Ebi Atawodi, Director of Product Management at YouTube and former Uber PM lead, discusses how product managers can foster close relationships with engineering managers.
“Do you know your engineering manager's birthday? It's the day they showed up in the world. It's the most important day for them. It's the day they showed up in the world in the world. Do you know their birthday? Do you know their work anniversary? Do you know why they're doing the job they're doing or what they want to be? Are they trying to be a VP? Are they trying to go to a startup? What is it? And so if you go to this sort of human element of like, Trying to actually bond with the person, like we'll do fun things where we'll just go to a show together or something, or have lunch or dinner.”
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More from Ebi Atawodi
Insight
Atawodi: PMs fail if AI can write their PRDs from research alone
“If I could put all the research into BARD or ChatGPT, and it could spit out a PRD, Then you haven't done your job.”
Atawodi: Leaders should optimize for being loved rather than liked
“I don't optimize for being liked to be very, and it sounds very harsh. I do not believe in being liked. That's AB. I believe in being loved. Right. And that's a very, very different thing.”
Atawodi: Standard user stories are terrible; jobs-to-be-done is vastly superior
“I really hate user stories. Like, as a user tells me nothing about the context, the emotions, the feeling, the goals of the user. I love jobs to be done, because it tells me exactly what they're trying to do, where they are, what the goal is, and you understan…”
Atawodi: Pure storytelling resonates far more than blending metrics with stories
“One of the most powerful skills Of a product manager storytelling, right? Because you look at generation after generation after generation, what people pass on is stories. They're not numbers. They're not stats. It's stories. And actually when you blend storie…”
Atawodi: Travis Kalanick opposed cash on Uber but allowed it after testing
“And I talk all the time about the story of cash, where Travis Kalanick was like, against cash. By the way, I think up until he left Uber, he was against cash. But he was, he believed in data, and he believed in principle confrontation. He was like, go test it …”
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