The Future Headline
Write the tech-press headline your launch would earn, mocked into the real publication's page.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
A working-backwards artefact adapted for a world where nobody reads press releases. You travel to the future in which the vision has come to pass, write the headline and subtitle a real publication would run, and mock it into that publication's actual layout so it looks real. The severe constraint of a headline forces clarity on the single thing you are claiming and the feeling you want to leave behind.
Origin
An adaptation of Amazon's well-known working-backwards press release, which Atawodi explicitly references. Her modification is to reject the press-release form (nobody reads them) in favour of a mocked-up tech-press article — TechCrunch, The Verge, New York Times — and, more broadly, to write whatever channel your users will actually hear about the launch on.
Core principles
- 01Product management is clarity and conviction; the headline forces both.
- 02A headline is not a PRD — its brutality is the point.
- 03Translate the product into the pain it kills: they had a headache, they no longer have a headache.
- 04Mock it into the real publication's page so it looks realistic, which is what makes people believe it could work.
- 05The channel should be wherever people would actually find out — a press release, a TechCrunch piece, an App Store update, a tweet, a podcast.
How to run it
- 1
Travel forward and write the headline
Assume the vision has come to pass and has gone well. Write the headline you would want a journalist to write about it. Do not hedge — one claim, stated as fact.
Pro tip Pick a specific publication and use its logo and layout. Atawodi used the New York Times masthead for one and TechCrunch/The Verge styling for others.
Watch out If you cannot write a headline, you do not yet have clarity on what problem you are killing.
- 2
Write the subtitle — the launch
Under the headline, write the sub-deck: 'they just launched a way to do X'. This forces you to name the concrete thing you are shipping and check that it is realistic.
- 3
Localise the reference so it lands
Anchor the headline in a reference your audience feels. Atawodi framed Uber's multimodal payments vision as replacing the Clipper card because her San Francisco colleagues would immediately relate to it.
Pro tip Choose the metaphor for the room you're presenting to, not for the abstract user.
- 4
Put it in the deck to provoke a reaction
Drop the mocked headline into your strategy deck and socialise it. Its job at this stage is not completeness — it is to provoke a response and start the conversation about whether the world it implies is one you want.
- 5
Only then write the article
If you want to go deeper, write the full article afterwards — the body copy, the quotes, the details. Atawodi wrote the full piece over time, but always started with the headline alone.
Pro tip Sequencing headline-first prevents the article from becoming a PRD in disguise.
In the wild
As a platform PM building Uber's commerce infrastructure, Atawodi pushed a vision of a single connected multimodal trip — bike, train, Uber, scooter — and tap-to-pay with your phone. She wrote a mocked New York Times headline: Uber wants to replace your Clipper card; all you need is your phone and the app. She wrote the subtitle, mocked it with the real logo, and later wrote the full article.
→ Her team did not build the consumer product, but they built the payments and access infrastructure for the team that did, and the multimodal scenario became part of the platform vision. Tap-to-pay for transport via Uber exists today.
As a platform PM, Atawodi ran these exercises with partner teams who had not articulated their own future, in order to learn what infrastructure she would need to build for scenarios that did not yet exist.
→ Platform investment decisions grounded in concrete future scenarios rather than guesses.
Common mistakes
Writing a press release nobody would read
Atawodi's blunt take: press releases are dumb because no one reads press releases anymore. The artefact only works if it mimics a channel your audience actually consumes.
Letting the headline become a PRD
A headline is not a spec. If it contains implementation detail, it has stopped doing the job of forcing clarity on the outcome and the feeling.
Skipping the visual mock
Text in a doc reads as speculation; the same words inside the real publication's layout make people believe it could actually happen — which is what unlocks socialisation.
Is it for you?
Best for
A PM who needs to provoke leadership or partner teams into reacting to a future they haven't considered, without design support.
Not ideal for
Internal-only infrastructure work with no user-visible surface that could plausibly be announced anywhere.
From the transcript
“so I go to the Future and I write the headline I want see and I write the subtitle just that”
“you'll hear me say product management is Clarity and conviction and in writing the headline you have to focus headline is not like it's not…”
“the press releases like to me it's like dumb to write a press release No One reads press releases anymore”
“we translate that pain killer into they had a headache they no longer have a headache”
From the episode
Crafting a compelling product vision
Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)