How to work better with Product, as an Engineer with Ebi Atawodi

The Pragmatic Engineer

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How to work better with Product, as an Engineer with Ebi Atawodi

Ebi Atawodi, Director at YouTube Studio, shares strategies from Uber and Netflix on building strong product-engineering partnerships, fostering trust, and unlocking team innovation.

Gergely Orosz

Apr 30, 2025

Transcript

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In This Episode

How do you get product and engineering to truly operate as one team? Today, I’m joined by Ebi Atawodi, Director of Product Management at YouTube Studio, and a former product leader at Netflix and Uber.

Ebi was the first PM I partnered with after stepping into engineering management at Uber, and we both learned a lot together. We share lessons from our time at Uber and discuss how strong product-engineering partnerships drive better outcomes, grow teams, foster cultures of ownership, and unlock agency, innovation, and trust.

In this episode, we cover:

Why you need to earn a new team's trust before trying to drive change
How practices like the "business scorecard" and “State of the Union” updates helped communicate business goals and impact to teams at Uber
How understanding business impact leads to more ideas and collaboration
A case for getting to know your team as people, not just employees
Why junior employees should have a conversation with a recruiter every six months
Ebi’s approach to solving small problems with the bet that they’ll unlock larger, more impactful solutions
Why investing time in trust and connection isn't at odds with efficiency
The qualities of the best engineers—and why they’re the same traits that make people successful in any role
The three-pronged definition of product: business impact, feasibility, and customer experience
Why you should treat your career as a project
And more!

Takeaways

This episode is different to most podcasts in how both Ebi and myself share our learnings on how we went from a rocky engineering/product relationship to a very productive one.

My biggest learnings:

Product-minded engineers get more things done: so become one — and if you are a PM or EM, help your engineers become one! One of the biggest gifts from Ebi, myself, and our engineering team was helping all of us become product-minded engineers. Ebi exposed us to how Product worked, made decisions, allocated headcount, and pitched new initiatives to be funded by the business. I wrote more on how to become a product-minded engineer.

Work like a startup — even inside a large company. Our organizational unit inside Uber kept growing in business impact and headcount year after year, because we worked like a startup. Teams had clear business goals that translated to things like revenue increase, cost decrease, incremental new Riders, net new first Riders, and other metrics that the business (Uber) cared about. Within Ebi’s product organization, we prioritized the most impactful projects across teams, and teams (engineering and product teams) helped ship the most important ones, even if they were technically not part of one team’s roadmap. We worked with the assumption that we must help the business reach its goals, and if we don’t, our charter (and team) would potentially have no reason to exist.

Working this way is challenging when you have the resources of a large organization, but doing so helps your company — plus, it helps every engineer build a “product-minded engineer” muscle that can be very helpful if you later found a startup, or become a founding engineer at one. We covered more on this topic in Thriving as a founding engineer: lessons from the trenches.

Get to know the person behind the EM/PM/engineer/colleague. At work, roles are somewhat artificial. What is not artificial is the person behind the role. It made a massive difference when I got to know the “real Ebi” behind “Ebi, the product manager” — and the other way around, about “Gergely, the engineering manager.” It’s a lot easier to trust a partner when you know more about them than “just” their role at work.

Focus on doing great work as an engineer — first and foremost. As tempting as it is to “game the system” of performance reviews or promotions: both Ebi and I agree that you absolutely can game whatever system your company has in place to fast-track that next promotion, or try to get better performance reviews. But the people who do this, others around them notice — especially engineers! What speeds them up in the short term often slows them down in the long term. This is because more senior positions often need strong referrals: and someone who was visibly focused on their own advancement only can struggle to get these.

Do standout work, help others when you can, and be kind to others around you, and years later, other standout colleagues could well tap your shoulder, wanting to recruit you to the companies they are currently at. This is how Ebi often got recruited for increasingly senior roles.