Top 10 Things You Should Know
A living, stack-ranked problem doc every PM owns — and every stakeholder must fill in too.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 94%
A permanently-updated document in which each PM lists the ten problems anyone touching their surface should know, stack-ranked, refreshed quarterly. It doubles as an alignment instrument: the same template is handed to marketing, support, research, ops and data as their price of entry to the strategy session, replacing the fifty-slide stakeholder deck. The test of whether it works is that everyone's minus-ones give the same answer when asked the top five problems.
Origin
Atawodi first ran this at Uber on the Money team — she called it 'More Money More Problems' — in partnership with the data science and product analytics teams. She now requires it of every PM in her YouTube org, kept behind a Google short-link.
Core principles
- 01Clarity of the problem is the North Star — everything else moves, the North Star does not.
- 02The list is living: revised and re-stack-ranked every quarter, not written once.
- 03Problems can be qualitative, quantitative, or tech debt. Infrastructure is the product — you cannot build a skyscraper on a shaky foundation.
- 04Alignment is measurable: tap anyone's report and ask for the top five problems; matching answers means you did your job.
- 05Bring joy into it — More Money More Problems.
- 06Start with 10, but end up with three or four for any given deck.
How to run it
- 1
Every PM writes their ten
Each PM maintains a section in a shared living doc listing the ten problems with their product that anyone should know. Stack-rank them. Include qualitative, quantitative and tech-debt problems.
Pro tip Give it a memorable short-link (go/studio-problems) so nobody has to search for it.
Watch out Tech debt is not the engineers' problem to shout about — it is a product problem and belongs on this list.
- 2
Build it in partnership, not in isolation
Pair PMs with data scientists, product analysts, UXR and engineering to interrogate and evidence the problems together. The list should be defensible, not a PM's private opinion.
- 3
Hand the same template to your stakeholders
Before a strategy session, give marketing, support, ops, research and content strategy the same 'ten things you should know' template and require them to stack-rank. This replaces the fifty-slide ask deck and puts the work on them to bring colour.
Pro tip Stakeholder lists surface things you would never find internally — one content-strategy list revealed the average reading age of an American is 11, which reframed how much text the product should use versus images or video.
Watch out If you just say 'come present', they will bring fifty slides and no ranking.
- 4
Sandpaper down to the consolidated ten
In the insights day of the strategy session, merge the multi-faceted problem lists and grind them down to one final, consolidated top-ten. Then use them in every deck as three or four crisp, visceral numbers or insights.
Pro tip Atawodi printed the problems on cards, scattered them across tables, and had groups discuss and vote on which were most painful.
- 5
Audit the alignment
Periodically ask the reports of your engineering and design partners — not just your own PMs — what the top five problems are. Matching answers mean the clarity has propagated. Divergence means you have work to do.
In the wild
On Uber's Money team, Atawodi started the living problem doc in partnership with her data science lead's team of product analysts. PMs, UXR, data and engineering met to work through the problems together. She then printed the problems on cards, scattered them across tables in a room, and had groups discuss and vote on the most painful.
→ A shared, evidenced, stack-ranked problem set that the whole cross-functional group owned — and the origin of the practice she now enforces across her YouTube org.
In a recent strategy session, the content strategy team's 'ten things you should know' included the fact that the average reading age of an American is 11 years old.
→ Reframed the product's reliance on text and opened the question of whether images or video should carry more of the load — an insight no PM list would have produced.
When YouTube got a new Chief Product Officer, Atawodi opened her presentation with a single slide: four things you should know, with four numbers and four insights.
→ The CPO walked away holding the four things that matter — clarity delivered visceral, crisp and clear.
Common mistakes
Rambling when asked what problems keep you up at night
Atawodi says it still baffles her how many PMs cannot answer this. The problem set is the thing you come to work for; if you can't name it crisply, nothing downstream works.
Treating tech debt as engineering's issue
Infrastructure is the product, period. Leaving tech debt off the problem list means the foundation degrades while you build on top of it.
Writing the list once
It is a living document revised every quarter. A stale problem list gives false alignment — everyone agrees, on last year's reality.
Is it for you?
Best for
PM leads and product managers who need to establish shared, evidenced problem clarity across a cross-functional org before any strategy or vision work.
Not ideal for
Very early startups where the problem set is small, obvious and already shared across a handful of founders.
From the transcript
“the Tactical thing that I I almost make every PM of my team do I call it top 10 things you should know it's a…”
“we tap them and say what are the top five problems for Studio they should have the same answer”
“so you use my framework to give me 10 problems if you say come present they'll do like 50 slides like no that's just 10…”
“I literally printed them on cards and I put them on tables scattered the groups and had people kind of vote discuss and vote the…”
“infrastructure is the product period”
From the episode
Crafting a compelling product vision
Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)