From Purpose to Product: Ebi Atawodi’s Playbook for a Vision That Ships

Ebi Atawodi opens with a quote she encountered in the middle of the pandemic: 'The greatest tragedy in life is not death; the greatest tragedy in life is a life without purpose.' She says the quote forced her to ask what she wanted to show up in the world and why she was there. That reflection became her why: she wants to help people harness the power of storytelling.

A second quote, from a dystopian sci-fi novel set in 2020, argues that purpose unifies us, focuses our dreams, guides our plans, and strengthens our efforts. Ebi repeats its claim that purpose defines us, shapes us, and offers us greatness. She connects that idea directly to product teams: this is the work they are trying to do. After a previous conversation with Lenny that ran long, she saw emails and comments saying vision is difficult to bring to life, so she decided to follow the podcast with a playbook.

Ebi joined YouTube in the middle of the pandemic after leaving Netflix, and she describes her leadership approach as starting from conversations rather than answers. She says the biggest mistake a leader can make is thinking they already have the answers, so she moves through conversations to comprehension, and from comprehension to conviction. On day one with YouTube Studio, she used a simple hack called '10 Things I Should Know,' inviting marketing, product counsel, product managers, and UXR to each list the ten things she needed to know. The exercise forced people to stack-rank what mattered most.

Out of those conversations, the team locked itself in a room and built a vision called 'expression meets connection.' YouTube’s mission is to give everyone a voice, and Ebi says she loves waking up to that mission because giving everyone a voice is powerful and aligns with her own purpose. The team reasoned that giving everyone a voice matters through expression, but no one comes to shout into the void—it is all about connection. The vision became a product statement grounded in the idea that the product is a creative partner, supported by five evergreen themes.

The vision came to life through Sophia, a Gen Z creator persona wearing a vegan leather jacket. Ebi notes that Sophia does not think of herself as a creator—no one really starts out saying 'I am a creator'—but when you ask kids today what they want to be when they grow up, they say Creator rather than YouTuber. The team grounded the story in Sophia’s journey through a document nicknamed go/studio2026, a four-year plan for recognizing her along the way and remembering that community is key because there is a human on the other side of every view and subscriber. The document laid out three strategic pillars: reaching everybody, refining your voice, and sustaining your voice.

Ebi defines strategy as saying yes to a few things and no to a bunch of things that are great ideas; bad ideas have already been weeded out. The three pillars were to focus first on reaching everybody and helping everyone find their voice, then on refining your voice and getting closer to your story, and finally on sustaining your voice so creators do not burn out. The vision deck was large—42 slides—but it contained four marquee products, and the team believed that bringing those products to life would help Sophia reach her journey.

When the deck went out, the reaction was not universal enthusiasm. Ebi recalls people saying it was 'very Google,' invoking memes, predicting it would take forever, and warning that the system would grind the team down. She holds a counterintuitive belief: if no one really hates it, no one really loves it, so she looks for and provokes the people who dislike an opinion because that is a beacon that she has touched something. This year, all four products are live, and she is proud to be able to talk about the vision her team came up with at YouTube. They are on the journey to realizing the 'sustain your voice' pillar for Sophia.

Ebi says people treat vision as something ethereal, but she believes there are four elements of a product vision; in the talk she emphasizes three. First, a vision should be imaginative yet realistic—it should not feel completely unattainable, but it should excite and inspire people. Second, it should be lofty and constraint-free; as soon as you think about today’s technologies or whittle it down to something simple, you lose the purpose of a lofty vision. Third, it should be long-term, which means different things at different levels; at Ebi’s level, she believes she should think three, four, or five years out, not only for products but for her own life.

To separate purpose, mission, and vision, Ebi uses a mountain metaphor. If your purpose is the why—for example, showing that you are capable of surmounting a difficult challenge—then the mission is climbing Mount Everest and getting there alive. The vision is what you see at the top and describe: the Himalayas, the clouds. In her telling, it is that simple.

Ebi recalls a PM who was frustrated and wished his team had a vision. She asked what stopped him from booking out three days and creating one, and he stared back like a deer in headlights. She insists you only need three days and a bunch of passionate people. The same PM later delivered on that vision.

Ebi focuses on three L5 product managers—Katrine, Chris, and Lilan—to show how PMs below the leadership level can influence vision. She calibrates the level: L8 at Google is a GPM, while L3 is straight out of university. A core tenet is that you cannot and should not do this alone, because humans are social beings who are stronger when they do things together. Behind those three PMs were product teams with UX designers, UXR, and engineering leads working hand in hand.

The playbook has three parts: empathize, envision, and evangelize. Ebi jokes that teams spend almost half their time coming up with the empathize and envision work, and the other half evangelizing it. The most painful thing she has seen is a great idea that gets stuck in a document.

Ebi traces the empathize step to her transition from general manager to product manager at Uber, when Yuki conducted her conversion interview. She told him she was trying to get people to see a problem they did not get, and he told her she had to 'show them the Frankenstein'—an image that shows the badness. At YouTube, Lilan did that with the old YouTube Studio screen for creators: it was VOD-style, and over time the team added podcasts, playlists, posts, and more badges until it became difficult to navigate. If a creator used vertical video, the screen could even be blank because it defaulted to the VOD experience.

Katrine used a similar approach with the main YouTube app, showing a messy information architecture that made it obvious the experience needed fixing. The second empathize move is to ground the problem in a single big data headline. At Uber, Ebi’s headline was that 10% of rides, eats, or experiences failed because of a payment issue—a striking number for an $80 billion company. Katrine’s headline was that last year 42% of creators were in the main app and never downloaded YouTube Studio, and this year 60% were in the main app, with the number still growing; everyone got it, and the team set out to meet creators where they were.

Chris took a different empathize route: the team spent a large chunk of its first day tearing down apps that had nothing to do with YouTube Studio but had something interesting to draw from. Ebi loves going into Product Hunt to see what is new because humans do not exist in a vacuum. One of her favorite interview questions is to ask about a product the candidate recently discovered and is passionate about; saying Google Maps, Gmail, or Facebook is an instant fail because it suggests the person is not curious and not keeping a pulse on what is out there.

For the envision step, Ebi wants the idea to feel visceral. She compares it to a gym session where the trainer says the last three reps need to burn; if they do not burn, you need to increase the weight. A vision should be uncomfortable in that way—it should consume you and also scare you a little. Ebi tells people not to be afraid of that feeling, because it is part of making the vision real.

The next tool is an elevator pitch with six elements, which can live in a Google Sheet, Coda, or on printed paper. Ebi prefers to give everyone on the team a piece of paper because it is best when they are not on their screens. She has run the exercise many times and says teams about to start a project often have different answers for the user need, the differentiator, and even the name of the product.

Katrine’s pitch for Studio Mini, a version of Studio inside the main app, was grounded in the user, the need, the key benefit, and written in the present tense as though it already existed. Ebi also shows a platform vision for the metadata editor—the MD—where creators put their title, thumbnail, and description, framed around unlocking the full potential of content. She dislikes user stories because 'as a user' tells her nothing about context, emotions, feelings, or goals; she prefers jobs to be done because they explain what the user is trying to do, where they are, and what the goal is.

The team brought the job to be done to life through Ana the surfer, following her journey of finding her voice and showing how the product meets her where she is. At the beginning, Ana gets highlights and mostly vertical videos; as she refines her voice and reaches more subscribers, she looks at multiple formats, tries longer videos, and goes live, and the product helps with creative block through insights. Lilan also incorporated another team’s idea into a content page redesign and went to that team to show how it should come to life, then extended the journey to dubbing content with another partner team. The final envisioning tool is the concept car: not just a steering wheel or engine, but the full car, so the team hooked up the entire app into a complete prototype with a short link that partner teams could play with in newsletters and research, including notifications and onboarding rather than a single test screen.

Ebi values retros because they surface learning, and one PM told her that the real solution is always upstream. Her UX partner put this on top of the Double Diamond: solve the right problem, and solve the problem right. At Uber, Ebi carried five stages that helped her calibrate reviews, because teams often present a concept before anyone has asked whether the problem is worth solving. A simple practice is to put the color of the current stage at the beginning of every slide—defining the problem, coming up with concepts, solutionizing—so stakeholders can calibrate their feedback.

Once the vision exists, road-show it in three concentric circles: first tell the team and get all its feedback, then go to the stakeholders who will help bring it to life, and finally go to leadership with a connected story. People may not love it, and that is okay, because if nobody hates it nobody truly loves it. After the green light, the mistake Ebi sees is spending nine months trying to get the first thing out the door instead of breaking the vision into chunks; Lilan fixed the search component and made it multiformat first, which showed the direction and created quick wins that built equity and trust.

Throughout execution, the vision can be lofty and you can be stubborn about it, but what comes to life will require flexibility in the details. Ebi recalls an Uber vision in which a character named Dev wakes up, has morning coffee, and orders Uber through Alexa—despite there being no partnership with Amazon at the time; the point was to imagine a payments experience that would support that future. A couple of years later, after she had left the company, she saw an announcement that made the imagined experience feel real. It is powerful to imagine something, bring it to life, convince people, and put it in users’ hands.

At YouTube, the four marquee products are now live in customers’ hands, though Ebi calls it the beginning of a journey. It took 13 months from the vision for the content hub to get the first version out, 18 months to bring moments to life because of the number of things that had to be hooked up, and 71 days for Chris from exec review to launching a product that gave creators ideas and inspiration for their next video. Ebi says product vision takes a big chunk of life, and she applies the same thinking to her life vision: life is short, and every second should align with purpose and make a dent in the universe. She asks the audience to think not just about their products but about the vision for their lives, because when we walk in our purpose, everything feels aligned.