Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal

25:31Now, OKRs are not meant to be hit 100%. I think we celebrate if we hit about 75 to 80 % because you do wanna set stretch targets and then every half we do planning and we will allocate resources between all of those OKRs. So fix it for example, don't get all the resources but they also don't get zero resources. Which may have been the case if we had not set a culture which celebrated this and allocated resources towards this and rewarded this. Awesome. OK. Like clearly an important ingredient here is the CO and C suite on down values this as something we will invest in and we'll trade off all focus on growth for this because we believe this is gonna help us grow and win long term.

26:19Absolutely. Absolutely. Some people hearing this just as a final question along this area are gonna feel like, OK Uber, so easy to dock food. Of course I'll order Uber Eats every day. I'll go and ride so good. This is what a dream. I'm a dock fooding like crazy. But a lot of people work at like, you know, oracles and snowflake and like, I don't know, five tram, all these companies where it's much less, you know, non -consumer product essentially where it's more difficult to dock food. Just any advice for folks that want to create a culture of dock fooding and kind of up their dock food game at a product that isn't consummary.

26:57So first of all, we thought the same when we thought about the driver app as well because it was a little bit distant for people. Now, I would say while it is more difficult than just ordering food and taking a ride, it is not as difficult as, you know, perhaps some of the other products that you mentioned. But I do think that you just stretch that you and further. We do have a product we call Uber for Business where it's a business admin using it. We do have our merchant product. So Uber Eats is actually three sides of the marketplace, the eater, the consumer, the courier who's bringing your food and there's a restaurant.

27:34Now, how do I dock food, the restaurant product, for example? So these questions are very, very valid. So my guidance would be and what I try to do is try to get as close to that customer as possible. So in the case of a merchant, we go spend time at restaurants. I'll give you a latest one. So we have a cafe here at Uber on campus. We also have a barista. So we enable the barista to be an Uber Eats restaurant. And they have an Uber Eats tablet and I can actually order from that barista. So now your dock fooding being an eater, your dock fooding being a courier and your you can dock food being a merchant.

28:18So some of my product team, they actually will go to the barista. They'll stand behind the counter and they'll experience what it feels like for these orders to commit. We have very close relationships with our big customers, such as McDonald's or Domino's and all of them. We also have a lot of small medium business restaurants and we have relationships with them which allows us to go and spend days with them. So that we can observe what life is like behind the counter for a restaurant worker, for a kitchen worker, how does our product show up and we learn a lot of stuff. And I would say, I would ask everyone who's listening irrespective of the product that they're working on, go to the end degree of how much you can stretch.

29:02And if it's really an IT admin at your customer who's using your product, I would do two things. A, go to that ID admin and sit next to them and observe them using the product and be set up what we call test accounts and try to pretend to be an IT admin and set up that account. I went through our merchant setup flow which I can just do by setting up a test account and I learned so many things of all the points of friction that we are putting in that flow. So I think there is still a lot that you can do even if you do not have a consumer product. Awesome. So the advice there is just find a way, get as close as you can.

29:40You may not be able to ride an Uber, drive an Uber card, get an Uber ride, but there's some way you can get really close. You may not be exactly do the thing. Awesome. Okay. I'm gonna go in a different direction and there's another theme that came up again and again when I was asking people about you and what you're amazing at. And a motto came up again and again, it was ship ship ship. Talk about that. Why is this motto this way of working so important to you? Why is it something you try to encourage everyone to always think about? I think it's actually a natural extension of what we just talked about.

30:15If you are going to go dog food and experience the Spain and you're gonna document it, what's next? You have to ship this. I'm a big believer in you don't ship documents, you don't ship brainstorming meetings, you don't even ship designs in a figment. What you ship is code in your product. That is the only thing that actually ultimately has impact on the end user. So as I mentioned before, I develop a sense of impatience. It's a positive impatience if you will. That okay, I just observed a problem for our riders or for our drivers. They have to get a solution to that soon as possible and for that you have to ship ship ship.

30:57Now, you could interpret ship ship ship to be just mindlessly shipping. No, this is not about mindlessly shipping. But once you know that you're working on something that is important, that is solving a problem. It could be a big feature or a small feature. Then you have to cut down the cycle time. My biggest enemy is the cycle time of, we know it is a good thing. All the way to our user seeing it, you have to minimize that time. So that's why ship ship ship has become such a motto for me. And we try to do a lot of things internally, operationally for us to enable that. And I'll say, we still are not there.

31:34In my opinion, I think we can still be faster, we can still cut a lot of that cycle time. But we are on a constant quest to get as good as we can. What does this look like in practice, other than just reminding people, ship ship ship ship ship, just in a group eating this mantra, how do you help people ship faster? Do you point not just work all night and all day, you know, shipping long, staying long hours? Just what are some ways to actually operationalize this? I think it stems from the cutting down cycle time, which is the time it takes to make decisions. I realize that a lot of the time is not, I mean, all the time that you spend documenting the requirements or designing the product or actually writing code is time really, really well spent.

32:19All the time that is spent in between those activities to align, to discuss a decision, to not make up your mind, then have a meeting the next week, oh, let's regroup two weeks from now, that happens in our companies a lot. The question is, how do you cut that down? And for that, what we do is we have product reviews. And as much as possible, we try to come out with decisions in those product reviews. And you have to operate in a one -way door versus two -way door concept. If something is a two -way door, you have to be able to make the call quickly. And you want to make a good call, but if you get it wrong, it's okay, we can turn it back.

33:03If it is a one -way door, if it's a massive launch, sure, it's okay for it to take some deliberation, maybe it even goes through the C suite and we have a discussion. But my guidance to my team is, cut down the decision making that has to happen or the cut down that time required for the decision making between those various steps. If you think that I heard that you do, that you didn't mention that I think help with this. One is that there's a period where you ran daily stand -ups with cross -functional teams during COVID just to keep things moving. There's another story I heard where you wrote a 15 -page PRD over the weekend to unlock a stall team.

33:38Feels like these are kind of a look for opportunities to unlock, essentially. Well, I want that to be an exception rather than the rule. But yes, I want to be able to step in or I want all our leaders to be able to step in when needed. I think you have to be hands -on. You have to be hands -on when needed. You know, those two examples, we were coming out of COVID. We had a massive shortage of drivers on our platform. And we were talking about growth earlier. And we had clear goals on how we grow the number of drivers on our platform, all the way from getting new drivers in and improving the funnel, as well as retaining existing drivers.

34:18And Lenny, there was no shortage of the number of ideas. But again, there was a problem with cycle time. So I said, great, our cycle time is going to be 24 hours. And so there was, I think there was a period of about six months when we did do daily stand -ups. And they were extremely helpful to unlock the teams on making certain decisions. And we shipped a lot. And I think it took us about nine to 12 months. But we were able to come out the other side having a great number of drivers. And the great thing is that what we did in our driver and career funnel at that time is still paying off. Because the number of drivers and careers continues to continue to grow.

34:57And now we are worldwide at about a eight million number. And we were probably close to half of that when we were just out of COVID. So that's an example of where daily standards help. I try to minimize that. The PRD exam. Yes, I did write up PRD. It was a 15 page PRD. We were working on a pretty big concept. And it was a risky concept. And it was a driver facing. And that's always sort of high stakes. And we had about, by this time we have had about 20 conversations and brainstorm meetings and documents that had been written with the best intentions. But thing that was not becoming clear is, hey, what should we actually ship?

35:39Because there were a lot of good ideas and not so good ideas. But no one was actually putting you all together to say, this is what we're going to ship. So it was one Sunday night. And I literally, it took me two hours. And I just wrote down, I'm like, guys, this is my stake in the ground. We can completely change it. But this is the product we will ship. Agree or disagree. Now, the product that we eventually shipped was at least 50 % different than what I had written down. But it just catalyzed us getting to that endpoint. Now, if I were to do that every single day or every single week, then I would say there's a problem.

36:14You wouldn't have time to deliver food and give rides. That is exactly right. Or I would not have time to do hiring. Or I would not have time to do performance reviews and so on. So, but once in a while, I think it's totally fine for product leaders to step in, especially if you're trying to remove ambiguity and you're trying to just speed decisions up, it's okay to step in and be hands -on. Another tactic that I heard that I think that I want to ask you about someone anonymously said that you ask for live demos. And here's the question. He always insists on doing live demos that make everyone nervous when they present.

36:51The question is, why? So, I think they may be talking about when we do product announcements. So, when we do product announcements, externally on stage, et cetera, I do insist on actually live demoing the product. Part of this comes from, I grew up as a product manager back in the day in the 2000s at Palm. Palm, the Palm Pilot, Palm sort of was cut from the Apple clock. There were a lot of X Apple people there. And you know, you're in the consumer electronics business. And every single year, the way you would announce your product is you would get up on stage and you show the product working. And leading up to that moment was a lot of massive amount of work to make sure that it actually works on stage.

37:40Now, I will say there's an internal reason and an external reason to do this. The external reason to do this is you have to tell a story. One of my other beliefs is, which I may not have shared before, is no one actually really cares about the feature that you want to talk about. People are way too busy. You're obsessed about your products. You, your products are your life, but for your end users, your products are maybe 10 minutes of their life once a week. So their life does not center around your products. They don't care. How do you make them care? You have to tell a story. And that story comes from actually showing the product in action, rather than a lot of slideware and pictures.

38:28So that is my belief that I don't want to have Puberty about my own product. I need to be able to tell a story about how an end user will actually get value out of that. That's my external reason for why I insist on live demos. My internal reasons for why I insist on a live demo is why let us a lot of work. I think it creates a certain level of rigor ahead of time before the product is ready to launch, because if it is going up on stage, it has to work. And two, what you know, you may ask the same person who asked you this, it creates such a sense of pride amongst the product team and the engineering team to actually see their product live on stage.

39:10And now it's on video, and it will stay forever to see the product that they put their blood sweat in tears into actually working. I think that's a huge moment of pride. And I take it as personal responsibility to make sure that I can help sort of bring that moment. But yes, leading up to that is a lot of work. A lot of stress. OK, that was a great answer. Today's episode is brought to you by Coda. I personally use Coda every single day to manage my podcast and also to manage my community. So I put the questions that I plan to ask every guest that's coming on the podcast. So I put my community resources.

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40:20Like I mentioned earlier, I use Coda every single day and more than 50 ,000 teams trust Coda to keep them more aligned and focused. If your startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, go to Coda .io slashlennie today and get six months free of the team plan for startups. That's c -o -d -a .io slashlennie. To get started for free and get six months of the team plan, Coda .io slashlennie. I'm going to shift to our conversation a bit to general career advice. I've got a bunch of questions. I actually asked the community my newsletter slash community what to ask you and I had a few really good questions that I want to run by you.

41:02So one is just what are some of the most impactful and recurring pieces of advice that you share with early career product people that you find most helps them get unstuck and most helps them move to where they want to move in their career? One is go to a job where you can ship multiple products as fast as possible. Comes back to cycle time where you can let's say over a period of three to three years, you can go through three to five product cycles as fast as possible because you want to put that under your belt. Don't worry too much about how you show up in a room. Don't try to spend too much time on being the smartest guy in the room.

41:50Just define the product, work with your engineering, with your design team, with your data team and ship that product, rev that product, iterate on that product, ship the next product. What you will find as you do that over those three to three years, three years later you suddenly realize that wow, I've actually shipped a lot and the other thing that I strongly believe is what makes a great product manager is not the five amazing strategic ideas you had over those three years, it's the thousand micro decisions that you made, not the five macro decisions that you made, but the thousand micro decisions that you made.

42:30Where should I put the button? Should I put the screen there or not? What should the copy say? Do I launch this product in Atlanta or in New Jersey? You go through these and what you want at the end of that is you'll start developing an innate sense of judgment. So you want to increase your cycle time to be able to get to judgment as fast as possible because when you make a similar decision the tenth time, you don't even have to think about it, it just happens. And we constantly talk about experimentation versus gut or data versus gut. As you progress in your career, you want to develop that gut as fast as possible because in my opinion, that's where differentiates a good product manager from a great product manager that they have developed some extra level of gut and they are able to make the correct decisions because of the experience that they have had over that time.

43:23Another way to label what you're describing as product sense, which is something a lot of people are always told they should be building and are very unsure how to go about building it. And what I love about your advice here is this is how is you find a place where you could just ship over and over and over and that keep that cycle time down. And there's almost like implicit advice here is if you're working at a company that takes a long time to ship, this is probably not a good place to be starting your career. That's right. Another question from the community, this is from James Conway. He asked that, okay, you see you've been in product for about 25 years, something like that at this point, right?

44:00That's right. 24 years. 24 years. 24, okay, almost 25. I'm almost there. Oh man, that's a long time. Okay, so the question is what's remained constant throughout your career in product? And do you think that constant will hold even as AI starts to change the way that we build product and build teams? I think that our many things AI is changing and AI will change, even if I, you know, what did I work on 24 years ago or how did I do product management 24 years ago? Is different than product management today, the way we write PRDs, the way you do designs, the way you make decisions, the fact that you have access to data today didn't really exist 24 years ago.

44:44The only data that you had was surveys and those surveys took six months to run and for data to come back. And now we have instrumentation and telemetry and everything that we ship and we can analyze data. So I would say things have definitely evolved. With AI, things are just going to change even more rapidly. I've already seen on a weekly basis, we are introducing a new guy of doing things. And if you look at a typical product cycle all the way from doing market research and user research to writing the first draft of a PRD to doing the first draft of mocks, doing user research and even storytelling that we talked about, how do I actually tell the story about my product?

45:23AI is making all of that much, much easier and I think that transformation is going to happen very fast. What has not changed? What has not changed in those 24 years is you having to understand what your end users want. And I know that's kind of the cliche of product management. Like, yes, of course, I have to understand my end user ones. I think it is harder than we think. I think it takes more than we typically do to actually really get your finger on the pulse of what your end user feels. And I think that that has stayed constant. I think that is the holy grail, not just to understand one archetype of an end user.

46:02I mean, at Uber here, not only are we operational in 75 different countries, even in a single country like the US, we have different kinds of end users, whether it's demographics, whether it is socio -economic status. And for us to internalize, what do end users want? AI will definitely speed it up. But for a product manager, it is going to stay constant. The one thing I do think product managers need to be aware of is the importance of knowledge is going to stay. It's going to continue. But the importance of judgment, and as you mentioned, product sense and the gut feel, it is going to become even more important in the world of AI.

46:47And as a result of that, we need to increase that or reduce that cycle time even more so we can develop that product sense and judgment. Sort of along those lines, there's a question I got from, I don't know if he's the CT of Uber, a CT of Part of Uber, Pervine, who I believe you work with at Uber. Yeah. Okay. So the question here was asking what he hates from engineers. Does that ring any sort of bells? I think Lenny, that's a trick question he wants to get me into trouble. I'm sure. Let's get to trouble. Let's do. But let me let me tell you, I actually know the answer to this question. What I hate about engineers is when you work on a project and they say, I can't do anything because I do not have a PRD from a product manager.

47:36Now while I consider that to be important for my job security and a PM job security for a PRD to be required, I also think that the best engineers are the ones who actually don't need to start with a PRD. They can have a wide -boarding session with a PM, with a designer. They should have just an equal seat at the table in terms of what we are going to build and then they go create. They should go create and they should write a document together and they should just build. One of the things that some people like about me and some people probably hate about me is I'm very boundaryless from an all -perspective and how I operate.

48:16So if someone has a product opinion, it doesn't matter whether you're in the product org or the ops team or customer support or engineering or design. I think everyone's opinion matters and is valid and I welcome that. I welcome their participation. I don't care about org boundaries. Now, at the same time, I will have an opinion about how we message our products. I will have an opinion about maybe some engineering architecture to the extent that I understand that what I will have an opinion about an ad campaign or how we operationalize our products. So in that spirit, what I hate is if we are blocked because a certain document was not written to the entity of specificity.

48:58I love that you answered the question. That's great. I think what's also interesting along those lines is it's a lot easier now to write a good version of a PRD -slash -1 pager with AI tooling where you kind of just like here's what I want to build help me craft it into something very specific that we can use as a product requirements document. And you have so many tools now. You know, we do a lot of brainstorming, we do white voting. You could actually convert summaries of those conversations into the first draft of your PRD. So there are many tools available now. So I don't think PMs or engineers have any excuse to be blocked because of lack of fiaties.

49:35All right, amazing. I want to ask a few Uber questions. I think there's a few that a lot of people think about when they think of Uber today. The first is it feels like there's just this big elephant in the room of what has Uber become a self -driving emerges. You know, we see all these self -driving cars around. Uber has historically been drivers, people driving cars. What is the vision of where Uber goes in a world where self -driving becomes more and more of a thing? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a big area of conversation internally, externally. So absolutely agree with you on the importance of it.

50:08If you rewind back the clock, we actually had our own self -driving unit. And during COVID, we decided to divest off it. And we decided that we're going to take a partner oriented approach. And that is the approach that we have taken since then. Over the last year, we have signed about 15 partners. In fact, we just announced another partner earlier this afternoon called Mammability. So we have been announcing many, many partners when it comes to AVs. And now that's our strategy. Now, what does that actually mean? What do these partners do? What we are building is we are building a hybrid network.

50:47The hybrid network has a hybrid of human drivers and AVs on the same network. And we work with partners. We have a set of APIs that we have built. It's a very rich set of APIs. And we have partners who basically integrate with those APIs and get access to this hybrid network, this hybrid marketplace. And let me explain why that is beneficial. These cars are expensive. These are assets that need to be utilized. And if let's say a city has 500 AVs, when it is 10 .30 AM on a Tuesday, mid -morning, we know that demand is going to be really, really low. And you may have a lot of these vehicles actually sit under utilized.

51:30Whereas when it is Friday evening at 6 PM, you don't have enough cars to fulfill the demand that you will have at that point. So if any of these partners try to operate that service themselves, it can definitely work. But you're going to leave either customers dissatisfied or you're going to have under utilization. So our hybrid network really allows them to equalize that. Because when you don't have enough cars, we are able to send drivers to fulfill that demand. And then given that demand density that Uber brings, we are also able to utilize all the vehicles, even if it is 10 .30 AM on a Tuesday.

52:05So that is the value proposition of our network. We are big believers in autonomy. We think autonomy is going to lead to more safety. It is going to take some time. So as we project out, we don't know if it is going to be five years or 10 years, till it sees a certain kind of scale across the world, across many, many cities. We are in about 75 countries today. It's roughly about 15 ,000 cities. So there's a huge geographical landscape for us to capture as well. But that's our strategy. And so far, we recently launched an Austin with Weimo. And we have launched, we of course have Phoenix with Weimo.

52:48We are going to be launching Atlanta soon. We've also launched internationally in Abu Tabe with our partner Weride. And then there are many more launches that are going to come down the road. So by the way, I talked about mobility. Delivery has something similar. So we have sidewalk robots with many partners who in a town -down area for a short distance delivery, I'm actually doing cousins of deliveries today. Oh, well, I've seen those robots are very cute. I never, I always like wonder how they get to the where they're going. But clearly it's working. The Weimo thing I've totally noticed that Weimo basically, in some form, has decided to move away from their own app in many cities and Uber is how you get a Weimo, which I don't think a lot of people understand.

53:32So what I'm hearing is essentially the strategy is just be the super app for getting around and getting food and Uber drivers are part of that and part of that is autonomous vehicles. And is the idea over time it will stay that way. They'll always be in need for humans to drive cars for a long time. I will answer that in two ways actually. I think for a long, long time there will be a need for humans to drive cars. There are pickup and drop -off spots that AVs can't go to today. There are going to be regulatory hurdles that we have to get across before AVs are everywhere and so on and so forth.

54:12Second, we have a mission to make sure that we can provide a great earnings opportunity on the Uber platform. Today that is fulfilled by driving people and delivering food or delivering groceries but that list is going to continue to expand. And we want to make sure that we offer more and more earnings opportunities on our platform. I mean, even me going back to dog fooding about, I think about a year ago, I also started picking up groceries because now we have a pretty large grocery business and I have gone and I've carried crates of water up a flight of stairs and delivered that to the doorstep and you know and there are more things that we will do as well.

54:55We have a partnership with Walmart where we may send a courier who may pick up 15 different bags and deliver it to 15 different homes. So the need for human drivers on a platform or human earners, I would say, is just going to continue to increase because we're going to have multiple earning opportunities for them over time. I love that visual of you carrying up big jugs of water to some random person's house. I think that tipped me well. I think that was a good tip. By the way, what do you do with the money earned from this? Is it just keep it or it's like it goes somewhere? It's so we have a policy that the money actually is not kept by us.

55:33We refund it back to the riders or to the eaters. And you just, what do they see when they get this refund? They're just like enjoy. Actually, that's a good question. I think they see the, I don't think that it says that this is because it was delivered by an Uber employee. It's a good question. I should go back and see what it says. We're doing it. We're doing it. We're docked footing right here. Yeah. Okay. Another question that I want to touch on is Uber. I feel like Uber was one of the first companies to take profitability really seriously. I remember Dara meant tweeting or sharing this insight during COVID, I think, of just like investors and public markets are now valuing cash profitability.

56:19We need to change the way we operate. And you guys have clearly done that. It must have been a pretty hard thing to do for a company that was used to just, you know, like famously all these companies raised a bunch of money, scaled like crazy, blitz, what is a blitz scaled? There's a read -off call that. And then making a big change like that, I imagine it's very hard. What was that experience like just kind of switching cultures from just raised money, go crazy to profitable cash flow sort of business? I think it was awesome. I think it was a great, great period because if you're taking inefficiency out of your system and you're taking the dollars you saved back into the business or back into the end -user's pocket or the driver's pocket, that's just a great feeling.

57:06And as you said, doing that is not easy. It's actually very, very hard, but that's where real innovation actually kicks in. Let me give you an example. One of the ways that you would take cost out of the system in the delivery world is to batch trips together. So when a career is delivering from point A to point B, maybe they can deliver two packages. They pick both of them up at point A and they deliver them to point B and to point C and point B and point C happen to be close together. And there, we just delivered a lot of efficiency with the career style. And now you multiply that by a thousand different ideas that we may have both in the mobility business as well as the delivery business.

57:46And it's a grind, Lenny, there was a grind in terms of how do we take inefficiency out of something like that, which is our core marketplace logic? How do we take inefficiency out of how we do promotions? How do we take inefficiencies out of support costs, payment costs, background check costs, there are many, many pockets. And some of that required building new paradigms and building new software. And when you actually save that money and you're able to put that back into the business and become a profitable company so that you don't go under and your stock price goes up, that's actually feels very, very rewarding.

58:22So I think that data has done an excellent job driving that. And I think the company has done an excellent job responding to that. And I feel that that still goes on today. Yes, we became profitable about two years ago. And now, you know, we are driving great margin quarter to quarter, but the spirit of making sure that our core is solid in terms of efficiency, it continues to feed the system and continues to allow us to then make more bets that may be outside of the core. I imagine a lot of companies are going through this same sort of experience now, trying to get cost, trying to be efficient, the government, those governments going through this.

59:03It's very difficult to do well with that, you know, cutting things that are really dear to people, especially like at a product company, big bets that are going to maybe pay off on the future, big innovations, things people are really excited about. Is there any, for people trying to do this at their company, do you have any tips, like, I don't know, one or two tips to do this well, to keep morale up to not lose sight of big opportunities in the future, anything there? Yeah, I think we divested out of two big businesses, which were our self -driving unit as well as what we call Uber Elevate, which and we divested out of both of them during COVID.

59:38COVID was a very special time for us, if I could use that term, our mobility business dropped by 80 % overnight, and I think that Dara and the leadership team actually showed tremendous leadership during that time. And one of those was to make those calls to divest out of those businesses. Now, I think an important part to remember is you could be on the quest to just drive profitability and you may lose your sight on new growth bets as we call them here, and how do you do that? So I have my framework on this, which is I think of our portfolio as concentric circles. The center of that concentric circle, the core is our core product.

1:00:24We do 33 million trips every single day. And if you think of a typical Uber trip or an Uber delivery, there is a multi -point failure possibility all the way from you opening the app to a driver accepting, are you doing the pickup, doing the drop -off, and you're getting a receipt, and then similarly, there are a number of steps on the each side. And we obsess over making sure that that core is as raw as possible. And also to our point about profitability is as efficient as possible as well. So imagine taking even one cent of efficiency out of 33 million trips every day, the numbers just really start to add up.

1:01:06So you have to make sure that you're spending, you're paying a lot of attention to that. As I go out and dog food, I'm dog fooding the core mostly and making sure that it is flawless in my own little way. And if you're spending enough attention on that, then you get the license to expand out of that core and start to think about other growth pets. By the way, this is where Uber each came from back in the day. This is where Uber groceries come from, which is now a very large business for us. And on the right side, Uber reserve, Uber 14s, which is something I launched a couple of years ago, are focused on taxis.

1:01:43And there are many other growth pets that are now in the billions of dollars, in total. That's where it came from because we are making sure that the core is being paid attention to. And it's giving us the license to sort of go out of that in that concentric circle. There's another area of Uber that it feels like a shifting a bit. So historically, I know a lot of people that have worked at Uber over the years or Uber has this reputation of being very data driven, very ruthless with hurtization. A lot of what you've been talking about is feels like the opposite of just anecdotes and experiences empathy.

1:02:18So let me ask you this question. What's something that you, as a company, as a leadership team chose to do that was not what the data was telling you to do? Could be a feature, could be a whole big bet that ended up being successful. I have a few. And each of those could have gotten me fired, Lenny. It was that sort of gut -based. I'll give you a few examples. When I joined, I was working on safety. And safety is a big issue on the Uber platform. It was a very, very big issue back in 2017. We had not built enough software to be able to manage safety in the physical world. So while safety in terms of incident reduction, look at the number of incidents you're having, and then you just, just like a growth hacking project, you just drive that number down, needing to do whatever you can.

1:03:09I said in addition to that, we also need to incorporate a lot of functionality and features and UI in the product both on the rider side and the driver side, which is delivering a sentiment of safety. And making sure people feel safe, you know, 99 .9 % of our trips are totally fine from a safety perspective, but that doesn't mean that people are not concerned. So we, in addition to driving down the incidents, we also have to develop a bunch of features so that they feel safe. And that actually helped a lot because we started hearing from our users that, oh, we measure something called safety sentiment, and that safety sentiment has been going up a lot.

1:03:49So I would say that was sort of back in the day that I drove. Another crazy one was I pushed the company to work with taxis. If you look at my resume, I worked at a company called Flywheel, which is a taxi app company. And so I spent three years there. That's what got me into transportation or being interested in transportation and eventually ended up at Uber. And Uber and Taxis have always had an issue with each other. We all know the history. And I was saying, no, we should actually launch with Taxis. If now if you look at the data, the data will tell you that the number of Taxis is going down that the Taxis are not very reliable, that Taxis have antiquated software in them, that taxi drivers may not want to provide the same level of service, so on and so forth.

1:04:38And there's a little bit of a gut feeling. I said, no, look, there are drivers who want to make money, who do not always have enough demand. We have a lot of demand. If we put the right incentives in place, we will be able to create a structure where we can work together productively. And today in the US, I think we operate Taxis in about 10 to 15 different cities in New York City, by the way, every single yellow cab is hillable through the Uber app. And that is generating a pretty large amount of revenue for us. And we have Taxis all over the world as well. So that was probably another one where the data just didn't support my gut decision.

1:05:18And the last one I would say is Uber for teenagers. There are so many reasons to not do that, by the way. You go talk to parents and they're like, I am never putting my team in an Uber. And if you talk to the risk people in the company, they're like, we are not going to put teenagers in our cars. And there's a lot of liability. I happen to be the father of a 16 year old and a 12 year old. And I can tell you that one of the biggest problems in our household is gets transportation. And I'm like, how can that not be a problem? And how can if anyone is going to solve a transportation problem, shouldn't that be Uber?

1:05:54And so how can we build a product? So I started with, let's just build a product that is going to solve every single one of these problems that parents have in terms of safety. So it launched that two years ago, it's been growing really, really well. And in fact, in California for several reasons, we had to turn the product off. And I get emails every single day from parents in California about why did we have to turn that product off? So I would say a lot of the growth pets that we actually make may not have the best data, you know, supporting them. But as long as we understand intrinsically what the end user wants and the problems that we need to fix, I think you have to kind of go with your gut.

1:06:35And I would say when it comes to transportation, we still have not solved a lot of problems that people have. And so that's all headroom for us. Very cool. On the taxis point, I've always thought, like taxis are like great in so many ways. They just now exactly had to get places. They're so like, they're like very knowledgeable. And they just get to done. It's not like the most pleasant experience, but they're very good at what they do. And so I think it makes so much sense to integrate and reminds me also my wife always jokes. There's always startups that like come in, disrupt the whole industry like Airbnb's another example.

1:07:09And then they end up just kind of providing the same service. Oh, okay, cool. And that we got taxis again. They're very good. Exactly. They're very efficient. They know the city like the back of the head. Yeah, especially in the UK, the whole knowledge thing. Okay, I'm going to take us to a couple of recurring segments on this podcast. The first is AI corner. Is there some way you've figured out how to use AI in your work, some AI tool to help you work better, to help you work faster, to get better work done? I would say that team is using a lot of tools. No, that team is using tools to build initial prototypes, initial mocks, I should say, the teams using that for user research to be able to process information as well.

1:07:53What are some of the tools if you can aim them? We're using both chat GPT as well as Gemini, quite heavily in the company. We have closed relationships with both the companies. Specifically, I end up using chat GPT a lot for summarization of documents. That's one thing. I mean, all of us have too much to read and we don't have enough time. I've not used notebook LM yet. I know a lot of people who have started using it and that is the next thing that I'm going to use, just to be able to build an audio podcast based on a bunch of information that you can consume. I think that's awesome. What I've been doing is I have been using chat GPT and Gemini to summarize long user research documents.

1:08:35Some of these reports, they are 50 to 100 pages long. I will never have the time to read them. That's really making me much, much better acquainted with Pro. This is what riders in South Africa feel and this is what's happening in Brazil. This is what's happening in Korea. That has been a huge enabler. The second thing that I have really, really started liking is the deep research feature. The deep research feature in, again, both Gemini as well as chat GPT, where you feed them a prompt. You actually present a pretty hard other day. We were thinking of a driver feature. It's a driver feature that has been discussed a lot in the past.

1:09:14We haven't done it. I just asked chat GPT, deep research. Here's the feature. This is how it would work. Can you let me know if drivers will like it or not like it? Is there anything we can change about that feature for the drivers to like it? It presented me an answer, which I would say it's an amazing research assistant. It's absolutely a starting point for a brainstorm with my team, with some really, really good idea. I think that that is making us not just more productive. I think it's actually going to make us better at our jobs. That is an incredible use case. Essentially, it's a thought partner on strategy and helping you find gaps in your thinking.

1:09:56I think for Uber, it's easier because these crawlers can learn a lot about what Uber is for some products. They won't know as much, but clearly there's something you could do there, for whatever your product is. By the way, it's cool that you guys give access to GFGPT. A lot of companies don't. A lot of companies only have Gemini out here, something like that. I'm going to take us to another corner on the podcast. I call a fail corner. What fail corner is about is people come on the podcast. They share all these wins. Cool. Taxis worked. And teens worked. And safety worked. And we got profitable.

1:10:29Everything's just going great all the time. But in reality, that's not how it goes. Is there a story you could share where something went wrong, something didn't work out the way you expected in your career and what you learned from that? I still somehow, when I think about it, I don't end up calling it a fail. But absolutely, you could call it a fail because the product didn't work or the business didn't work and so on. I was at Palm a long time ago. Palm developed a Palm Pilot. And then it went into the phone business. Some of your listeners may have used them. Some of your listeners may be too young to remember.

1:11:05And then there was a period of time when it was really Blackberry and Palm, or the two smartphones on the market, especially here in the US. And then Apple announced the iPhone and then soon thereafter Android was announced by Google. And it took us a long time to respond to that. It took us maybe three, four years to respond to that. And in the end, HP, what Palm? We did not have the level of scale or the level of hardware quality that we needed to have to be able to effectively compete with the likes of Apple. When you are going through the motions, when you are actually in the moment, you don't always realize what's going to happen.

1:11:48You also think that, oh, we will be able to recover and we will be able to compete. But I think there are many, many things that I learned from that. And I always keep that very close to my heart. In consumer markets, if you are player number three or player number four, it's a little hard. Because the two top players are going to compete with each other so ferociously that it's especially if they are scale players like Apple and Google, it's difficult for number three and number four to be able to keep up with that unless you have a very, very unique angle. And the way I use that now is I am, Lenny, always paranoid, about the number three or the number four player or the number two player who may have an innovative idea, who may try a different strategy, who may try a different go -to market, I just never take the status quo for granted.

1:12:42So that's sort of one learning. And I think the second learning is speed and hustle and resilience. After I spent time at a couple of startups, I mentioned Flywheel, which was a taxi company, which is also not able to scale. But what I learned through that period is that hustle and sense of urgency is extremely important. So when I think of my portfolio of skill sets right now, really, that's portfolio that I have developed from a lot of failures over my career. And those are, I would say, sense of urgency because you need to move fast, because status quo can never be taken for granted. And second is resilience, because times will be hard and things will be difficult.

1:13:29And you just have to power through them. And you have to keep building for your end users through that and the times will change. So I would say those are the things that I've learned and those are my failures. I can see where this motto of ship, ship, ship came from. It does absolutely a causation there. Such an is there anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to a very exciting lightning round? I can talk a little bit about how I think about, I think I've talked a lot about end users, but I cannot talk about end users enough. So in terms of offering my unique take, which may be completely flawed, but that is my unique take.

1:14:09I'll offer I love this, which is I don't think our relationship with our end users is reciprocal. And which means when I wake up in the morning, all I'm thinking about is how can we make our products better for our end users? When end users wake up in the morning, all they're thinking about is I have to do this at my job. I have many complexities, many problems in my life. And that's what occupies their mind all the time. They're not thinking about you. They're not thinking about your product as much as that may be, you know, a hit to your ego. However, for those and I'm talking about let's say Uber rides, for those 15 minutes in the day when they do think about your product, that is your opportunity to absolutely dazzle them.

1:14:56Like give them an experience that they will not forget, but it will be so seamless for them that they don't have to think about. So next day when they're again going to work, they just open the Uber app just as as muscle memory. But do not expect their life to be centered around your product. Their life is complex. All of our lives are complex. You're just trying to be a part of their lives. You're not trying to take over their lives. You never will. I love this advice. There's a there's a book that I loved that is for writing. And the title is Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit. Yes. And that's a applies exactly to product.

1:15:36Smart end reason has this quote where I think it's everyone's time is already allocated. They don't have time for your product. They have stuff to do in their day. And to hit that bar is very high. And so I think that's a really important reminder. Thank you for sharing that. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? I am. Number one, what are two or three books that you have recommended most other people? Maybe a boring answer, but these are the books I believe in. I recommended the Steve Jobs book by Walter I sixen. I have recommended Elon Musk book.

1:16:13I have I have read the Ashley Wants one fully. I'm in the middle of the Walter I six one. And I have recommended hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz. These are the three books. I think that there was a period of time in Silicon Valley, maybe 10 years ago, and maybe this is still true, but everyone wanted to be Steve Jobs. And they thought that they can just recreate being Steve Jobs. There was sort of this fever in the valley. And the reason why you want to listen or read that book is you need to understand the context of what makes up the entire person. Yes, the person part is important, but how they apply their own context to the products that they shipped and they changed the world is important because not that I or anyone else can recreate what they did or what they're doing, but take the learnings from them and see how you can apply the same principles to your context.

1:17:10You're not going to behave the same way that they did. You're not going to build products the same way that they did, but you're going to give it your absolute freaking best because that's what your end users deserve. And you're not going to compromise on that. That's sort of what my take away is. And I think that take away is extremely strong in the books that I talked about. And the Ben Horowitz book, it goes back to my concept of resilience. We have some people have this really optimistic view of how life is in the corporate world or in the product world or in the CEO office. It's not so. These are lonely jobs.

1:17:45These are hard things. And how do you persist through that? I felt that that book was amazing at teaching teaching. Need that. Amazing. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or favorite TV show? My favorite recent TV show is Peaky Blinders. Peaky Blinders is on Netflix. It's based in the 1920s. And now they're in the 1930s. I'm on season six. It's it's Irish family. That's in a town called Birmingham and they go through all these years. And they do all sorts of bad things. But again, it's an amazing story. So I highly recommend watching it. I started watching it, but I didn't stay with it.

1:18:21So maybe I got to revisit it. Do you have a favorite product that you have recently discovered that you really like? It is the product that makes me or you wokes that emotion in me right now is deep research from chat to be because I've never had a research assistant. And I keep going back to that research assistant. And I think it's an excellent product. I'm sure it will improve further, but that would be my favorite product recently. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to and work or in life? Yes. And my kids are sick and tired of hearing this from me now, which is just focus on the inputs.

1:19:04You have input metrics in life and in work and you have output metrics. You can't really control the output metrics.

1:19:15All you are trying to get good grades or become very good at high school sports or you're trying to ship a great product or you're trying to improve retention or churn or whatever. You can only control the inputs of focus on the inputs. I wonder what context you use with your kids. But anyway, final question. You shared a really good tip for having not annoyed an Uber driver. What about as food delivery person? What can a customer of eats do to avoid pissing off a delivery occur? If they're delivering food to your home at night, turn the port slide on. Because they've just driven in the dark. They don't know your house.

1:20:02They're trying really, really hard to find your house. And after that, they turn the flashlight on on their phone and they're trying to find the door where they can place the food just on the light on. That makes so. I'm super guilty of forgetting that sometimes. And they also don't want to be shot by someone thinking they're sneaking around. This was incredible. Two final questions. Working folks find you online if they want to reach out, follow up on anything. And how can listeners be useful to you? Send me a message on LinkedIn. I will say that I've been guilty of not establishing an online presence and writing, life and work have just taken over.

1:20:39I need to do a better job. Maybe your blog, your podcast will really help you with that. But yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place. And how can listeners be useful to you? Well, back to my dog fooding theme. Send me feedback. Send me feedback. Hopefully everyone is an Uber user whether it's rides or whether it's eats. Send me feedback of how we can get better as a product. And the more detailed your feedback are the better it is. It's very easy to say this doesn't work or that doesn't work. But if you actually describe and say, Hey, this is what happened. I was doing this and then this happened.

1:21:18This didn't make sense. This is how you can change it. I think that'll be extremely valuable to me. Only 40 page reports accepted. Just kidding. So, Aachen, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Lenny. Thank you for having me. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode.