The Human Behind the Role
Optimise for being loved, not liked — earn the right to give raw feedback by proving you care first.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 88%
Atawodi's team-culture operating model. Being liked optimises for niceness; being loved means extending yourself for another person's growth, which sometimes requires hard conversations. The prerequisite for raw feedback landing well is a demonstrated, repeated interest in the human behind the role — which she makes concrete with a small set of questions most people cannot answer about their closest working partner.
Origin
Ebi Atawodi's synthesis. The definition of love she uses — 'the choice to extend yourself for the spiritual growth of oneself or another' — is M. Scott Peck's, from The Road Less Traveled. 'Freedom and responsibility' and 'highly aligned, loosely coupled' come from the Netflix culture memo; 'owner, not a renter' from Uber's values; the informed-captain / decider concept echoes RAPID. Her origin story is a mutually hostile relationship with her first engineering manager, Gergely Orosz, that turned into a lasting friendship.
Core principles
- 01Vulnerability is your strength — we are all fantastically flawed.
- 02Freedom and responsibility: you get autonomy, and with it the buck stops with you. Act like an owner, not a renter.
- 03Every decision has one informed captain — not six people with consensus.
- 04Raw feedback only lands when the person already knows you care about them beyond their role.
- 05If you're spending eight waking hours a day with these people, you might as well enjoy it.
How to run it
- 1
Design the culture explicitly with your peers
Get the leadership triad (PM, engineering, design) plus your VP in a room and deliberately decide the culture you want on the team — because if you don't intentionally evolve culture, it evolves without you.
Pro tip Atawodi's group named itself after its members' initials — small rituals make the culture something people can point to.
Watch out Cultures that are never revisited become monolithic and stop serving the context. Ask what good behaviours you reward and what bad behaviours you condone.
- 2
Run the human-behind-the-role audit
Ask yourself about your closest working partner: do you know their birthday? Their work anniversary? Why they are doing the job they do, and what they want to become — VP, founder, something else? If you can't answer, you don't yet have the relationship.
Pro tip Then act on it: go to a show together, have lunch or dinner. The bond is the substrate everything else runs on.
- 3
Establish freedom with responsibility, and name the captain
Give real autonomy, and be explicit that the buck stops with the owner. For every decision, name the single person on the hook, then empower them to gather all the context and input and decide.
Pro tip Atawodi observed at Netflix that when the buck genuinely stops with a person, they get more methodical, not more reckless — they push themselves from 95% to 99% confidence.
Watch out Do not accept 'there are five of us and we all agreed'. Ask who owns it.
- 4
Give feedback raw, on the foundation of care
Once you have consistently shown that you care about the person behind the role, deliver feedback directly and without softening. They will hear it as being in their interest because the evidence of care precedes it.
Watch out This sequencing is not optional. Raw feedback without the demonstrated care underneath reads as cruelty.
- 5
Make the team the first reviewer
Stop teams shipping PRDs straight out to external partners. Route work through peers on the team first — Atawodi's team uses a Gmail plus-address distribution list (e.g. team+prd@) so half-baked docs get shaped by people who care about you before they reach the world.
Pro tip Send it while it's still baking. That's the point.
In the wild
In her first PM-in-training role, Atawodi and her associate engineering manager — Gergely Orosz — absolutely hated each other. Working through it, she discovered the human behind the role and learned that he loved to write; she started letting him kick off leadership docs even when they were product-centric.
→ They ended as close friends; he went on to author The Pragmatic Engineer. The episode became the origin of her birthday/work-anniversary/ambition audit.
As Uber's culture drifted from the Uber 1.0 she joined (as employee ~1024), Atawodi got hold of the Netflix culture memo through a colleague's spouse and deliberately built a Netflix-style culture inside her own Uber team.
→ The values she carries today — freedom and responsibility, the informed captain, owner-not-renter — and, indirectly, her later move to Netflix.
Common mistakes
Optimising to be liked
Being liked means being nice, which means avoiding the hard conversations that actually help people grow. Atawodi explicitly does not optimise for it.
Letting culture drift unattended
If you don't intentionally evolve the culture, it evolves without you — and the company ends up playing catch-up, or the culture goes somewhere you never wanted.
Deciding by consensus
Five people who all agreed is not an owner. Without an informed captain, nobody is accountable and the decision quality drops.
Is it for you?
Best for
PM leads and engineering/design partners building a new team culture, especially where hard feedback currently gets softened into uselessness.
Not ideal for
Transactional or short-lived working relationships (contractors, one-off vendors) where the investment in the human relationship won't be repaid.
From the transcript
“I do not believe in being liked that's AB I believe in being loved”
“love is the choice to extend yourself for the spiritual growth of one self or another”
“do you know your engineering manager's birthday”
“do you know that birthday do you know their work anniversary do you know why they're doing the job they're doing”
“I do believe in this freedom of responsibility I will give you freedom but with that comes responsibility that means the buck stops with you”
“I'm in too many conversations where I'm like who is on the hook for this decision like who cares if this decision is made it's…”
“here's the thing if you don't intentionally evolve the culture it will evolve without you”
From the episode
Crafting a compelling product vision
Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)