@ebi-atawodi
Senior product leader at YouTube, Netflix, Uber—expert in crafting compelling product vision.
Product management is two things: clarity and conviction. Clarity means sifting out everything polluting the core problem. Conviction is your feeling of how the world should be — not certainty, not perfection, but a strong enough belief that you'll fight for it.
Do you know your engineering manager's birthday? Their work anniversary? What they actually want to become? If you can't answer those, how strong is your working relationship really?
If I can put all your research into ChatGPT and it spits out a PRD, you haven't done your job. The value you add as a PM is the product sense — the feeling of what's right — that no AI can replicate from raw research alone.
A vision needs to be devoid of today's technical limitations. The whole point of traveling five years into the future is to come back and say what we need to fix NOW to get there. Today's limitations may not be tomorrow's.
The 'Once Upon a Time' vision framework: Once upon a time [the problem]. Then one day [the change you made]. And because of that [what happened]. And finally [how you left the world]. Forces you to tell a story, not a strategy doc.