The Once Upon a Time Vision Story
A five-blank Mad Libs template that turns a product vision into a story anyone can retell.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
A deliberately simplistic fill-in-the-blank narrative structure for expressing a product vision. Stories outperform stats and even stats-plus-stories for transmission across people and time, so the template forces the vision into pure narrative form: the world before, the escalating consequence, the turning point, and the dent in the universe you leave behind.
Origin
Atawodi picked this up at Uber — she says she does not know who originally put it together there — and first saw it applied to driver loyalty. She now uses it at Google/YouTube, where teams restate it when they ship. Structurally it echoes the Pixar 'Once upon a time / Every day / One day / Because of that / Until finally' story spine and the hero's journey.
Core principles
- 01Stories, not numbers, are what get passed from generation to generation — pure story beats numbers-plus-story for transmission.
- 02Being story-driven is not the same as being unanalytical; the analysis lives elsewhere.
- 03Simplicity is the magic — the constraint of the template is what forces clarity.
- 04The 'one day' beat is the vision itself: the big change you are going to create.
How to run it
- 1
Once upon a time…
State the original state of the world, in the register of the problem you are solving. This is where the problem lives — the good thing that existed, or the pain that always existed.
- 2
And then… / because of that…
Chain the escalating consequences that produced the pain. Each 'because of that' tightens the causal logic and makes the problem feel inevitable rather than asserted.
Pro tip Use two or three 'because of that' beats — enough to build pressure, not so many that people lose the thread.
- 3
And one day…
Name the change you create — this beat IS the vision. Put a date on it (e.g. 'and one day, in 2026…') so it lands as a commitment rather than a fantasy.
Pro tip Dating the turning point makes the story usable in planning conversations, not just inspiration decks.
Watch out If the 'one day' beat is a feature rather than a change in the world, you have written a roadmap item.
- 4
And finally…
Close with the state of the world you leave behind: how did you leave people feeling, what changed, what is the dent in the universe. This is the emotional payoff that makes the story retellable.
Pro tip Atawodi always ends with 'and finally' — the last thing you left the world with.
- 5
Re-attach it to shipping
When a team ships, restate the Once Upon a Time story alongside the launch to remind everyone what vision the work was serving.
Pro tip Atawodi's teams put the vision back in the shipping doc as a matter of routine.
In the wild
Once upon a time YouTube was fun — cat videos, everyday people. And then one day it became a really polished thing, with people producing hour-long, highly produced content. Because of that, a lot of people felt they couldn't create — they couldn't tell an hour-long story. And because of that, they decided to just watch and consume, not create. And one day we launched Shorts — 60 seconds. And because of that, anyone can express themselves again, bringing back the joy and magic of YouTube.
→ A retellable, one-paragraph articulation of why a product exists that anyone in the org — or outside it — can repeat verbatim.
Atawodi first encountered the template at Uber when a colleague used it to frame the driver loyalty programme's vision in a working session.
→ Her reaction — 'holy cow, this is it' — and she has used the structure at Uber, Netflix and Google since.
Common mistakes
Blending metrics into the narrative
Atawodi is explicit that this is a pure story, not metrics blended with story. The gap in transmission power is widest for story alone; numbers dilute it.
Using it as a substitute for analysis
The story is the communication artefact, not the reasoning. The problem list, strategy and big rocks still have to be done rigorously behind it.
Leaving the turning point vague
Without a dated, specific 'one day', the story has no vision in it — it is just a lament about the current state.
Is it for you?
Best for
A PM at any level who needs to communicate a product vision to a team, stakeholders or leadership without design resources or a big deck.
Not ideal for
Situations demanding a rigorous, numbers-first case (funding decisions, pricing) where a narrative alone will read as hand-waving.
From the transcript
“Once Upon a Time blank and then blank and because of that blank and one day something happened”
“and you could actually put the date in 2026 right”
“if you do numbers alone or numbers with stories or stories alone the Gap is so wide in stories alone”
“Once Upon a Time you know YouTube was fun and people had cat videos and zoo and all of that and then one day it…”
From the episode
Crafting a compelling product vision
Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)