platform PM, and surprise, surprise, I always say platform PMs have to be an order of magnitude even stronger at vision setting because you have to build the foundations of stuff you don't even know is coming.

So I would do these exercises with my partner teams to kind of figure out, even if they don't know it, like force a vision out of them to say, "Is this where we're going?" Because then, as somebody building the commerce infrastructure for Uber, I need to know what I need to build if that is a scenario that's actually going to happen.

We were also thinking about this world where you could tap to pay with your Uber phone. So there are all these crazy ideas, and I wrote a headline of, "Uber really wants to replace your Clipper card in San Francisco," because I wanted my San Francisco buddies to relate to what I was saying.

So, "Uber is now replacing your Clipper card; all you need is your phone and the app." I wrote it out, and you know, we didn't go and build that product, but we built the payments and access infrastructure for the team that did, and we were very involved at the beginning when it was getting kicked off of how does this look in the world where you can use your Uber to pay for transport? You can do that today.

So yeah, that's a real-life example, and that was an article that you ended up writing of what the announcement would look like, or is that using this?

Okay, awesome. It was the article framework, so it was literally the New York Times headline. I even had their logo, and then I had the subtitle. Later on, over time, I wrote the actual article, like the whole thing, but I started first with that just to provoke a response.

What did you see as the impact of having that? What kind of benefits did you see having this article that you could pass around? Do you have any memories of like, "Wow, that was really helpful"?

Here, it's two things. You'll hear me say product management is clarity and conviction. In writing the headline, you have to focus. The headline is not like it's not a PRD, right? It's a headline.

So when I've done this, like, "What is the impact of this going to be? What's the feeling I want to leave people with?" It forces you to get to that clarity of, "Okay, we solve this problem. This is actually going to be the painkiller that we're solving."

Then we translate that painkiller into, "They had a headache; they no longer have a headache." You know what I mean?

So I think it brings clarity. For me, as the PM, I'm like, "This is why I'm saying this is important." Then you have the subtitle. You usually have a headline and then like a sub bit, "They just launched a way to something, something," and you have to write that as well—like, "What is the thing we're launching, and is that realistic?"

Then using that to kind of socialize the idea to say, "This actually could work." I didn't go off and build it; somebody else went and did it, but we had already thought about it, and it got into our platform vision of, "We need to be able to support these different kinds of ways to pay."

There's another interesting one. Now you're going to go to the third one, which is, you know, write the story, write the article that someone else will write or visualize it.

To visualize it, two things have actually happened. One, a year and a half ago, in a strategy session I was running at YouTube, I actually took a screenshot of the Google Play Store. I mean, I use an iPhone, but I work at Google, so I was trying to be, you know, so I took the Google Play Store, and then I created rounded rectangles—just blank rectangles, four panels—and then I printed that out and gave everyone a sheet.

I said, "If we realize these, we solve these problems, right? We solve all these problems that we've identified. What would be the screenshots?" You know when you go on the App Store, it has like the, you know, "Make money" or "Express yourself" or what are we trying to say, and what is like the mock, the hero mock, the marquee mock that we're showing?

Then again, it forces people to, "Oh goodness, we can't show everything, so it's got to be three or four things that land the big rocks that will solve this problem."

Everyone did theirs, and then we talked about it. What was interesting is you'll find two or three that everyone comes up with if you've done a good job of telling a story around the problems, and it's actually quite beautiful to see.

That's a very simplistic visualization; that's not like a beautiful sketch or a video. I really like that as just a reminder that when you're even the article approach of announcing the thing instead of the traditional press release or even like a TechCrunch article, it's where will people find out about the thing you've built?

Then use that as a way to frame what you've done. So in your case, it's like the App Store. They're going to see this update in the App Store. Let's just see what that would look like as we announce it in the App Store.

It could end up being a tweet; it could end up being a podcast. You know, there are all these different channels, so I think that gives people more ways of telling the story if it's not going to be like a press release.

Okay, and then, yeah, so you talked about this third approach of the design, like mocking up essentially the vision. I always feel like if you have a designer helping you craft your vision, it's such an unfair advantage.

So yes, definitely try to get a designer in to help you tell the story because just one design is going to, like you said, be worth a thousand words, as they say.

The thing, though, is it's such a—I feel like it's an easy cop-out to be like, "Oh, but my design team doesn't have resources." So I'm like, "No, that's not an excuse. Start drawing it with your hands in the App Store, right? Like still tell the story."

Because the story—you should be able to tell this. I'm obsessed with Steve Jobs; you should know he told the story without slides, right?

So that mocking it up is just so you can actually bring that narrative and tell that story. So do an App Store or, you know, sketch it out or use little rectangles to show low-fidelity mocks. Do not use, "I don't have a designer" to be the excuse for why you don't bring it to life, right?

Often the designer sees it like, "This sucks; I'm going to make it better."

Exactly! So that's exactly what I did. I sketched this thing once, and I gave it to a designer. It was literally Post-it notes, and they were like, "Okay, I see where you're going," and it's exciting.

"I have some cycles; I'll spin it up." They spun up a low-fidelity one, loved it, and I'm like, "Actually, I'm just going to make it pretty." Then they made it pretty, and we got there.

I mean, now I'm a director, so I have a bit more agency with resources, but I was like an L4 PM, like a, you know, not even a senior PM when I did my first vision exercise.

Okay, this is awesome because I think it's really vague, this idea of "I need to develop a vision." I think you've shared some incredibly tactical, clear steps you can take.

I also want to talk about how to actually develop the vision. I think you have kind of this step-by-step approach, is that right?

Okay, awesome. So before we get to that, just like again reminding people what we just talked about, which is just like here's all these ways of framing your vision, and there's a lot of ways to do it. You know, it's not like you need to make a beautiful deck; you could just write it out. You could write a press release; you could write a tweet, or you could get a designer to help you mock it up or just mock it up yourself.

Awesome. Okay, so let's talk about your suggestions on how to actually go about developing and figuring out the vision for your product.

There are three pieces if you think about it. One is what I call empathize, the second is create, and then do evangelize.

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 in a second the tactical way I have done that across Uber, Netflix, and Google in a way that scales.

Then the create piece is, "Okay, now if we solve this problem, what does the world look like?" That's the vision we've just been talking about.

Finally, evangelize. I find, especially as you get more senior, the life cycle of a product or group of products gets wider and wider.

I set out a vision, for example, at YouTube last year that was called "Vision 2026." Only this year, a year and a half later, are we now in a stage where it's actually going into the planning cycle. We've actually finished all the things; we're 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 this stage because you're going to meet a lot of naysayers. Like, "Oh, but you know that one person's like, 'But you know there's no way the engineering is ever going to solve.'" There's always going to be those people, right?

Which is why I said you need to come up with the 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."

What is understand work? It's crazy to me the number of PMs who never go through their products and go through the onboarding unless, of course, you're the onboarding PM. But actually going through the onboarding flow—what does that look like?

I have multiple variations of accounts on YouTube; I have multiple accounts on Instagram. Where do I just—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 the same with Uber. I had Uber; I had other partner apps. I would look at them in payments. So this is empathize; it comes very easily if you dog food or cat food.

Dog food meaning using your own product—absolutely a must. Cat food means 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.

But your research, if you think about the product life cycle, research is like ahead, and then UX, right? And then you go into building; it's like in that phase.

I find too many people leaning to, "Let's go test it; let's go do some research." It's like, "Dude, you're a human; look at the product. Would you use that?"

You build 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 love opening 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? What is it about this new thing they just know 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/studio problems. They literally put 10 things—like 10 problems you should know. You revise it every quarter; you update it, and they're stagnant.

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 that.

So these are just known problems with the product that everyone is aware of and correct.

Okay, and you keep—you kind of farm for the problems, so you keep that doc going.

When you start getting to the strategic lens, so you have a set of problems, what I sometimes will do is, especially if you're, for example, a platform PM, but PMs generally have lots of stakeholders.

There'll be a marketing team that's asking for something or an operations team that's like, "Our market needs this." I'll sometimes bring them in at the beginning of the strategy session and give them a template: "10 Things You Should Know."

So you use my framework to give me 10 problems. If you say, "Come present," they'll do like 50 slides. I'm like, "No, that's just 10 things you should know," and stack rank them.

So I've put the work on you now to give me some color. I hear from marketing, comms, support, research, content strategy. I actually had that in my last strategy session where it was the most mind-blowing "10 Things You Should Know."

One of them was like, "The average reading age of an American is 11 years old." So you start to think, "Oh my God, all the text we have, maybe we should use images or a video or whatever."

So bringing this sort of multifaceted view of the problems, and then you do the work of like sandpapering down to the core thing.

Then you have the final 10. So that would be the tactical—like you want to take it to a more strategic lens. That's how I'd layer that.

The first day of my strategy session is usually insights. I'll usually do three days: insights, strategy, then big rocks. The insights piece is where we go deep into the problems, and I use this template of "10 Things You Should Know."

Then we come out with a consolidated list of 10 things you should know—like a consolidated list.

I really like this additional tip you just shared of, as you're trying to develop a vision for the team, bring in stakeholders and use this framework to help them crystallize, "Here's the most important things to me from the product and things that I think are big opportunities."

Then essentially now you've got buy-in from stakeholders of, "Hey, at least they've heard me, and they understand, and then here's what they came up with."

And then I could be like, "No, but what about this thing?" But at least it gives you a way to bring everyone together and understand how the process is going.

Okay, so this week of work you just shared—can you just talk a bit more about this? What is this, you leading the team through an exercise to develop a vision and a strategy?

Correct, correct.

Got it. So you said the first three days are aligning and fully understanding and immersing yourself in insights.

I usually have strategy sessions of three days. I try to do it in two days; that is the absolute limit because I think you need to create white space for just the magic to happen.

But I usually use a framework that's literally what I call the narrative structure. So when we get into the conviction part, right, the clarity is the problems to solve. The conviction is the narrative. The framing of that conviction is insights, strategy, big rocks.

So the insights day is just focused on understand work—these five problems, actually using the app, doing tear-downs of other apps. It's just like a day of, you know, understanding.

In the Google design sprint, they'll say, "Ask the experts." In a way, I've given the experts a template; that's what I'm doing, you know, basically.

Then the second day is where we now go into the strategy—like of all the problems we've seen, the 10, which are the on ones we want to focus on in which order, right?

And who's in these meetings? I always have four folks, so it would be, depending on the level of the strategy, it would be product, my engineering partner, my design partner, and research.

Got it.

So it's the leaders of the team—the leaders of the team. Depending on the org, I'll bring in data science if it's because at Google we have a more shared data science resource, so I invite them as one of the partners.

"Come tell the 10 things you should know." So they'll say, "We need to do more instrumentation," or whatever.

But you hit on a fantastic point, which I was going to connect later, which is when you get to the evangelized stage, humans love to know you heard them.

So imagine it's like you did all the work of bringing them together to say, "Hey, tell me 10 things." You've asked the questions; you've come back and said, "Here's the strategy that we're going to focus on, and here's the vision."

That evangelized—that last stage where you evangelize becomes so much easier because it's like, "How did you arrive at this vision?" That goes away, or like, "But you guys didn't soften that."

It's like, "We heard you, and then we parsed them into these 10, and everybody agreed with these 10, and therefore that's why we came up with this vision."

So let's segue to the evangelized step, which I always think about. I always think about the Seinfeld meme of when he's 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."

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 an 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, right? 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 have to be bought in and have conviction, but they want to get there to actually sail on that boat together.

So the team is the biggest part, and it's the whole team. It's not just the PMs that are the vision or just the designers. No, the vision—I will literally first start with, you know, each of the folks that were in the room.

We will basically bring our teams together and present it out. 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 teams—PM, engineering, and design for each of the product teams—and just presented it out.

I had multiple—we had the first one, then I had one in my PM weekly, presented it again, then he asked, "Still any questions?" because people are still—it's like percolating. It's like the teabag; it's like it's oozing out, and they're trying to understand it, and they're trying to stress-test it.

What I also do is I write the output of the workshop. So I'll always write the output, like, "These are the insights we came out with; here's the 'Once Upon a Time' framework; here's the strategy; here are the big rocks, and a vision is coming."

Then we'll do the vision and say, "But this is the vision of where we're going if we do all these things." That will be a living document—comments open for comments, right?

Not 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, you know, if you put rocks in a washing machine, they polish each other.

So I actually 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 rose. So it's okay to have that friction.

So 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 100% certainty; I'm trying to get you just on the ride.

Then, you know, I kind of go to the 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 bought into the vision as well, and they'll also bring perspectives.

You're missing this piece; we have a lot of engineering support tickets that will blow up if you do this thing, right? What does that look like? We have—you guys haven't solved the one 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 is that people are bought into that story, and it's okay to have all there.

Then finally, you know, 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 L5 or L6, 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 for all Uber experiences."

Then we had this vision of a world where, you know, 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. We had mock-ups of what that looked like.

So go as big as possible—like go big! Let people tell you to pull back; let your manager use a lasso and pull you back. Like, go as much as possible so that I go to leadership, and then I have leadership amplifying that story as much as possible.

So those are the three concentric circles: core team, the people that 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 then adjacent teams because as we're building this thing, it might mean that we tell, you know, for one of your requests or something, right?

And then finally, leadership. That's how I would do it.

Sounds like a lot of work and a lot of time. Do you do this for yearly planning? Do you do this for future, you know, 2026 vision? Do you do this for quarterly plans? What's kind of like the scale of vision that you invest this time into?

We go back to the four parts of the vision we said: lofty. If a vision is something that's coming next year, write a newsletter. Write the newsletter, the headline article version, or do the mock.

When you're really getting into a vision, you're talking about something that almost feels attainable but realistic. So you do the work, and you take that time because you know that the rewards when you get everyone rowing in the same direction will mean a lot more velocity.

The ripple—I talked about evangelizing within the company—it's everything. When I start talking to a candidate, I say, "Hey, my team's mission is expression meets connection; our vision is this."

Then they already—their eyes, like you can see the twinkle, right? So the ripple effect of this thing is just broad and big.

My engineering partner was just hiring for a role, and in the job description, she opened it first with our team mission, and it was like we have these short links—Google, it's like Google SL, you know, Studio vision.

People just get excited just seeing it. So it's really this evergreen thing that we're talking four and five years; it's not the next six months.

Next month, do the tweet.

Okay, awesome. I think this is very clarifying. So is this something you encourage your PMs to do? Is it just like always be working on this vision for the next, say, five years? Invest this time kind of in the background as you're shipping things every day, every quarter to make sure people understand where it's going long term, and then it's like this one-off exercise that maybe you repeat every year or two?

I think if you have to repeat the vision every year, you have not created a good vision.

I haven't done the work. So I'll give you an example of the one at Uber. What we kept doing was we would bring more fidelity to actually parts of the vision, right?

So we had a little draft; we had high fidelity. Then at one point, we did a sizzle reel and actually had like, "If this thing is live," but we're not creating multiple visions.

Remember all the things you read—the desk on every table—it's not like every year it's changing or going to Mars. It's not every year; it's something that it's more—you literally rinse and repeat.

So the vision means something that is evergreen and lasts, in my mind, at least three years. However, at the sort of, you know, and I'm talking about PMs from L4 all the way to L7 in my team, which is kind of like from a junior PM, senior PM, all the way to GPMs in my org, all have a variation of a vision that's a three-year thing.

Now, when they're going into like a sort of micro vision, that's kind of a macro vision where maybe they're solving a small problem, right? Then they'll just do a mock of what that thing looks like next year.

In that mock, they'll present like, "This is the mock of what we think it should look like." That is a vision; it's a micro vision.

But it is a vision, so they'll do that, and that's the thing they use to say, "Hey, leadership, this is the problem statement; here's what we think; how might we solve this big problem, and here's what we think it looks like when we ship it?"

That's a mini vision. So that's the—you know, what I'm talking about is this macro vision, but you absolutely can have the micro ones along the way.

Awesome! That is really helpful. By the way, I really like that phrase, "How might we?" I find that extremely useful in communicating, like almost a vision, basically, just like, "How might we solve this problem?" Just that phrase alone is a really—there's this concept one of the PMs I worked with used called fertile questions.

When you ask someone a fertile question, it leads to discussion, and a really good way to create a fertile question is, "How might we get more people to engage with YouTube analytics?" It leads to a lot of good brainstorm ideas.

So good—good micro tip right there that we can include.

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So I want to move on to craft, but before we do that, is there anything else that you think would be helpful for folks to leave with in terms of getting better at vision?

Say someone's got a development opportunity of getting better at vision. Which of these things you've shared do you think would be maybe something they could start working on? Is it crafting this five-year vision? Is it picking one of these three ways to communicate it? Is it changing the way that empathizing to inform the vision?

I'll give a 1.5. I think it's number one. It baffles me, and it begs, you know, I'm somebody who came into product. I didn't have a sort of product management career; I came into product, and I've done that now at Uber, Netflix, and Google, and it still baffles me the number of people where when I say, "Tell me the top problems that keep you up at night," and then I ramble, I'm like, "What are we talking about? Why are we rambling?"

This is literally the thing that you come to work; this is the thing that should excite you. So I cannot overemphasize this importance of, like, you know, top 10 things you know, but you don't have to start with 10. I start with 10, and I actually always end up with top three.

So in every deck, I'll have three things—like three numbers or four numbers. We just got a new Chief Product Officer at YouTube, right? Because Neil Mohan is now the CEO. When I did my presentation to her, the opening sign is four things you should know with these four numbers and four insights.

So it's like she walks away with that information now. So it's like that is probably the most vital—it needs to be visceral and crisp and clear.

Then from that, just for yourself, have fun with it. Take out a Post-it note and sketch if you were to solve this problem what it looks like. Just start there, right? Just start there.

And then if you can at least convince yourself—I don't so much care about the deck; the deck helps, absolutely, or the pictures and the mocks. If you can tell the story of like, "This is a problem, and this is the world I see," imagine a world—that in itself is already you evangelizing the vision.

Amazing! That is so helpful. So essentially, make this list of the most significant problems that your users have with your product.

I think you also include infrastructure, tech debt issues, maybe internal problems too.

Awesome! I just want to know this list for every company now—just what are their biggest problems? I wonder what they're struggling with, right?

Okay, and by the way, that infrastructure piece is—I know it's a nugget on the side, but infrastructure is the product, period.

Like, people are like, "Oh, tech debt." I'm like, "Yeah, it's a product debt." You cannot build a skyscraper on a shaky foundation, so it is your problem too.

It's not for the engineer to be barging on the door about, "Oh, this is a problem."

So that's the other one I'll just call out. That in itself is a problem as well.

You're speaking to the heart of every engineer listening, I know.

Okay, and then the other tip was sketch the solution. Just like do a Post-it, draw it out, see how it feels. I think just like people don't realize just the power of, "Oh, I have to actually think about what this will look like," and I just kind of paint this very fuzzy picture of what it might be.

Amazing! I feel like this is the most tactical and practical piece of a segment of advice on how to get better vision. I'm so excited to get this out and for folks to have things that they actually do to get better at vision.

I wish—I feel like this could be the whole podcast, but you have more awesome stuff to share, so I want to keep going.

We're going to keep you here and extract as much content as we can out of your brain.

So you touched on this phrase that you like to use for describing what is the craft of product management. Kind of like toly describing the craft of product management, and I know there's many layers deep in this concept, but just to start, what is this kind of phrase and framework you think of to describe what is product management craft? What is the job of a PM, basically?

So I sort of say clarity and conviction, and that's what product management is. It's like you bring clarity, and you have conviction, right?

So you find a lot of time—we've just talked about a number of things—all of those things, what they're doing is bringing clarity.

That clarity, especially, is to the problem. So, you know, even when I'll just give you a little tactical thing, I noticed there are some PMs who will send an email, and I read the email, and I'm like, "What do you want me to do? Is this an FYI? Are you saying there's a problem? Do you want me to help?"

So just even there, something as simple as that—I'm just giving, right? As PMs, it's like we're constantly influencing, right, by bringing clarity.

So the clarity—all the stuff we just talked about—coming up with a list of problems, you know, really trying to understand what customers care about, all you're doing is bringing clarity.

So that when you're in a room and someone is going off and doing, "Actually, we don't need that research. I feel like we all know that that's a problem. We don't need that research. Let's instead of doing foundational research or doing, you know, let's do UX validation when the time comes."

That's the kind of clarity you can break that saves cycles.

So that's the clarity piece. If you think about what clarity is, you define clarity; it's this transparency; it's the simplicity of understanding. That's what the word is, right?

It's removing all—it's sifting out all the stuff that's polluting the core thing. That's how I think of clarity.

The sort of tactical thing that I use to bring that clarity is the framework I talked about, which is the narrative: insights, strategy, big rocks. It brings clarity to why we're doing what we're doing, how we're going to do it, and what we're going to do.

I spend time talking—I can spend time talking about all those, but we talked about the workshop to do that.

I actually have one of my old EMs, who you've actually had on the podcast, talks about this a lot. I made every PM—like people have fancy decks; that's great. Clarity comes when you write.

So I made them write two-page documents. I will let you go up to four, maybe, but like two-page documents with insights, your strategy, or I use the word approach sometimes, and then the big rocks.

The big rocks are not like a laundry list of 20 things because if I asked you to make me a cocktail, you would put ice in first, then you would pour the drink. You would not put the drink and then put the ice; it'll splash, and it's messy, and that's how an endless roadmap looks to me.

So it's like three, four, five things that anyone can remember that are the biggest things that if we land this, it gets us closer to solving the problems that every other little thing is around.

You can kind of fill that around; that's the sand around the big rocks.

So let's just actually double-click on this little framework that you're sharing of insight, strategy, big rocks. This essentially what you ask your teams to share as their strategy, as their plan, essentially.

Like the high-level plan, it's not yet a roadmap strategy, I guess. Do you think of this just like as vision and strategy as this document?

This is not vision because this is not telling us what the solution is, what the world will look like if we solve the problem. That's the vision, right?

This is actually bringing clarity to the narrative of why we exist. So if you were a company, and I always use these—I feel like we can solve a lot of problems in life if we found a parallel in the world.

The parallel I just look for is like if this was a startup, right, and you wanted to tell people why you exist and why they should invest in you, which is kind of what you're doing as a PM, what is a big problem you solve as a company?

What's the strategy? What are the things you're going to deliver that would end up in your—the headlines that are coming in the future that you need money for, right?

You're telling investors, "I'm going to build these things; I need money, right, to do these things." That's what this is.

It's just a narrative, and I think one of the simplest things a PM can have is this narrative that when people come to you and be like, "Hey, you see all these emails? Introduction, meet this person and the PM of this."

Like, "Oh, I want to send them a time to understand what you do." I'm like, "Nope, go to go/slash narrative, read it. Then when we set up the time, let me—you have questions."

Guess what? A lot of calls will fall off just from that. Or when, you know, someone comes into the team and they're like, "What are we about onboarding?"

"Here's the narrative, right?"

So that's the narrative, and that's the one that you refresh periodically so that you can refresh every quarter. You can refresh every six months because you're kind of adjusting to what's happening in the world, what the problems are.

So that's a narrative.

One last question there, just so folks get a sense of where this fits into all their work. Does this come before defining the vision? Vision and then the roadmap—where does this fit in terms of vision and roadmap in terms of the process?

So again, this document is evergreen and updated. I'm a big fan of evergreen documents because you create this mental thing where everybody just knows, "Go, you know, link whatever the short link is, bit 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 like it's lived through the test of time.

So I believe in evergreen documents. Update the existing document or do like 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, which has gone through a planning cycle now, I already had a vision for the team, but basically for each team, you know, 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 had the big rocks.

Everyone wrote the two-pager, right? So we were this two-page document, and then they circulated around their partners, the engineering teams, and got feedback.

That's what they then used to 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."

Usually, what the rule we gave was like if you have more than three engineers on it, less than three engineers on a problem, consolidate. More than three, it needs a line, right?

So then you have the roadmap; it's just a Google sheet with a list of things and the resources assigned to it.

That's when we start to see, "Okay, where are you blocked? You have enough U; you have enough this." It's a bit more tactical, and then you have your roadmap.

But then, you know, after you've done the insights, strategy, big rocks, or the roadmap, you can in parallel or after say, "Okay, let's take a week off, right? Spend time in a room and shape the vision."

Right? Let's take a day off like I did. I've once done one in a day. The sketches I talked about—we literally locked ourselves in a room.

We had at Uber, we had no meeting Wednesday; at Google, we have no—youTube, we have no meeting Friday. 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 had posted notes, and the designer, of course, was like, "This thing is ugly," and then made it pretty.

That was the vision. The vision—I remember seeing so many docs at Uber with literally slides from my doc, right, saying, "We agree with this vision, and so therefore we're going to build this thing for our team to support it."

That's great! You're influencing, right? 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, you know, Studio vision, and 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 are 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 already spoke about conviction, so conviction is the vision where you basically very succinctly tell, "Here's where we're going, and here's why we're doing this."

So the definition of conviction is a feeling of what you think the way the world should be. It's a feeling; it is not certainty; it is not absolute; it is not perfect, but it's a feeling of, "You know, I feel like this is the right thing to do."

That's what we're seeing, right? We talk about product sense; it's your building this feeling of what you think is right, and so you bring that to life.

Everything we just talked about is literally you converting the conviction from your head into something that people can consume, and that's the conviction.

Clarity, narrative, vision, conviction.

So this is specifically the craft of product management. If you want to get better at the craft of building great products, these are the two areas I imagine you point your PMs to get more clear on things and then have clearer conviction.

How do you think of the skill of getting better at conviction?

If you have conviction and it's all clear, then you don't have conviction. It's quite flimsy, right? If you're like, "I kind of think, you know, maybe we should, you know, the five things we should solve," I'm like, "Then you don't have conviction."

So I'll sometimes stress-test, and I'm like, "What if I took away all your resources, and you only have five? Which is the one you're going to build?"

I do all these kind of draconian things that just force clarity, right?

And so then the conviction will come out, and it's like, "Yeah, but I'm uncomfortable." Like, "Okay, so the thing that's making you uncomfortable, go spend time, go spend your research, go spend your cycles on getting higher certainty on that conviction rather than chasing for things."

Because I don't want to use the word lazy, but like too scared to pick a lane, right?

So don't peanut butter—like nobody does anything well by peanut buttering resources, spreading them thin.

So that's the conviction. It's also things like people—you know, I'll sometimes have someone come to me and say, "We have these two scenarios," and it'll be a document, and there will usually be, you know, the typical person, CS, of the options.

I'm like, "So let's say we weren't in the room; that's the leadership team. Which is the one the team wants to get behind?"

And then you sometimes see the team hasn't even done the work between themselves talking. I'm like, "No, no, no, no. You need to go do the work."

And if you have gotten to a point where you have conviction but there is some risk, then let's talk about the risk that you need help mitigating or help solving.

Because it's too easy to come to me and be like, "Oh, here's the two options, and you do the work and tell me which one to pick."

No way! No, that's not going to make you a better PM. Go figure out why you can't stand by a right.

So the core to conviction is like pick your battle. Here's where we think we need to invest, right?

Let me use—I like the word battle. Clarity is saying that you are committed to actually fighting this war in the first place, right?

Like there are lots of other things you can fight; this is the fight you're fighting in and why.

The conviction is like how and the way you see the world. If you win that battle, great!

Okay, so you gave a talk on product culture and how the company culture informs and changes the way the product is built.

So you worked at three very different cultures that I'm aware of: Uber, Netflix, and Google—all very different companies.

I guess maybe just as a broad question, what did you see about the culture of the company do to change the way product is built?

You think about what Uber has done in the world, and you think about where we are now, where it's almost people—it's almost so natural to bring out your phone and a car turns up with someone you do not know that you get into and trust them to take you where you're going.

If you fast-forwarded to when my grandmother was alive, she would have thought you were crazy.

So just think of all the pieces that had to come together for that to work. It was a super, like a super hands-on zoom out, zoom in.

We used to say boardroom to streets, right? You could roll up your sleeves and go in the streets and then go to the boardroom.

The operations team really went into the fabric of a and tried to convert that mission into what the manifestation is in the city.

I started at Uber as a GM before I became a PM, so I firsthand experienced that. I got my job; there were like seven cars on the road, and I had to figure it out in a country where there's no reliable running water.

We want to do reliable transport, so what does that look like when drivers don't have a mobile phone, don't have a car—all that?

So there's this big piece of the operations, and what Uber basically did was, "We're going to work very hard to get the right people in seats; we're going to give them complete autonomy."

The magic that just came out of that, you know, is the reason that Uber exists.

That infrastructure is very much what has allowed a lot of the gig economy to thrive—like setting up these playbooks, trying things, learning, sharing with each other was a very big part of the culture.

Now, over time, I call this kind of like the monolithic culture. There was a culture, and the culture never went back and said, "Hold on, let's revisit this. Does it still serve us? Has the context changed? What are the parts that we need to improve, evolve?"

Because here's the thing: if you don't intentionally evolve the culture, it will evolve without you.

Culture is always going to evolve; that's just the way humans are. Culture are the norms and beliefs, right? And beliefs and norms change; that's how humans are.

So I would say, what are the good behaviors that you reward and the bad behaviors that you condone? If you're not going back to revisit that, then the culture just kind of moves on, and then the company's now playing catch-up, or it moves on in the way you don't want it to.

Then the world is kind of like, "Oh my God, Uber! Delete Uber!" which actually happened. I lived it. It's very sad to wake up and know that you're doing the right thing for the world and see that 400,000 people have deleted your app just because of a miscommunication, really.

So this is a really big piece of Uber. The spin there on the autonomy was one of the cultural values was principal confrontation and toe-stepping, right?

This is codified in the Valley system. It's like forget about levels; step on toes if you believe it's the right thing for the business.

I talk all the time about the story of cash, where Travis Kalanick was against cash. By the way, I think up until he left Uber, he was against cash, but he believed in data, and he believed in principal confrontation.

He was like, "Go test it out," and we tested it out, and it did well, and that's why cash exists on Uber, right?

So I've talked about how it evolves and also, you know, the benefits of Netflix. Where it started as a monolithic culture, it was like it came out of, "Oh, we went through this experience where we had to lay off, you know, lay off a lot of people."

So it was like, "How do we create a culture of freedom and responsibility?"