This Vision Playbook Will Change YouTube and Your Life | Ebi Atawodi

I always say to people let's say I took away Google and I took away PM you know director product senior PM who are you if you took away those things you keep chipping away at them right what's the essence what's left and so for me I'm like I'm a Storyteller that's the thing I want to be known for that's who I am a I'm a Storyteller I'm a lover of beautiful things in the world like I collect beautiful things I collect fliers I collect whatever that's why I am that's why I want you to remember of me many people might add other things like oh AB knows how to do Visions or AB you know is a tennis player like whatever like you know quick learner but what is that and it's so important that you have a complete story because the company hired you for that complete story you create a different relationship to the company where you're not expecting all of your fulfillment to come from a company and that's not fair on any company because company is not your whole life and so when you have a full life and that life is beyond just the thing you do the job title it's actually the thing the impact you leave on the world is really the thing as well as how you show up in the world then I actually think you bring a lot more energy into the work you're doing a lot more passion a lot more meaning a lot more intent right cuz there's like balance cool welcome everyone my guest today is Abby AB is the director of product for YouTube Studio a product that I and millions of YouTube creators use every day and I really excited talk to be about crafting YouTube Studio Vision you know making the right product tradeoffs for YouTube studio and also why you should Define your career by your purpose is require John H so welcome n thank you for having me all right so you know like I'm like a aspiring YouTube Creator I use Studio every day and you know it does like so many things right from like video management to analytics to your community like you know if you had to make an elevator pitch for your vision for Studio what would it be it's your creative partner and it let lets you tell the story you want to tell how it and helps you Foster that connection with your community that's amazing yes the creative partner part is like very creative partner and we spent a lot of time on that because we're like it's not quite a co-pilot it's not like an assistant because you know we're Google assistant is like the buzzword when you are in a room with someone who's a partner one is they meet you where you are so when you start a company your you know the two Founders in a bedroom there's a you know you're in the same place you have empathy for each other there is a hustle you're kind of there is no who does what you're just sort of going and you can bounce off each other right especially in the creative space it's always there's always this need to kind of like bounce ideas off someone else who's on the same wave l so we didn't want it to be like it's not an oracle we don't know the answer every Creator is unique and different even though people think we do there's you know there's a m i mean I always say if I could give you the formula I would have a million Subs I don't I have like 120 yeah yeah you got experience a pain yourself to grow the channel you know exactly so you know there is something magical about being a Creator and I think the goal is how can we be that creative partner where it's like we're right there with you and how do you work on a team to come over with us like what was the process to come with this create a partner of so I wish I could say it was one process was like magical you know but I'll start by saying this and I I you know we I'll

go sort of take a couple of steps back so when I joined the team in April 2022 one of the things that I've always said and I read this book a long time ago called the first 90 days and it's really shaped how I on board into any role because when things have gone wrong it's usually because something happened Upstream right like the real issue was Upstream of you so I you know I came in and I have this framework I call a three C's which is basically I have a lot of conversations with everyone like my vp's peers my vp's buddies that he respects my peers you know my team my end Partners direct reports my design uxr partners direct reports so overall I end up speaking to like 40 people and a few sort of key Partners as well marketing pouncil etc etc and then after I go through conversations I ask everyone the exact same five questions because what I'm looking for are converging and diverging themes like what does everyone say what are the outlier things and then I go into what I call comprehension where I try to make sense of what I've heard so I literally have a deck where I say hey these are not there's a disclaimer at the opening it's like these are not my thoughts these are the thoughts of the team but my last question is if you were me and you were coming into this role with the afro and everything what are the three things you would do in the next 90 days and I literally tally them and what you end up having is a stack drank pzero list basically because people are literally telling you if I were you this is the thing you should focus on Soo you also start to see what people care about and you know the top six things I essentially you know and then I go back to my final C which is conviction so it's conversations that lead to comprehension which leads to conviction and so I have the six things and from the conversations one of the things that keeps coming up is what is Studio like who are we a platform for other teams within YouTube to build into or are we a product very important question who's the customer is the customer the internal YouTube PM or product team or is a customer the Creator right so we so I was like these are very existential questions like I don't know how you know you can be successful if we're like questioning what our product is and how who our customer is right and so that came up again and the other thing that came up was what's our vision and where are we going so I want to you know I say that because it's important you know I don't want people to believe that you know you just come in you're a leader and she's going to come up with a vision like that's not what happened it came up and then that led into okay guys this is the readout from what everyone is saying across levels across functions do you agree in how might we solve this so of course that then creates the impetus to justify locking a bunch of people in a room for four days I mean they did go out to sleep and things we literally locked ourselves together for four days was Monday to Thursday and the goal is really we're going to come out with an answer to what are we what is the product what are principles what's the vision and what's the strategy those are literally like the four big things we wanted to come out with and so going in you know because I'd already have these conversations you start getting sprinkles of where to look for the insights but since we had a full day of just inviting teams in 30 minutes so we had eight hours plus breaks whatever but we had teams coming in for 30 minutes and they came in and they got a slide that was titled 10 things you

should know because if you sit say hey come and do a deep dive of your products I feel like it becomes this you know my VP sometimes there a dog and pony show but because becomes this kind of like let's show you how great we are and all the stuff we ships yeah that's all that's great I mean that's why you're here I hope you're shipping stuff the real Crux of it was tell me what's painful tell me the things that keep you up at night and by forcing 10 people had to stack rank so these are the 10 things whether you're marketing or you're some you know another product team or our direct product teams these are the 10 things that you think are you know extremely important and some were qualitative yeah some were quantitative but when we got all of those and one of the sessions was the uxr lead are my uxr partner had also gone and pulled 10 things you should know from all of the uxr Corpus and that one day of insights basically gave us ground Truth where three years down the line our strategy still holds right it's like still the strategy of today which to me I'm like okay that it worked right that's not you will never I don't think you'll ever get to 100% for Fidelity not even 90 you're looking for 80% F Fidelity so that you're like okay I have conviction that's a problem that we want to actually solve and then you can go obviously do the work the usual product work to you know my colleague always says understand work to go deeper on a problem so that was day one and I can't un you know say this enough if you get that day wrong then the foundation every everything else is incorrect the vision is yeah this episode is brought to you by vanta whether you're a startup founder navigating your first audit or a security professional scaling your GRC program security has never been more critical or more complex that's where Van comes in businesses use van to establish trust by automating compliance needs across over 35 Frameworks like sock 2 and ISO 271 V can help you start or scale your security program by connecting you with Auditors to conduct your audit and set up your program fast plus with Automation and AI throughout the platform Venta gives you time back so you can focus on building your company join over 9,000 global companies like alassian Kora and Factory who use Venta to manage risk and prove Security in real time get $11,000 off at van. com Peter that's VA n. com Peter for $1,000 off now back to the episode if you start a great like you know I went into a room by myself and like here's the vision guys like here's my Rion work yeah but also I think that as well as the actual insights if we didn't have the right people in the room coming to present those insights we would have had an incomplete picture because you just Studios this thing you use it every day there multiple verticals in there multiple products in there so we had to try and get a complete picture of the top problems then we can say be this subset are worth solving right yeah that was basically day one was all about the insights then we paused and then we sort of zoomed out I'm giving you the full thing so let me know how much detail you then we went out and I had everyone sort of write a headline for if we were the product you think we should be what would be the headline for you like down the line that we've solved this problem and so

everyone wrote their headlines and this is just a quick way to get a pulse check of how aligned we are mind you everyone's just heard the day of insights right so they've heard all the problems so what's happening already is they're kind of solving in their minds and what I tend to do when people are going through insights is just write the how might we so you just you get a sort of stream of Consciousness but we went into the second day it was all about like okay let's project to the Future what's a headline if we solved all of this that you would want that you would be proud of and then we took a step back from that and I had literally a print out of a template that I used it's like once upon a time and had everyone fill that in on paper so none of this is on laptops or screens so ibody wrote that out then we started discussing where were things converging so there were a lot of themes that kept coming up one that I still remember today was this connection connection and I'm like that's interesting because you know a lot of people don't think that we care about connection you know views or Subs actually there's a human connection when you put something out there there's another human taking time out of their day to listen to that thing and connect with it and that's a human I mean we show up as a number but it's a human and what we hear over and over again from creators is when the going gets rough the reason I started creating when I question what I'm doing or when it gets difficult or I'm running out of ideas I go back to my community right why I started doing this so connection kept coming up and another thing that kept coming up was this notion of telling your story whatever story that is and so very quickly we arrived at this huh expression meets connection and that's kind of like the mission statement of the team like expression meets connection you can express yourself how you want tell the story you want regardless of your size who you are what device you're on and you on the other when that story is told you have connection so you've got the insights you've got the end State you've got a vision statement and then we didn't try to consolidate or converge at this point just let's write and discuss why we put what we put down there very quickly after that we went into a sketch exercise so let's say we solved all the problems I literally had a template it's an app store like an Android you know Google Play Store lock up with empty screens because you know how you go on a on an app store yeah you hire the L both exactly you have the panels like screenshots you can't put 20 in there you can put like a handful and I restricted that I was like you get four right so let's say the app the dream app we've solved all the problems you think we should solve it's in the App Store draw the four images that would sort of speak to the things that you think are the Marquee tenple features and again on paper and what you also start to do is You're Building empathy because I'm in the room this is not my entire team by the way the team came in but this is just me my in partner my u and my uxr partner and so you know we by doing that you're also creating empathy for what it is to translate a rough idea into a sketch like sketching humbles people quite a bit and then you know once that's once we sketch that again certain themes started popping out so I always say to my teams when they come to me and they ask me like how do I do this and I've even had one you know one of my GPM on my team he was like texting me in the middle of their during their breaks for their Vision session and he's like you know like we're all coming up with some diverging things so you know when does it start C I'm like just trust the process it will emerge I promise you and you know he has a vision now and the team's behind it and they're excited about it but I'm like you have to trust the process that these seeds will be sprinkled around and something will germinate so as we start sketching again you start to see some things that are converging everyone had something more than just a list of comments in the comment section in studio right it's just a list of comments it was it used to just be a list of comments but everyone had something else that was like this community Hub which as you've been following has just gone live and you know there everyone had multiformat as a core element but here's the thing no one was like actually we're just going to do components and patterns for partner teams so this question of like are we a platform or are we a product was very quickly answered right no one was like oh in my app store it's actually like you know ship your product in 16 weeks to the YouTube internal product team so that very quickly solved itself and then after we did sort of App Store Mock we started having the conversations and out of the conversations and grouping the Fe you know the problems that we you know the Halm we statements I talked about earlier some them started emerging I was like okay there were a lot of how might Weis so around making the product more accessible there are a lot of Hite we around making the product feel more connected there a lot of H might we and we use different words right but we ended up with like six we ended up whittling the six down to five and then we said actually this these five feel like a mass Low's hierarchy of needs you know we probably shouldn't be solving hyper personalization so it's this whole theme of like we understand your channel so we're not giving you just vanilla ideas or vanilla suggestions right and this was before Jenny I was like sexy like Jenny I had not even like chat gbt and Gemini and all that none of that was live at this point and but we there was this notion of like personalization different from customization and as we looked at that hierarchy like there is no point going and building a hyper-personalized product when I can't even upload a video on Studio mobile yeah exactly this is literally you probably know this was a gap to some time you can upload a video on you had to go into the YouTube uh main app or you had to go on desktop so like there's some fundamental Primitives that are in the accessible bucket right before we get to you know the cherry on the top and so that's how we ended up with the this framework of pillars I like to call them themes my team always calls them pillars I call them themes because they're not really pillars you know they hold something up they're actually just themes of the ways we think about the product and what's been interesting is every year when we write what we call two pages which is strategic imperatives for the next year my team actually a PM on my team owns one of those themes so the connected chager and it's their job to actually go and gather all you know work with all the different product teams to write a sort of a harmonized product strategy for that area that touches multiple products versus like shipping the or chart so those themes have carried through and then the themes are like just so find your voice and so your voice or is that no those are actually strategic pillars the themes were accessible so making sure anyone whoever you are whatever language whatever device whatever internet speed you can create you can express and connect right and then it was connected like how do we make sure in everything we do you're reminded about your community and so things we do like data stories which tell you hey here's your weekly recap and which country do you think was that you've probably gotten these reports like which country do you think had your top viewers this week yeah I love those things yeah they're very motivating yeah exactly it's all these little sprinkles that my enge partner um calls it micro moments of Happiness so you know these little and then we said support it so when something goes wrong the yellow icon you know because you will have those moments right how do we make sure you don't feel like you're in a bind stuck so you feel supported and then we had empowered and that's we have the right information but it's not just like here's all the data it's actually actionable and the insights are actionable so you could do something about it so those weekly reports are an example but also the inspiration tab is another one where it's like hey here are 10 ideas for you right we can give you a feeling of empowerment by giving you the right you know the right information or the right insights and then finally personalized so those are like the themes five themes I love it yeah so just to recap what you just described like so basically for first day you try to first try to understand what people think try to entprise people and then you have like a full day where you just like have people pre presentent their point of view and just like just try to understand empathize and then you kind of had everyone come with their own one line statement or like that kind of themes kind of emerge around expression these connection which by way I think it's like really it's really actually pretty insightful because like you said it's very just be like hey you know I want to grow my views or like I want to you know make money on YouTube but actually for me personally it's like the random nice comments that I get like kuse me go going that's actually really yeah exactly and sometimes some creators forget that and it becomes about the business and the deals and the whatever and that's you ask them you know i' I've interviewed hundreds of creators now and sat in uxr sessions and you asked this question why did you start almost 99% of the time it's like you know I had a story to tell and I thought there were other people interested in my topic or I had a life experience and I thought there be other people that could connect with that life experience and it's something where or I you know I was passionate about something and I wanted to share it with the world or I was and why do you keep going it's always the community you hear what it's like my they're like my best friends my community like you know you hear all these things so yeah I Community is at the heart of it really and I love how

like I this process is and also like the whole Pro thing like I Ain on a terrible platform because like I cannot just build a platform and be like hey you guys come build my platform like I need to have opinion about what the any use or want like that actually is My Philosophy I actually don't think these old ab isms I think a platform PM needs to be an order of magnitude stronger than just a regular PM right because you have to be able to quickly empathize with my end customers needs which are ultimately the same customer let's right so we all work for I mean these big companies we all work on different parts of the product but ultimately it's one customer at the end with like Nuance La so you're just looking at segments or segments of problems so I always say a platform PM needs to actually be in order of magnitude you know stronger in product sense because now I have to understand like for example PMS on my team we support 40 Partners like 40 product teams right yeah and so every team thinks my thing as it should be is like the most important thing that needs to ship tomorrow right the P zero I need this capability or like the world will stop and it's so important that as a PM a platform pm1 you ideally you should be able to see around the corner and almost predict where the puck is going so you can build for that reality so before waiting for teams okay you know we started talking a lot about you know if every team is going to go build ji stuff and they're all going to need context of the Creator right to so it's just it's not just a vanilla if I go in Gemini and type question it should know oh this is Peter's Channel and whatnot we probably should think about a scalable way to do that so that everyone has the same source of Truth in a way otherwise everyone is calling the same data each time and saying give me this give me views give me whatever package it you are I'm sending a prompt right but actually if you can boil a plate that part then you have all these features sort of not completely diametrically opposed from each other and that was something that the PM that was thinking about on life cycle already started thinking of hey what's the essence of the channel and how do we think about you know uh that so that we can support all these teams that are going to need the essence of a channel yeah like share compacts on the Creator comps yes otherwise everyone is pre- context prompting and that's more tpus that's another turn that's you know all the things so yeah you got to be like I don't know who's managing the studio homepage but like we got to be like you almost have to understand the customer the Creator better than like the individual product PMS because like you pull everything together right otherwise it may be like a tragedy of common situation we just like a bunch of stuff there and this was the the Crux actually that ended up like deciding you know it was analogy EAS said let's say there are four teams that come and say so we had actually true story we had four teams one team that was doing TV shows another team playlists another team doing podcasts and podcasts usually shows right as part of a playlist and then you had courses okay all four teams when they mocked up their products they look completely different everyone is unique we're podcast shows or we're movies you know and we're like wait hold on a second you know the PM on my team who drove that she's like what I'm going to push back cuz I can build a scalable collection framework that you can all use yes they're going to be different things but ultimately it's a collection of videos right so you know and then of course every team pushes back because you need to go a little bit slower to solve it in a way where it's it you know works for everyone's nuanced use cases and it's flexible enough and with platforms you're always staing off relevant and consistency right and so every PM is going to be like you're slowing me down just get out of my way but actually by doing it though I mean true story as they should but by doing it the way we did and slowing them down just a little bit they've all gotten benefits for free as we've for example playlist analytics podcast analytics right versus video analytics you now have analytics at the collection level so these are the kind of things that you know my team had to think about like round the corner so that tomorrow another team comes and says we want to do I don't know I mean the courses example was actually the example they were like oh we want to do courses like oh we have this thing already for you that's been used by podcast and we reing playlists and then they can just use that B from scratch just like the component I think a very part of like this whole V shy thing was like P for product and like it'll help you potentially push that other teams make right decisions I'm curious if Studio has any like PR principles um I think the number one principle that we have is we build you know all build for creators first right okay if it's good for creators it's good for YouTube That's the always been the YouTube The partnership right and creators are the live flood of YouTube so that's number one so a lot of the time when it comes down to it you can come back to the Creator and say but hold on a second show me your ux are right why are we building this thing or what you know so that I think that's a very big one I think a couple of other ones that we had for example you know play place where everyone can tell a story whatever story that is we're not a place where only a certain kind of stories can be told which means you know especially when it comes to formats our product should work well for a live Creator who does only life a shorts long form a Creator who does five minute long form right but also a Creator who tries to do all of them and this is just this notion of equity and we weren't always that that way right it used to be that in a lot of parts of the product like the content Hub it would default to the long form videos tabs exactly so a Creator who only post shorts would first land on this empty screen and then go to the next tab we're like actually let's just build this Equitable framework so that now you have the shelves and you just have the you've probably seen that in your mobile Studio you have the shelves and it's like VA shorts live and you can see everything and Creator is like oh actually made me remember I haven't looked at shorts in a very long time because I posted one short and forgot about it so that was another principle but a lot of these principles actually emerged from the discussions we had on the third day so day one was insights day two was like visioning day three was starting to distill like let's bring it all together right and day four was when we actually locked in the Strategic imperatives and the big rock products that would like what are the three four five products that would make this strategic imperative come to life we have to have these sort of back and forth like here we have a clean up platform cleanup we need to do we have these sorts of asks does that mean we're not doing them and we have to have these very tough conversations because strategy ultimately is saying no to a lot of things and saying yes to things right uh what were the three or four prod you guys landed yeah what were the Strategic parts or like youed on you talked about find your voice refine your voice the was let's talk about that now so we sort

of said okay we've been building for the big Creator who has long form for a very long time right and we're the platform where people come when they're like I am serious about making you know a business out of this and making you know videos and what started to happen was the perceived perception for the barrier to entry was higher and higher so there was this assumption that you go everywhere else to have fun or go try it out when you're serious you come to YouTube and we're like yeah come on we started with cat videos so you know like we've that that's the perception but that is not the that's never been the intention of the art for so we said okay we're going to make it very intentional pivot and still focus on our key products like thumbnail AB which we shipped for sort of large creators that are asking for these like for you know for a lot of creators thumbnail AB won't even get to power because you don't have enough views give thumbnail you don't have yeah you don't have enough of a sample size and so we were like what would it look like if we built for the Creator who's making like their first video what does the product look like and so some of the tenple things that came out for and that's what we call find your voice this is that stage where you are posting I mean it looks like my channel I post cooking videos one day travel videos another day I DJ the other day like I'm not like I you know I'm just sharing my life and for a lot of people that's going to be it it's like I have a voice I'm finding it and I will spend most of my life trying lots of things and that's okay for some people a subset of those people they're trying to lock in and find a voice for many people it's just going to be participation which is perfectly fine so it's okay let's what does the product look like for that Creator and there were a lot of things that Creator is mostly in the YouTube app not Studio they're not going to download a second app they're in the YouTube app and they're going to upload a video there so we're like well we need a mini version of studio so one of the 10 pull products was Studio mini which is like a mini version of studio in the main app we call it the main app the YouTube app is called the main app internally and in that app we will give you basic analytics know basic comment management like just enough for you to manage your content yeah get started manage your content without requiring you to download another app so that was one of the temple things for find your voice but when you get into sort of refine your voice this is sort of now I know my thing is cooking videos I'm still trying to figure it out and refine it and get to a scalable place but I know my thing is cooking videos I know my thing is chess moves and so now we need to help you want to go deeper you want to maybe understand who in my audience who in my community is coming back who's returning my returning viewers with new viewers what's the retention curve looking like we wanted to make sure that when you download Studio mobile which is what most people do if you don't have a full-on laptop you can access all you know most of yta you have parody so for a long time you wouldn't have all the YouTube analytics that were on web on mobile so we brought a lot of that to mobile we wanted you to be able to you know go a little bit deeper with your this is the thing I talked about earlier go a bit deeper and understanding your different form formats of content so content Hub and this multiformat Equitable content Hub was one of the tenpole products for refine your voice and in the other 10 product was Comm the community Hub which just launched so those were the two like Marquee products in addition to parity and a lot more you know gen inspiration and then you have the sustain I'm there I've made it I just don't want to burn out I want to do this in a sustainable way and you the surprising thing is you find for a lot of those creators you know they have the same needs as sometimes small creators they need this the micro moment of Happiness they need those little you know wins as well and so with that a lot of what we're also doing is bringing these magical things like the congrats you got to 50 and making it a little bit more we added a few more steps a few more sort of celebr steps on the web but also you know doubling down on things like the inspiration tab yeah I think those little moments really matter like it

makes me feel like I think I got a moment missing I got up to whatever 10,000 views or something which is probably peut St like it definitely mattered to keep me going yeah exactly and that's that is what you know it's like a life you'll have these big moments you have a wedding and you will graduate but they're all these small things along the way like the first time you don't burn the pizza you know in the oven or you know the first time you um the first time you know the time you got your email your first email like my ADD hot meal once upon a time and then my first these little moments as well as the likes you get from friends so we all have these micro moments as well as the tle moments yeah it's has to be like intrinsic motivation to do this like otherwise it just look can't views like you can like you know your emotion go up and down every we depend on how many US yours get like not sustainable yeah exactly let's talk about some like difficult like yeah had Mi like what one thing that you know I also work on like the equ of YouTube Studio for Roblox right and like one debate we're always having and I think Co a little bit it's just like between the large and the small creators like they spot very like they kind of want different they want completely different views of how H work the larger ones just want like a bunch of analytics and small ones want motivation I like I your point is the larger ones also want more motivation that's actually my point and I think we sometimes forget that the large ones also want motivation it might look different the moments might be different but they also want them they also want to set goals small creators like hey I want to get to my first 100 bucks big creators like hey I want to cross a million I mean you know but same goal right and it's like I always honestly life has all the answers we just need to look at it it's no different but ultimately we're building products for humans everybody has New Year's resolutions and steps to take and wait to lose and books to read same it's the same um do you enourage it sounds like you talk the career do you encourage your team to do what you're doing which is like TR do your channel it's like really TR expence pain abely absolutely actually one of the things I think a lot of PMS especially as you go into bigger organizations tend to forget to do is to be as hungry about the product as the customer they're building for and that's something you know I don't know how you build empathy for somebody using the product if you're not you don't go through the same experience and see the same issues problems and pain points so absolutely yeah to varying levels of success like I encourage but not everyone is at the same level it's hard to like and that's you know some people be like oh but I'm you know I feel like you know putting myself out there I'm like well welcome to being a Creator putting yourself out there so maybe put a version of yourself that you're comfortable putting out there maybe your thing is your dog just record your dog doing silly you know Silly the time yeah I mean that's the thing right as big companies like you can be a amazing cross FAL collaborator but like if you don't dedicate like at least some portion of time to actually experience with customer pay yourself you could just lose touch yeah absolutely yeah all right so let's talk about like another topic you know you worked at a lot of great companies YouTube Uber Netflix you're also on the board of Lego I believe right and uh Vision I'm curious if you have like a personal vision statement or like a personal purpose I do I have a personal purpose the vision statement actually is just is going through an iteration right now okay and so you know I'll talk more about the purpose and the vision my purpose is to empower and inspire people through stories it's literally my life force and even though when I look back it's like oh there's always been this connective like thread and I think you know the more and more I kind of chip away at you know chip away at this thing it gets clearer and clearer it's not like what as I was going to each of my jobs I was like oh a St you know I want to get closer to stories because everybody hindsight is always 2020 right but one thing I've noticed is with me one of my first ever one of my proudest moments is publishing a book on Nigerian photography and I remember how that started it was like a small thing it turned into a fouryear project you know one of my current proud

moment is I just made a film a short film yep I did and the trailer is on YouTube but I made a film and you know I it was a you know it wasn't me with a camera I directed the film but I also I wrote the script I did the screenplay I you know did the casting did you know I did all these things um I had to work with you know director you know dop like cinematographer editor sound designer so it gave me also a lot of empathy for high quality production and what that takes right when I look at some you know creators like Marcus Brown Lee or you know who po have a lot more polished content um it's impressive yeah what B you want to make a film like because you know you could just like you know YouTube J all day yeah I heard I actually one of the beautiful things of YouTube is you get to like meet all these great people so I was at the India Creator Summit and they you know we had Mr Perfect as they call him who basically yeah this amazing you know amazing Bollywood star and we had him over and he said something that really struck me and it was basically when I meet people and they have a story to tell you know I know that they're going to end up making that film and so he yeah his name is Amir Khan amazing Bollywood star but yeah people call him Mr Perfect cuz he's the perfectionist and that's stuck with me it's like people you know who have a story to tell are bound to make a great film they will tell it they will do everything to tell it and that I think that was it for me I wanted I had a story to tell been sitting with me for four years I thought it was going to be a book and then I ended up at Netflix and I was like oh actually this is another form factor I never haven't played with and that got me curious and I sat on it and I was like wait do I you know do a big budget production but I have a job you have time for this and then came to YouTube and I was like actually you know I could do this and I ended up I shot the film shot it in five days took a week off work and um I watched a ton of YouTube videos how to write a script Danny Garrett he's a he do does a lot of documentary amazing stuff on YouTube I binged every BTS video of that guy of just like the of yeah it was amazing and then I brought it that gave me energies when I came to work I'm even more energized right so I actually fundamentally believe in these things we do that give us empathy for the product but also feed our soul because you then put that energy into what you're building that passion that energy yeah I love that you know I love seeing leaders who rashy encourage people to actually pursue their personal passions and like do them themselves I mean speaking of ton story right you know let's talk cover real quick like a lot of people if you go to LinkedIn and their story is like you know I'm a director on YouTube and I was X Netflix that's my story you know the and this is not it's when people have in the LinkedIn it's like and something and it's ex this I'm like yeah imagine if we went through life and I was like AB XO like my all the people I dated I'm like you know like speak about the person you're with now and then maybe there a story will emerge and you could talk about the remaining ex's I just find it interesting yeah it's kind of like a little bit of a toxic behavor right also like it also affects your psyche like no like or and you become a director or something like I you go work you to make it to yeah so how you have any advice for folks to actually be defined by their own personal stories as opposed to like this kind of job title stuff all right so this is going to Rattle a few people but you know I'm a big believer in if no one hates it no one truly loves it so I'm I like polarizing reactions cuz it tells me I ha nerve I always say to people let's say I took away Google and I took away PM you know director product senior PM who are you no you don't need to answer but like know I'm not putting you on the spot by the way I mean you but the amount of people who just have a blank dare it's like who are you like some people it's a parent a mom a dad some people it's I'm a partner what are you know if you took away those you keep chipping away at them right what's the essence what's left and so for me I'm like I'm a Storyteller that's the thing I want to be known for that's why I I'm a sto I'm a Storyteller I'm a lover of beautiful things in the world like I collect beautiful things I collect fliers I clict whatever that's why I want you to remember of me many people might add other things like oh AB knows how to do Vision so AB you know is a tennis player or AB you know like whatever like you know quick learner but what is that and it's so important that you have a complete story because the company hired you for that complete story the company hired the person right once upon a time and I think what then happens which is you know a little bit I don't want to call it but it's it rattles a lot of people is you create a different relationship to the company where you're not expecting all of your fulfillment to come from a company and that's not fair on any company because company is not your whole life and so when you have a full life and that life is beyond just the thing you do the job title it's actually the thing the impact you leave on the world is really the thing as well as how you show up in the world then I actually think you bring a lot more energy into the work you're doing a lot more passion a lot more meaning a lot more intent right because there's like balance wow that's a that's an amazing

point to and I think that's like really I think everyone kind Val to hear this right because like yeah because no one can Pi the fact away from you that you're a Storyteller right like someone like can take away my job from me or something but like no one can take that away from me yeah and also it makes me I'm like okay what does storytelling look like within the construct of Google and so I bring that to the visions that I said you know we told the story of find your voice to find your voice sustain your voice we told the story of Sofia and actually what I wrote was a you know I it's a play on user story but it's not as a you know it's not the user story like as a user I want to actually to use a story meet Sophia she's 19 she woke up in the morning and on her phone she gets notification says congrats she's like I literally write a story without any screens and that is how I bring the vision to life and so you put you're in the shoes in the mind of Sofia now like oh what are the con what are her fears what are her needs what are her goals and then I wrote that story all the way to the end so storytelling but in the context of Google I've brought the thing I love to the word I love doing and now that's even I feel like that's more magical so yeah storytelling I Google storytelling like with my kids I my callor to me I'll give the story yeah you talked about Lego in my Lego interview this is actually something I brought up you know uh Lego's mission is empowering you know kids especially to play or people to play a lot of adults you know Lego fans and for me I most in mind I remember saying I like for me what I love about Lego is in every box is a story it's you're either building a story that's been told already or you're creating your own but you are telling a story and that's like your creative juices going so for me when I think about it like there's a box set of NRA Dam and there's a story in there it's like this thing in Paris that is a or the box set of the Titanic it's a story you're building a story and so there's this connective thread and now at a place in my life where I'm looking for things that align with that purpose I wasn't there when I started my career I was just moving through and bringing storytelling into it but now it's okay actually I want to look for alignment where it exists everyone do same yeah well close on this like um can you briefly share what your film is about and what people can watch oh absolutely uh the film is a celebration of West African Artistry and I've been very inspired by what I've been seeing coming out of Korea where the content is the celebration of Korean culture and it's made for Koreans and we all watch it we watch it and we're like I now know what you know fermented kimchi is you know because I watched all these shows and I understand the culture by connecting through that so I had a similar sort of you know passion for you know a lot of West Africans don't know how much PR and Heritage lies in these artist artistic practices that we have and a lot of them are just stories that are told right and I was starting to get a little bit worried that you know over a couple of generations those stories might go away and so the first film is the you know following the life of a drummer who's making what we call a talking drum and it's a drum that literally we say it speaks because you can sort of squeeze it and it moves the membrane and funly enough that a similar drum exists in Korea by the way I feel like there's an interesting connection there and it's you know this eura Nigerian drum but we follow the story of him making the drum but I think the most beautiful thing this I'll leave you with is I when I was writing the story I wrote the story around this one person who's like he's the maker of the drum and what it taught me as I started actually casting the individuals to tell to make the drum was you know something that kept coming back was we don't do that there is no one man or woman who makes a drum it's not possible and I was like oh but actually isn't that true for everything is there anything where you can say this thing I made it by myself like there's somebody who C cut the raw materials there's someone who drove it to the store there's somebody who came up with the design like everything we do is in community and so what I ended up you know being able you know focusing on capturing in making of the drum is this communing around a drum but all these individuals the Tannery the wood cutter the maker that you know that come together to make this drum and so a film about it's a short film it's a 15 minutes a docu film and the trailer is on YouTube and my the other handle is a zobo Studios so that's separate what's the title of the fils BR caners for sure it's called Dune but you might need to put it in your show notes literally means Sweet Sound in Europe D du n yeah right I'm the watch after this I'll send you a link like And subscribe yeah well I mean face this is awesome I kind of wish start with the purpose first place but this is awesome so much yeah you do that thing creators do where they edit the end at the beginning you know yeah yeah get your 15 seconds thank you so much for having me cool all right thanks so much