The Three Concentric Circles of Evangelism
Socialise a vision outward: core team, then stakeholders, then leadership as high as you can reach.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
A staged campaign for getting a vision adopted rather than merely published. You start with the people who will build it, let the friction polish it, move outward to the stakeholders whose buy-in the vision needs, and end with leadership — deliberately aiming higher than feels comfortable so that they amplify the story on your behalf. Buy-in is not consensus: the target is not certainty, it is that people get on the boat.
Origin
Ebi Atawodi's practice from Uber (where an L5/L6-level vision reached an all-hands stage) through to YouTube, where she ran it for her Studio 'Vision 2026'.
Core principles
- 01Humans love to know you heard them — evangelism is easy when the audience contributed the inputs.
- 02You are not trying to get anyone to 100% certainty. You are trying to get them on the ride.
- 03Friction is the polish: rocks in a washing machine polish each other.
- 04Go as big as possible — let people tell you to pull back; let your manager lasso you.
- 05It percolates like a teabag. Expect to present it multiple times before it lands.
How to run it
- 1
Circle 1 — the team that will build it
Present to the whole team, not just PMs: the PM/engineering/design triads for each product area. Repeat it in your PM weekly and take questions again. Buy-in and conviction have to be genuine — these people are sailing the boat.
Pro tip Expect to present several times. People are still stress-testing it; it needs to percolate.
Watch out Don't restrict the vision to the PM or design population. If engineering doesn't hold it, it isn't the team's vision.
- 2
Publish the workshop output as a living, comment-open doc
Write up the insights, the Once Upon a Time story, the strategy, the big rocks and the vision itself. Set the doc to comment access — not view-only, not edit — so anyone can leave a mark and feel they have a say.
Pro tip You do not have to respond to or resolve every comment. The point is that people can leave one.
Watch out View-only kills the sense of participation; edit access invites chaos. Comment is the setting that produces polish.
- 3
Circle 2 — stakeholders and adjacent teams
Take it to the stakeholders who contributed their 'ten things you should know', plus their managers and adjacent teams. Expect the full range of pushback: support tickets will blow up, you haven't fixed today's thing, you're talking about five years out. That's fine.
Pro tip Because you gathered their problems first, the 'how did you arrive at this?' and 'you didn't consult us' objections simply disappear.
Watch out Adjacent teams need buy-in because the vision may mean saying no to their requests.
- 4
Circle 3 — leadership, as high as you can reach
Present the vision to leadership at the highest level you can access, and then let leadership amplify the story. Aim deliberately high — you can always be pulled back.
Pro tip Atawodi was an L5/L6 at Uber when her leader put her on stage at an all-hands to present the 'one wallet, all Uber experiences' vision.
- 5
Let the vision replicate
A well-evangelised vision spreads without you: other teams cite it in their own docs, recruiters open job descriptions with it, and candidates respond to it. Give it a short-link and repeat it in hiring conversations.
Pro tip Atawodi opens candidate conversations with the team mission and vision, and watches for the twinkle in their eye.
In the wild
As a relatively junior L5/L6 PM at Uber, Atawodi built a vision of a single Uber wallet usable across rides, Eats, trains — anything — with mocks of what it looked like. Her leader put her on stage at an all-hands to present it.
→ She later saw docs across Uber containing slides lifted directly from her deck, with teams saying they agreed with the vision and were building to support it.
After evangelising her YouTube Studio vision through the three circles and keeping it behind a Google short-link, other teams began referencing it unprompted — 'I saw your Studio vision, and on slide five when you talked about this, here's what we did with it'. Her engineering partner opened a job description with the team mission.
→ The vision now spreads through the company and into recruiting without Atawodi in the room.
Common mistakes
Building the reservation but not keeping it
Lenny's Seinfeld analogy, which Atawodi endorses: having a great vision, roadmap and strategy that nobody knows about is the same as taking a reservation you don't keep. Distribution is the most important part.
Chasing 100% certainty before moving on
Waiting until every objection is resolved stalls the vision indefinitely. The bar is that people are bought into the story enough to get on the boat, not that they are certain.
Giving up at the first wave of naysayers
Every vision meets people saying engineering will never solve it, or that you should fix today first. Atawodi says many people give up here — but her Vision 2026 took eighteen months to reach the funding stage.
Is it for you?
Best for
A PM who has a vision written and now needs it adopted across a team, a stakeholder set and a leadership chain over a multi-quarter horizon.
Not ideal for
Small startups where the whole company is in one room and a single conversation replaces the entire campaign.
From the transcript
“in terms of evangelizing I think about three concentric circles right so the core of your vision is your team”
“and that will be a living document comments open for comments right no edit not view only comments”
“if you put rocks in a in a washing machine or they they polish each other”
“and then finally uh you know once you've got the feedback from stakeholders you then go to leadership and Leadership really as high as possible”
“go as big as possible like go big like let people tell you to pull back let your manager use a lasso and pull you…”
“I'm not trying to get anyone to 100% certainty”
From the episode
Crafting a compelling product vision
Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)