Lenny's PodcastBrian Tolkin: How twin turbine jets shape Uber and Opendoor
How product and ops fly as a twin turbine jet plane at Uber and Opendoor; calm leadership and product reviews as collaboration, not a firing squad.
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Scaling Uber and Opendoor: Marrying Product, Ops, and Calm Leadership
- Brian Tolkin, now Head of Product and Design at Opendoor and early Uber employee, shares how deep operational experience made him a better product leader at two highly operational tech companies. He explains how Uber and Opendoor treat product and operations as a "twin-turbine jet"—each powerful alone but maximized together—and how that insight led to Uber’s pioneering product operations function. The conversation dives into running effective product reviews, applying jobs-to-be-done in a low-frequency, high-stakes market like real estate, and balancing data with intuition when A/B testing is constrained. Tolkin also reflects on intense launch stories, navigating Zillow’s failed competitive move into iBuying, and the importance of staying calm under pressure to lead teams through chaos.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasDeep operational experience creates stronger, more grounded product leaders.
Working in ops forced Tolkin to understand how the business truly works—talking to customers daily, managing local metrics, and seeing real-world constraints—giving him a far better foundation for deciding what to build and how to build it scalably.
Treat product and operations as equal partners, not competing functions.
Uber and Opendoor use the "twin-turbine jet" metaphor: product and ops can each run alone for a while, but the system performs best when both power the plane together, with ops providing fast iteration and qualitative insight and product turning those into scalable systems.
Build structured feedback loops between centralized product and distributed ops.
At Uber, a formal product operations function sat with product but reported into ops, owning the two-way pipeline: rolling out new features globally and channeling market insights back into the roadmap, closing the gap between HQ and local markets.
In ops-heavy businesses, be ruthlessly clear on where tech leverage matters most.
Early Uber engineering focused almost exclusively on dispatching and pricing, consciously deprioritizing tooling and growth systems until the core matching and pricing engine worked; similar discipline helped Opendoor decide what to automate and what to leave manual for longer.
Product reviews should feel like collaboration, not a firing squad.
Tolkin designs reviews around two explicit goals—accountability and making the product better—keeps groups small, uses templates that emphasize problem and customer context, and is deliberate about presenting leadership ideas as hypotheses, not mandates.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesThe people closest to the problems also have the best context to solve that problem.
— Brian Tolkin
Uber always had this mentality of a twin turbine jet plane… it’s operating most efficiently and effectively if both [product and ops] are working together.
— Brian Tolkin
Computers are deterministic but humans aren’t, so building products that have a little bit more flex or fail-safes becomes paramount.
— Brian Tolkin
You’re never as good as you think you are, you’re never as bad as you think you are.
— Brian Tolkin
Product is finding the kernel of truth in a sea of ambiguity and signals.
— Brian Tolkin
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