Ebi Atawodi
Director of Product Management for the Creator Experience at YouTube, formerly Head of Product at Uber and Director of Product at Netflix
Where to hear and read about Ebi Atawodi1 episode or test
Ebi Atawodi is Director of Product Management for the Creator Experience at YouTube, after leading product at Uber and Netflix. The thing most worth learning from her is a repeatable way to turn a short list of shared problems into a vision a team can see, then bring everyone along.
Do not use, I don't have a designer, to be the excuse for why you don't bring it to life.
Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)
Ebi Atawodi: the story and the lessons
1Ebi Atawodi's path from Uber to YouTube
Atawodi's career runs through payments, streaming and creator tools. She was Head of Product at Uber for Wallet, checkout, pay and financial products, then a Director of Product Management at Netflix. She now leads the Creator Experience at YouTube.
At Uber she started as a GM with seven cars on the road, in a country without reliable running water. She later joined the company as employee number 1024.
She started setting product visions early, as a junior PM. Her first vision exercise came as an L4 PM. Her Uber wallet vision, one wallet for all Uber experiences, was presented on stage at an all hands when she was an L5 or L6.
She cites this to show that no level is too junior to hold a vision.
A fading Uber culture sent her toward Netflix. She saw Uber's culture lose conviction and become a catchall. A product marketing partner whose wife worked at Netflix sent her the Netflix culture memo, and she recreated its values inside her Uber team.
That experience made her obsessed with Netflix, and she later joined it. The values she uses today trace back to that memo.
She aims to be loved by her team, not liked. She defines love as the choice to extend yourself for the growth of another person or yourself. That sometimes means hard conversations.
Her engineering partners know she cares about the person behind the role, so raw feedback is heard as being in their interest. She says vulnerability is her strength.
2How Atawodi builds a product vision
Every PM at every level needs a vision, even a small one. She compares it to a pilot who names Miami and describes the beaches and 24 degrees on arrival, instead of announcing a quota of 400 flights. A team without a described destination cannot trust its leader.
The mission is different: it is the purpose and principles that carry the team there. The vision is the summit, the mission is why and how you climb.
She tests a vision against four criteria before sharing it. It must be lofty, realistic, free of today's technical limits and grounded in a potent user problem. Uber's was a continuous trip with no need for parking, in cities where about 25% of the space is parking.
She imagines time traveling five years out and coming back to report what must be put in place. Lofty should scare you in an exciting way while still feeling within reach.
She writes the vision as a once upon a time story. The order is once upon a time (the problem), one day, because of that, because of that, and finally (what you leave the world with). Her Shorts retelling: polished one-hour content made people stop creating, then 60-second videos let anyone express themselves again.
She says generations pass on stories, not stats, and puts the story in the launch deck to remind the team what they set out to do.
She writes the future headline to force a clear pain and a realistic launch. At Uber her headline said Uber was replacing your Clipper card in San Francisco, on a real masthead and logo. The multimodal trip it described was never built as written, but it shaped the payments and commerce infrastructure for the team that built it.
The subtitle forces you to say what launches and whether it is realistic. She wrote the full article only after the headline sparked reactions.
She uses blank app store panels to make teams pick the big rocks. At a YouTube strategy session each person got a printed sheet of four blank panels and chose three or four hero screenshots for the solved problems. If the problems were told well, two or three of the same answers appear for everyone.
She sketches the vision herself instead of waiting for a designer. Her first sketch was post-it notes, and a designer then built a lo-fi version and made it pretty. A pencil drawing of topping up your Uber balance with cash at a corner shop became a product that took four years to build.
She calls a designer an unfair advantage, but says having no resources is no excuse.
She wants a vision to last about three years, with micro visions inside. If you must repeat the vision every year, it was not a good one. At Uber the vision stayed fixed while fidelity rose, from low-fi mocks to a sizzle reel.
PMs from L4 to L7 each hold a micro vision: a problem statement, a how might we question and a mock of it shipped. For a six month horizon, a tweet is enough.
She says platform PMs must force a vision out of partner teams. Platform PMs build foundations for needs that do not exist yet, so she says they must be an order of magnitude stronger at vision. She asks partner teams whether this is where they are going to learn which scenarios are coming.
3How Atawodi creates clarity and brings a team along
Atawodi has every PM keep a living list of 10 problems. Each PM maintains a doc of the 10 known problems in their area, qualitative, quantitative and tech debt, revised every quarter. At Uber it began as the 'more money, more problems' doc, built with data scientists and product analysts.
As a test, ask the PM, engineering and design leads for their top five problems separately. All three should give the same answer.
She makes stakeholders bring their own stack-ranked ten. Marketing, comms, support, research and content strategy each fill in the same template instead of presenting 50 slides. She then sands the lists down to one consolidated ten.
Stakeholders feel heard, so later evangelizing is easier. One surprise entry was that the average American reading age is 11, which pushed the team toward images and video.
She runs strategy as three days: insights, strategy, big rocks. Day one is using the app and tearing down other apps, day two picks and orders the problems, day three sets the big rocks. Product, engineering, design and research attend, with data science where it is shared.
Two days is the absolute limit, because the session needs white space for the magic.
She makes each team write a two-page narrative with three to five big rocks. The doc covers insights, strategy and big rocks, four pages at most. Everything else is the sand around the rocks, not an endless roadmap.
Her image is that big rocks go in first, like ice before the drink. "Clarity comes when you write."
She keeps the narrative evergreen and sends newcomers to it first. It has a short link and is refreshed every quarter or six months. She sends people asking for intro calls to read it, and new teammates get it as onboarding.
"A lot of calls will fall off just from that." The roadmap is built from it afterward.
She evangelizes in three circles: the team, stakeholders, then leadership. She presented first to the studio leads and the PM, engineering and design triads, then again in the PM weekly, before widening out. She shares the write-up as a comment-only doc.
She says friction polishes the idea, like rocks in a washing machine. At Uber she presented to leadership as high as possible: "Go big. Let people tell you to pull back."
She builds product sense by dogfooding her product and catfooding rivals. She goes through her own onboarding and flows, and keeps several accounts on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok to see how each manifests.
She says research updates your mental model of the customer, but product sense is the PM's edge. If an AI could turn the research into a PRD, the PM has not done the job.
4Atawodi on conviction and decisions
Atawodi says a PM's job is clarity and conviction. Conviction is a felt belief about how the world should be, not certainty. She says the vision and narrative turn it from your head into something others can consume.
"Clarity is the fight you choose. Conviction is how you see the world if you win it."
She expects a recommendation, not a pros and cons list. Handing leaders options A and B leaves the hard work undone. If risk remains, she wants it named, with a request for help mitigating it.
She stress tests PM conviction by cutting their resources. She asks which one of five items a PM would build if resources were taken away, or why they cannot stand behind option A. Where something makes them uncomfortable, she sends them to spend research cycles to raise certainty.
"Nobody does anything well by peanut buttering resources, spreading them thin."
She treats tech debt as a product problem the PM owns. Infrastructure goes on the PM's problem list, so engineers should not have to barge in to flag it.
"I cannot build a skyscraper on a shaky foundation." She also says tech debt is really product debt.
She names one informed captain for every decision. She keeps asking who is on the hook, because a decision should not be six people reaching consensus. That person gathers all context and input, like the decider in the RAPID model.
Freedom comes with responsibility: the buck stops with the owner. Uber had a similar value, owner, not a renter.
She consolidates any problem area with fewer than three engineers. When building the roadmap from the big rocks, her teams used this rule of thumb. More than three engineers on a problem gets a closer look.
The roadmap is a simple Google Sheet of work items and assigned resources, which shows where teams are blocked on UX or engineering.
5How Atawodi shapes team culture
She says culture drifts unless a leader steers it. Culture is norms and beliefs, so she asks which behaviors you reward and which you condone. Uber's culture drifted into the #DeleteUber wave, when 400,000 people deleted the app over a miscommunication.
"If you don't intentionally evolve the culture, it will evolve without you."
Netflix's written debates with one decider showed her a better way. Netflix debated its subscription-only stance in writing with a single final decider, which led it to also offer advertising. With one decider, people were more methodical, asking whether they could go from 95% to 99% sure.
Uber's strong core culture let one product flex to every city. A shared core with celebrate cities and customer obsession localized the product, so Uber ice cream got a different spin in Nigeria than in San Francisco. Travis Kalanick opposed cash but said to test it, it worked, and so cash exists.
She notes aggressive Uber beat nicer Lyft, yet warm Airbnb beat aggressive Wimdu, so the market decides which culture wins.
She writes her team's culture down with her partner leaders. She built it with her VP and her engineering and design partners, copying the Netflix model. The trio is nicknamed BEM, for Brian, Ebi and Matilde.
She has PMs share PRD drafts with peers before going outside. The team has an email alias using Gmail plus addressing (plus PRD), where anyone can send a PRD even in draft. Teammates help shape it before it reaches outside partners.
She says this improves the PRD and builds a team where people care about each other's work.
Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)
Teaches a concrete process for building a product vision: empathize with the problem, create the vision, then evangelize it in widening circles. Ebi shows how a living list of top problems, a story template, a future headline and a rough mock took her visions from an L4 PM at Uber to Vision 2026 at YouTube.
Atawodi's career runs through payments, streaming and creator tools. She was Head of Product at Uber for Wallet, checkout, pay and financial products, then a Director of Product Management at Netflix. She now leads the Creator Experience at YouTube.
At Uber she started as a GM with seven cars on the road, in a country without reliable running water. She later joined the company as employee number 1024.
She started setting product visions early, as a junior PM. Her first vision exercise came as an L4 PM. Her Uber wallet vision, one wallet for all Uber experiences, was presented on stage at an all hands when she was an L5 or L6.
She cites this to show that no level is too junior to hold a vision.
A fading Uber culture sent her toward Netflix. She saw Uber's culture lose conviction and become a catchall. A product marketing partner whose wife worked at Netflix sent her the Netflix culture memo, and she recreated its values inside her Uber team.
That experience made her obsessed with Netflix, and she later joined it. The values she uses today trace back to that memo.
She aims to be loved by her team, not liked. She defines love as the choice to extend yourself for the growth of another person or yourself. That sometimes means hard conversations.
Her engineering partners know she cares about the person behind the role, so raw feedback is heard as being in their interest. She says vulnerability is her strength.
Every PM at every level needs a vision, even a small one. She compares it to a pilot who names Miami and describes the beaches and 24 degrees on arrival, instead of announcing a quota of 400 flights. A team without a described destination cannot trust its leader.
The mission is different: it is the purpose and principles that carry the team there. The vision is the summit, the mission is why and how you climb.
She tests a vision against four criteria before sharing it. It must be lofty, realistic, free of today's technical limits and grounded in a potent user problem. Uber's was a continuous trip with no need for parking, in cities where about 25% of the space is parking.
She imagines time traveling five years out and coming back to report what must be put in place. Lofty should scare you in an exciting way while still feeling within reach.
She writes the vision as a once upon a time story. The order is once upon a time (the problem), one day, because of that, because of that, and finally (what you leave the world with). Her Shorts retelling: polished one-hour content made people stop creating, then 60-second videos let anyone express themselves again.
She says generations pass on stories, not stats, and puts the story in the launch deck to remind the team what they set out to do.
She writes the future headline to force a clear pain and a realistic launch. At Uber her headline said Uber was replacing your Clipper card in San Francisco, on a real masthead and logo. The multimodal trip it described was never built as written, but it shaped the payments and commerce infrastructure for the team that built it.
The subtitle forces you to say what launches and whether it is realistic. She wrote the full article only after the headline sparked reactions.
She uses blank app store panels to make teams pick the big rocks. At a YouTube strategy session each person got a printed sheet of four blank panels and chose three or four hero screenshots for the solved problems. If the problems were told well, two or three of the same answers appear for everyone.
She sketches the vision herself instead of waiting for a designer. Her first sketch was post-it notes, and a designer then built a lo-fi version and made it pretty. A pencil drawing of topping up your Uber balance with cash at a corner shop became a product that took four years to build.
She calls a designer an unfair advantage, but says having no resources is no excuse.
She wants a vision to last about three years, with micro visions inside. If you must repeat the vision every year, it was not a good one. At Uber the vision stayed fixed while fidelity rose, from low-fi mocks to a sizzle reel.
PMs from L4 to L7 each hold a micro vision: a problem statement, a how might we question and a mock of it shipped. For a six month horizon, a tweet is enough.
She says platform PMs must force a vision out of partner teams. Platform PMs build foundations for needs that do not exist yet, so she says they must be an order of magnitude stronger at vision. She asks partner teams whether this is where they are going to learn which scenarios are coming.
Atawodi has every PM keep a living list of 10 problems. Each PM maintains a doc of the 10 known problems in their area, qualitative, quantitative and tech debt, revised every quarter. At Uber it began as the 'more money, more problems' doc, built with data scientists and product analysts.
As a test, ask the PM, engineering and design leads for their top five problems separately. All three should give the same answer.
She makes stakeholders bring their own stack-ranked ten. Marketing, comms, support, research and content strategy each fill in the same template instead of presenting 50 slides. She then sands the lists down to one consolidated ten.
Stakeholders feel heard, so later evangelizing is easier. One surprise entry was that the average American reading age is 11, which pushed the team toward images and video.
She runs strategy as three days: insights, strategy, big rocks. Day one is using the app and tearing down other apps, day two picks and orders the problems, day three sets the big rocks. Product, engineering, design and research attend, with data science where it is shared.
Two days is the absolute limit, because the session needs white space for the magic.
She makes each team write a two-page narrative with three to five big rocks. The doc covers insights, strategy and big rocks, four pages at most. Everything else is the sand around the rocks, not an endless roadmap.
Her image is that big rocks go in first, like ice before the drink. "Clarity comes when you write."
She keeps the narrative evergreen and sends newcomers to it first. It has a short link and is refreshed every quarter or six months. She sends people asking for intro calls to read it, and new teammates get it as onboarding.
"A lot of calls will fall off just from that." The roadmap is built from it afterward.
She evangelizes in three circles: the team, stakeholders, then leadership. She presented first to the studio leads and the PM, engineering and design triads, then again in the PM weekly, before widening out. She shares the write-up as a comment-only doc.
She says friction polishes the idea, like rocks in a washing machine. At Uber she presented to leadership as high as possible: "Go big. Let people tell you to pull back."
She builds product sense by dogfooding her product and catfooding rivals. She goes through her own onboarding and flows, and keeps several accounts on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok to see how each manifests.
She says research updates your mental model of the customer, but product sense is the PM's edge. If an AI could turn the research into a PRD, the PM has not done the job.
Atawodi says a PM's job is clarity and conviction. Conviction is a felt belief about how the world should be, not certainty. She says the vision and narrative turn it from your head into something others can consume.
"Clarity is the fight you choose. Conviction is how you see the world if you win it."
She expects a recommendation, not a pros and cons list. Handing leaders options A and B leaves the hard work undone. If risk remains, she wants it named, with a request for help mitigating it.
She stress tests PM conviction by cutting their resources. She asks which one of five items a PM would build if resources were taken away, or why they cannot stand behind option A. Where something makes them uncomfortable, she sends them to spend research cycles to raise certainty.
"Nobody does anything well by peanut buttering resources, spreading them thin."
She treats tech debt as a product problem the PM owns. Infrastructure goes on the PM's problem list, so engineers should not have to barge in to flag it.
"I cannot build a skyscraper on a shaky foundation." She also says tech debt is really product debt.
She names one informed captain for every decision. She keeps asking who is on the hook, because a decision should not be six people reaching consensus. That person gathers all context and input, like the decider in the RAPID model.
Freedom comes with responsibility: the buck stops with the owner. Uber had a similar value, owner, not a renter.
She consolidates any problem area with fewer than three engineers. When building the roadmap from the big rocks, her teams used this rule of thumb. More than three engineers on a problem gets a closer look.
The roadmap is a simple Google Sheet of work items and assigned resources, which shows where teams are blocked on UX or engineering.
She says culture drifts unless a leader steers it. Culture is norms and beliefs, so she asks which behaviors you reward and which you condone. Uber's culture drifted into the #DeleteUber wave, when 400,000 people deleted the app over a miscommunication.
"If you don't intentionally evolve the culture, it will evolve without you."
Netflix's written debates with one decider showed her a better way. Netflix debated its subscription-only stance in writing with a single final decider, which led it to also offer advertising. With one decider, people were more methodical, asking whether they could go from 95% to 99% sure.
Uber's strong core culture let one product flex to every city. A shared core with celebrate cities and customer obsession localized the product, so Uber ice cream got a different spin in Nigeria than in San Francisco. Travis Kalanick opposed cash but said to test it, it worked, and so cash exists.
She notes aggressive Uber beat nicer Lyft, yet warm Airbnb beat aggressive Wimdu, so the market decides which culture wins.
She writes her team's culture down with her partner leaders. She built it with her VP and her engineering and design partners, copying the Netflix model. The trio is nicknamed BEM, for Brian, Ebi and Matilde.
She has PMs share PRD drafts with peers before going outside. The team has an email alias using Gmail plus addressing (plus PRD), where anyone can send a PRD even in draft. Teammates help shape it before it reaches outside partners.
She says this improves the PRD and builds a team where people care about each other's work.