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Brian 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.

Lenny RachitskyhostBrian Tolkinguest
Aug 4, 20241h 14mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:14

    Brian’s background

    1. LR

      You've worked at two businesses that have done incredibly well combining product and ops.

    2. BT

      Uber always have this mentality, and Opendoor does too, of the product operations twin turbine jet plane where you can, like, fly the plane on one engine for a little bit if you need to, but it's operating most efficiently and effectively if both are working together.

    3. LR

      What has having been in ops done to make you a better product leader?

    4. BT

      Give a really deep understanding of how the business actually works is a pretty good foundation for them going on to say, "Okay, what do we actually want to build in a more, uh, scalable technology way?"

    5. LR

      Something else I've heard that you're very good at is staying very calm under pressure.

    6. BT

      I've slept on the floor in China before launching UberPOOL, and, like, when you reflect the stress onto your teams, everybody tenses up. It counterintuitively doesn't produce better outcomes.

    7. LR

      (instrumental music) Today my guest is Brian Tolkin. Brian is currently head of product and design at Opendoor. Before that, he spent nearly five years at Uber, where he joined as employee 100 before Uber had UberX or UberPOOL or any kind of shared rides. He actually started on the ops team at Uber, moved into product, ended up leading product and launch of UberPOOL and then taking it global. He also started the product operations function at Uber before that function was really even a thing, which I didn't know until the chat that we had. In our conversation, Brian shares a ton of lessons about building products with a heavy operational component, also how to run great product reviews, how he implements the jobs to be done framework at Opendoor successfully, the story behind Zillow trying to compete with Opendoor, failing, and then partnering instead, plus a ton of great stories from the early days of Uber and Opendoor, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Brian Tolkin. Brian, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

    8. BT

      Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

    9. LR

      First of all, just a huge thank you to Keyvan Baigpour for connecting us, introducing us. He said all kinds of amazingly nice things about you. He also gave me some very hard questions to ask you. I hope you've come prepared.

    10. BT

      Terrific. Put me in the hot seat.

  2. 2:14 – 2:49

    Career beginnings at Uber

    1. BT

    2. LR

      Okay. I want to spend a bunch of time talking about product and ops. You started your career in operations at Uber. You actually started on the ops team, and you moved into product. You've also worked at both Uber and at Opendoor, which have both huge operational components. I think it's really rare that people, one, see a company scale to the heights of Uber and Opendoor with such a heavy operational component that are still tech companies. And, also, it's really where someone starts in ops and then moves into product and ends up where you are, where you're chief product officer at really successful company. So, I have a bunch of questions here.

  3. 2:49 – 6:47

    Transitioning from product operations to product management

    1. LR

      Maybe the first is just, what has having been in ops done to make you a better product leader? How does that change the way that you operate as a product leader?

    2. BT

      Starting on the operations side gave a really deep understanding of, like, how the business actually works, right? You are, you are truly operating it day in and day out, and the success of the city is, you know, in large part driven by the input that you are putting into it every single day on the ground, and whether or not there was rain that weekend, uh, which was (laughs) a nice driver of metrics, but talking to customers every single day, like, one-on-one onboarding drivers, uh, responding to support tickets. There's no centralized support team. There was no closer to the customer, right? And then, so I think that foundation, actually, for really understanding what moves the business and being super close to the customer actually is a, is a pretty good foundation for them going on to say, "Okay, what do we actually want to build in a more, um, scalable technology way?"

    3. LR

      (instrumental music) This episode is brought to you by Pendo, the only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application. Tired of bouncing around multiple tools to uncover what's really happening inside your product? With all the tools you need in one simple-to-use platform, Pendo makes it easy to answer critical questions about how users are engaging with your product and then turn those insights into action, all so you can get your users to do what you actually want them to do. First, Pendo is built around product analytics, seeing what your users are actually doing in your apps so that you can optimize their experience. Next, Pendo lets you deploy in-app guides that lead users through the actions that matter most. Then, Pendo integrates user feedback so that you can capture and analyze what people actually want. And the new thing in Pendo, session replays, a very cool way to visualize user sessions. I am not surprised at all that over 10,000 companies use it today. Visit pendo.io/lenny to create your free Pendo account today and start building better experiences across every corner of your product. P.S. You want to take your product-led know-how a step further? Check out Pendo's lineup of free certification courses led by top product experts and designed to help you grow and advance in your career. Learn more and experience the power of the Pendo platform today at pendo.io/lenny.

    4. BT

      Pendo.

    5. LR

      This episode is brought to you by Explo, a game changer for customer-facing analytics and data reporting. Are your users craving more dashboards, reports, and analytics within your product? Are you tired of trying to build it yourself? As a product leader, you probably have these requests in your roadmap, but the struggle to prioritize them is real. Building analytics from scratch can be time-consuming, expensive, and a really challenging process. Enter Explo. Explo is a fully white-labeled embedded analytics solution designed entirely with your user in mind. Getting started is easy. Explo connects to any relational database or warehouse, and with its low-code functionality you can build and style dashboards in minutes. Once you're ready, simply embed the dashboard or report into your application with a tiny code snippet. The best part? Your end users can use Explo's AI features for their own report and dashboard generation, eliminating customer data requests for your support team.Build and embed a fully white labeled analytics experience in days. Try for free at explo.co/lenny. That's E-X-P-L-O.co/lenny. I've seen that a lot of companies, and this was definitely true at Airbnb, where the product team kind of looks down a little bit on the ops team, where they're like, "Oh, we're gonna... We're doing things that are gonna scale to millions of users. We're doing these things that are gonna apply to everyone." There's this like ops team over there doing a few things that are gonna not scale. They keep asking us for things to build for their one-off ideas.

  4. 6:47 – 10:00

    Product and operations synergy

    1. LR

      Uh, what do you think that product teams often maybe miss or don't understand about the ops teams that would help them see them in a different light?

    2. BT

      Yeah, it's great, it's a great question, and I think Uber always had this mentality, and Opendoor does too, of, um, kind of like a twin turbine jet, jet plane where you can like fly the plane on one engine for a little bit if you need to, but it's operating most efficiently and effectively if, if, if both are working together. And, uh, and I think that's, that's really true, right? The, the reality is operations teams, local teams can iterate faster, can, uh, scale talking to customers really mu- much more efficiently, uh, have great qualitative insights and so if, if it's less... If it's seen more as like a harmony instead of a, a competition, I think that, that, that's really, really helpful, where it's like, okay, how do we get the insights that are happening day in and day out in the field on the ground, whatever that may be, and help us build better products because of that, right? Like a PM sitting in San Francisco can't be in, in Opendoor's case, 50 markets walking houses every single day, in Uber's case, you know, whatever, 1000 cities, understanding the nuances of safety in South America, right? That's just like not, not possible. But what you can do is foster a really good relationship and a really good feedback loop of how people who do deeply understand those things can help give, give insights. Now it's actually the birth of, um, product operations was, was sort of that, that insight as well.

    3. LR

      Can you say more on that?

    4. BT

      Yeah, sure. So sorry, I, I should probably define what, what product operations was at, at, at Uber and it was basically this notion that we've had a centralized... This was later in my career at, at, at Uber, but we had a centralized product team, um, building stuff mostly in San Francisco, not strictly true there are offices but at this point around the world, but, um, mostly in San Francisco, and then we had a very globally distributed operations team. And there's sort of a bidirectional feedback loop that wasn't, wasn't super strong in that, that, that feedback loop was basically when the EPD teams in San Francisco built new features, how do we effectively put it in global markets and then how do we effectively get input from global markets to better build features. And, uh, so one solution to that problem, our solution at the time was to start up a new function called product operations, who had accountability and reported into operations, but physically sat with and operated much like, um, a member of the product team to help solve that gap.

    5. LR

      Is that maybe the first time there's a... Like, did you invent product operations as a function?

    6. BT

      (laughs) I, I, I don't, I don't think so because at the time, I believe Google had, had a function... I can't remember what Google called it. It was something slightly different. But I met with a few folks who had, uh, had been in similar type roles at Google and a couple other places. So I, I, I, I don't take credit for, for certainly for, for inventing it. And other people have sort of actually dabbled in this model at, at Uber before me. Uh, there was just a, a formalization of it and then actual building out of the organization, et cetera, et cetera.

    7. LR

      Did none of that... Uh, sounds like you basically helped make it a thing. Uh, I know you... You don't want to... You're being very modest,

  5. 10:00 – 12:18

    Surge pricing at Uber

    1. LR

      I think.

    2. BT

      (laughs)

    3. LR

      Um, coming back to your point about decentralized operations teams, something I've read is that surge pricing came out of one GM in a market just testing, emailing all the drivers, "Hey, we're gonna give you extra if you drive on Saturday night." Is that true?

    4. BT

      That would've been probably a little bit before my time.

    5. LR

      Okay.

    6. BT

      Um, but that being said, one thing that is true is that, um, surge pricing for, for actually quite some times, right, all of 2012, certainly 2013 probably, I don't know, when, when we necessarily switched, was, uh, very much a human in the loop system or a very manual system where GMs in every city would control basically the parameters in which surge would operate. And so, um, much of the time that would mean, for example, like Mondays and Friday, uh, there would be no surge. Like, it was just... It, it couldn't flip on. And then Friday nights and, and Saturday nights it would flip on from whatever you set, 7:00 PM to 3:00 AM and the cap was, you know, x, whatever the cap was. And then within those parameters, the algorithm would, would optimize for what the price was. But yeah, GM controlled whether it was on or off and what geographies, um, were surging.

    7. LR

      Wow, I didn't know that. Was that out of a, we believe we are better than the algorithms or we just don't have time to make them amazing yet, so we're just gonna help, help them along?

    8. BT

      Yeah. Um, I think it was... It was probably a function of, of a bunch of stuff. One of which is like, hey, this is a fairly new concept and it's, it's powerful and, uh, uh, dangerous and so let's, like, make sure we understand what's happening. The second is kind of this belief that, yeah, local city teams know their cities best. And so you might know that an event is happening, a baseball game gets out, right? And it's like, oh, I know that this baseball game is going to get out at 10:00 PM so I'm going to set surge at 9:45, right? And the algorithm may not be, may not be able to pick that up. And then the third is, yeah, the technical constraint of like nowadays clearly it's all automated, uh, but it's, it's really hard to build a fully dynamic, always on, um, geospatially aware-... pricing system. And that's just a little bit of time.

    9. LR

      That makes sense.

  6. 12:18 – 15:47

    Scaling challenges, and stories

    1. LR

      Uh, I feel like you're full of wild stories from your time at Uber. Is there one that comes to mind of just... And I think you, like, helped scale in China UberPOOL?

    2. BT

      Yeah.

    3. LR

      Uh, maybe that's one. I don't know. What's... Can you share a wild story from early Uber days?

    4. BT

      Yeah, so in the, in the early days of, of Uber, one, one kind of fun story is, uh, obviously UberX is, is our main, mainstream product, but has a, a, a kind of funny, silly name, um, Uber, UberX. Uh, this, this product in the early days was, uh, going to be all hybrids and had a, had a bunch of different, uh, potential names. I was not, um, personally driving this. This was someone else on the operations team, but they built the model for what this product could be and there's no name for it yet, so it was going to be a placeholder. So what do you put as a placeholder? X, so UberX, and then the company was moving quickly enough, the product got, got green light and launched, and here we are, I don't know, 12 years later, 11, 11 years later, whatever it is, and, uh, UberX is the name that stuck, so...

    5. LR

      That is hilarious. I love it. So it was a placeholder.

    6. BT

      Yeah.

    7. LR

      It's like many products start that way where they're like, "This is just a temporary name." And then like, "Okay, I guess everyone just knows it this way now, we're gonna stick with it."

    8. BT

      Exactly. Too, too expensive to change and rebrand at this point.

    9. LR

      That's an awesome story.

    10. BT

      One that, um, is good about scaling Uber, UberPOOL in China is... Yes, so we were launching UberPOOL in China and this was going to be... China at the time was pretty big for, for Uber, but UberPOOL was not there yet, and so we were gonna... We were gonna launch and myself and a few other folks, uh, were, were in Chengdu, China, which is the, the first Chinese market that we were launching UberPOOL in, and, uh, we were gonna, you know, be on the ground t- to, to, to launch. Um, we wanted to go live at, I believe it was 6:00 AM for rush hour on, I don't remember the day, but whatever, Monday morning. And, uh, so we're there over the weekend, um, getting, getting ready to set up, and at the same time we were doing some, uh, data center testing. And so we flipped on all the testing infrastructure and, and thought it was going to work and nothing works. Uh, and the, the matching algorithm just isn't, isn't working. I'm like, "Oh my God, now it's, you know, whatever." 5:00 PM the day before we're supposed to go live, 6:00 PM, 7:00 PM, "Okay, let's get on the phone with the US, try and figure out what's going on." I remember I slept about 30 minutes that night between 2:00 and 3:00 AM, uh, being like, "Okay, well we, like, we have to go live at, at 6:00 AM." I think there was some press around it, right? Like, we were planning on going live, uh, and I think we got everything finally working at probably about 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning, and, uh, launched just in the nick of time. And I'll, I'll, I'll never forget. It was... We launched, it was great, we monitored, everything was good, and then we walked out, um, for breakfast at like 7:30 in the morning, everyone's sleep-deprived, no one, no one slept all night. And we got this, um, these like pancake street food things. And I, I have to imagine they were not that good, but in my mind they were like the best meal I've ever had in my life. So... (laughs)

    11. LR

      It's like a meal after a marathon or a-

    12. BT

      Yeah, exactly.

    13. LR

      ... or a big hike.

    14. BT

      Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

    15. LR

      Everything's so delicious. This comes up a lot, of just like these moments that are so incredibly stressful and hard and sleep-deprived end up being like the best memories and the best stories to tell and things you look back at fondly. It's so weird how human nature is like that.

    16. BT

      Yeah,

  7. 15:47 – 25:38

    Opendoor and Covid adaptations

    1. BT

      I mean, another one more, more recent for, for Opendoor, um, was, uh, we... Um, when COVID hit, right? We, like physically, we buy and sell homes and so we were physically going into people's homes and, uh, you know, suddenly March 2020, like, going into people's homes was not, uh, (laughs) not something you were, people were comfortable with. And you look at the real estate data coming out of China at the time and it, it looked like sort of coming to a standstill. And so, you know, we, we actually turned off the core business and we stopped buying homes for a few months 'cause we're like, "Hey, we, we can't go in and we don't know if anyone's gonna be buying, uh, any homes. And so, you know, what do, what do we do?" And, and we took those few months and then, uh, came out the other side and had virtualized the whole process, and that was pretty stressful, right? 'Cause you're looking at a business that relies on going into people's homes and suddenly you can't do that anymore. What, what do you do? So again, a fond memory to look back on, a very stressful time in the moment, uh, where, where it feels very, very difficult.

    2. LR

      Just since you mentioned Opendoor.

    3. BT

      Yes.

    4. LR

      I think many people have heard of Opendoor. Maybe just give a quick explanation of what Opendoor does for people that a- aren't exactly sure.

    5. BT

      So we're a digital platform to buy and sell real estate. Um, the, the core product today, um, is a seller-focused product where people can go online, um, enter some information about their home and we'll make, um, an all cash offer to be able to sell sort of with simplicity and, and, and certainty. And, uh... Yeah, so, so the, the product really works for people who have a... Want something that, that is certain and simple and easy. Um, I don't know if you've ever, uh, sold a home, but it can be a very, very, very-

    6. LR

      Yeah. Sucks.

    7. BT

      ... stressful, difficult process with showings and open houses and how to price it and will it sell and all of that stuff. And so we offer, um, basically a way to, to skip the whole process.

    8. LR

      So you basically sell your house to Opendoor and it's just like, "Cool, done. Move on."

    9. BT

      Yep. S- sell your home, uh, you pick your closing day-

    10. LR

      Yeah.

    11. BT

      ... you move out when you want. Um... Yeah. There's no, uh, no hassle.

    12. LR

      Sounds, sounds amazing. I want that.

    13. BT

      (laughs)

    14. LR

      Um, coming back to ops and product, just to kind of close this thread. Uh, again, you've worked at two businesses that have done incredibly well combining product and ops. Are there any just broad lessons you've taken away from how to make these two teams and functions work well together and to build a business that's very ops heavy but also software driven?

    15. BT

      Yeah. The first one we, we touched on which is A, there's just got to be mutual respect. Right? Both functions have their time and their place and their skillsets. And you just don't, don't build, build big, build big businesses of this type without respecting the fact that both need to exist. The second, particularly on the product and engineering side, is really understanding where and how the technology leverage comes from the business. And then being really focused on making sure generally, especially in your earlier days, you are more limited on the technical resourcing side than you might be on the operational resourcing side. And so how do you be really focused on where to invest your time, effort and energy, uh, technically, which is why most of the engineering effort for Uber was on the dispatching system and the pricing system. That's just where the leverage was at the time given, given the scarcity of resources and so I think the second one is being really intentional about where those ??? are and then being really forthcoming in saying, "Hey, that means all these other places where yes, it can make things easier, more efficient et cetera, et cetera, we are okay not investing in right now." And that needs to be an explicit decision, um, and very transparent. And then the last bit I would say is a deep understanding that the real world has entropy and it's hard and it's messy. For us, we at Opendoor, we go into homes, you know, someone may not be home, scheduling may be off, an Uber driver may cancel, there may be low GPS. All these things happen, right? Computers are deterministic but humans aren't, right? And so building products that have a little bit more flex or a little bit more fail-safes in case those things happen, uh, becomes a little bit more of a paramount. One other thing, last thing I would say is I think that the companies evolve as well so what I talked about at the beginning of Uber being, you know, very focused from an engineering and, and product side on the dispatching system and the pricing system. Obviously over time that's evolved. Now there's a centralized all of these functions as the company got bigger and more mature and scale and optimization started to be more important than expansion and sort of that Petri dis- Petri dish of trying new stuff and the tools got better and the tech got easier and there was more internal infrastructure. And so over time things can start one way and shift over time as the business needs evolve.

    16. LR

      Let's actually spend more time there. You keep saying things that I want to, that make me want to dig deeper. So at Airbnb we went through the same thing where there was all these local ops teams driving supply, finding homes, bringing them on the platform, and then there's like this tipping point where the product and organic growth and word of mouth ended up driving more and then orders of magnitude more. So there was no need for these folks to spend time doing these sort of things. Can you just maybe share an example, either at Uber or Opendoor, when you talk about like there's a time and a place and a skillset for ops, how that evolved. Like what was the team doing initially and then what did they end up doing as things grew?

    17. BT

      Yeah. I mean maybe, maybe a very, um, easy good example to pick just one part of the, the Uber process in the early days is at small scale, uh, actually back when it was the Uber Black drivers, every, um, driver was individually onboarded in like a 90-minute to a two-hour in-person in the office onboarding, um, with deep setting of expectations. The next version of that... So that's obviously very ops driven. The next version of that is kind of like a small classroom type setting of three or five or six drivers at, at a given time, um, also very ops driven. And then as we, we got into more mass market products like Uber Taxi or UberX, those are okay maybe 20 or 30 at a time. Okay, so now it's a little bit bigger classroom setting and we said, "Okay, let's make a video." Instead of giving verbally the same presentation let's just make an onboarding video and, uh, that was the next center of scale. But that, now suddenly we have a different problem which is okay, you have to validate all of these credentials, someone's driver's license, you know, who they are, all that stuff. At one person, easy. At three to four at a time, easy. 10 at a time, a little more challenging but fine. At 20 at a time, okay, you're starting to run up onto it. Now at you fast forward six months and you're doing 1,000 a week or whatever, okay, suddenly your system breaks and it's like, "Okay, we have reached the point where like operational system improvements is like no longer viable." So you say, "Okay, what are, what are the..." Like that, we've gone from the iteration stage to the scale stage and, and technology is, is uniquely good at scaling so now we say, "Okay, instead of having a bunch of folks around the world taking pictures of driver's licenses and validating and doing all that stuff, how do we integrate with some type of OCR technology or auto recognition of driver's licenses that feeds to a system that knows what a driver's license is, that can do automatic validation?" And suddenly you've done two things. One, you've scaled your system, and two, you've just created a ton of time for what at the time was probably dozens if not hundreds of people running these onboarding sessions all over the country or world at the time to do other stuff. Right? And so now you can sort of level that up and say, "Okay, do we do more analytics? Do we do more... Figure out the next process that needs optimization," or whatever the case may be and that virtuous cycle just continues.

    18. LR

      The way I like to think about this is do things that don't scale and then scale the things that you're doing.

    19. BT

      Yeah, exactly.

    20. LR

      That's the phrase, the phrase I always come back to.

    21. BT

      Exactly.

    22. LR

      This reminds me of a hot take that (clears throat) a previous podcast guest shared in a newsletter post, Casey Winters. He talked about that operations is usually... And this is kind of, it's a hot take, that operations is a sign of inefficiency and over time your job is to kind of squeeze that away and make it product software as much as possible, doesn't mean you always get there-... thoughts?

    23. BT

      Yeah. I, I, I actually don't fundamentally... It depends on what the operations is, but I don't fundamentally disagree. But I think the, the, the right lens to think about it is, um, and then those, those folks can move on to the next challenge-

    24. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    25. BT

      ... um, right? And so there's always another hill to climb, right? And so I think that was one of the things, uh, at Uber and Opendoor where there's sort of this culture of on the ground experimentation that's really helpful, where yeah, like we were just talking about, driver onboarding may now be solved with technology, so maybe a few extra hours a day. Like, how do we get better at, um, optimizing the UberX system? How do you start tinkering with food delivery? How do you start, you know, thinking about higher capacity vehicles? How do you think about a better feedback loop for those manual surge pricing sort of toggles that we talked about, right? There's... So, I generally agree. It just generally frees up capacity to solve more problems.

    26. LR

      It feels like a big part of this is, uh, making sure the operations teams understand there is more opportunity. Even if this ends up being automated, you- your job's not gonna go away.

    27. BT

      Yeah.

    28. LR

      We're gonna find something new to-

    29. BT

      Yeah.

    30. LR

      ... try and experiment and do things that don't skip.

  8. 25:38 – 40:30

    Product reviews and Jobs to Be Done

    1. LR

      Uh, I hear you're very good at product reviews.

    2. BT

      Okay.

    3. LR

      A few people, a few people told me this.

    4. BT

      Mm-hmm.

    5. LR

      I'm curious how you set up a product review and any things you've learned, any tips for how to run an effective product review.

    6. BT

      That's very kind of, of whoever mentioned that. Um, but, but yes, uh, big, big fan of, of doing them, actually in particular to maybe bridge the conversations in companies that have ops-driven cadences because... or, or, or start out, uh, very ops-driven because the cadences can sometimes be different, right? And so, um, the operational cadences that you might have, something like a WBR, a weekly business review, may not be conducive to always picking your head up and saying like, "Hey, where's the product going on a slightly longer timeframe?" And so I think product reviews in general for all companies are probably really helpful, but actually in particular for, for s- some of the op- op-, uh, product and operations led, led companies. In terms of, of things I've, I've learned, I think being really intentional about what the, the, the goals are, I think it's okay to say that there are two goals, a goal of sort of like accountability and inform to an audience, but also most importantly, I think this is the, the, the primary goal, is to help make the product better, right? To help the teams think through a problem and to have that, again, back to our, our earliest conversation, be a very intellectual, uh, conversation about the work and how to make the product better, and not super scary. Like, product reviews hopefully are not feeling like firing squads. That's a, that's a, a scary environment to be in, and not necessarily one that's conducive to how do we make the product better. Obviously sometimes the conversations have to get a little, um, intense, but, but in general that's what we're shooting for, is something that helps the team go back and think through how to make the product better.

    7. LR

      So the two goals you try to communicate for product reviews, accountability/informing people what's happening, but also just like we are here to make the product better, setting that context.

    8. BT

      Yep.

    9. LR

      Is there anything you do specifically to make it not feel like a firing squad, like you're coming in here to be attacked and criticized? Is there... do you set context at the beginning of the meeting? Is this just a part of the culture?

    10. BT

      Yeah. I think, um, de- definitely part of the culture, but also, uh, I, I am a firm believer in general that the people closest to the problems also have the best context to solve that, that problem. And so as a, uh, more senior voice in the room, often the job is probing, asking questions, throwing out ideas in a way that says like, "Hey, this is an idea. This is not a mandate," (laughs) right? "This is a, a thought." Right? And if there's context missing that would inform the product direction, then providing that context in not a question asking s- sense, but, but a, "Hey, this is context that, that you might not be aware of." Um, and so I think it's, it's all in how you show up as a leader and what that looks like in terms of probing and pushing the team on dimensions that they not may- that they may not be thinking about, and then understanding that the team is bringing a perspective that you don't have, which is they think about this problem 40, 50, 60 hours a week, and you might think about this problem three hours a week, right? So you bring a, a breadth, the team brings a depth, and how do you marry that?

    11. LR

      I don't know if you heard Dharmesh Shaw's, uh, episode or his thing on flashtags. Have you seen this?

    12. BT

      I have not, no.

    13. LR

      Okay.

    14. BT

      Did explain.

    15. LR

      He has a whole system. So he talked about how as a leader you want people to not take everything you tell them-

    16. BT

      Mm-hmm.

    17. LR

      ... as feedback, as, "I need to do this."

    18. BT

      Yeah.

    19. LR

      So he has a whole set of, uh, hashtags that communicate how important this is to him, from #FYI to, uh, to suggestion, to, uh, plea.

    20. BT

      Yes. (laughs) to plead at you. Yeah. This, this, this was actually explained to me. I don't... I don't think I've seen the original source, uh, so I'll go back and, and, and watch it, but this was explained to me as this... I'm actually a big fan. I think that's, I think that's great.

    21. LR

      Yeah. Just said, said, "I get everyone on the same page." Okay, maybe one last question here. Who do you... who do you try to invite to product reviews? Do you have any frameworks and ways of thinking of who to invite, who not to invite?

    22. BT

      Yeah. Good, good question. Uh, we, I would say, have, uh, oscillated over time, but in general, um, big subscribers of the, the, the best conversations happen when they're relatively small, so try and keep it under, under 10. Um, could be wide distribution of the document, right? The, the artifacts created are actually really powerful, and they're, they're powerful for the whole team to understand and, and sort of secret power is they're very powerful for new people who are onboarding, so you can be like, "Here, here are the last 20 product reviews." You'll get a pretty good idea of what's going on, right? But generally, the conversation itself try and keep relatively tight. Um, we try and keep it under 10.

    23. LR

      And these artifacts, you mean the recordings of the meeting that people can watch, or

    24. NA

      notes-

    25. BT

      Yeah, uh, or, or just the document. Um, depends on what-

    26. LR

      Oh, got it.

    27. BT

      ... the company culture is, whether you want to record it or, or just have the document.

    28. LR

      Got it.

    29. BT

      E- either way.

    30. LR

      And then is there some kind of specific cadence you operate on? Is it like a weekly product review that people can sign up for? Does every team have... How do you, how do you like to set this up, the cadence?

  9. 40:30 – 42:23

    The challenges of A/B testing

    1. BT

      Um, very hot topic of conversation. We do A/B test. Um, it is obviously the gold, gold standard and so we do as much as we, we can of A/B testing. There are parts of our funnel and flow that have more volume than others. So top-of-funnel A/B testing is a little bit easier than down funnels. Um, A/B testing, um, surely product, um-

    2. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    3. BT

      ... uh, or tech, uh, features is easier than A/B testing processes, operational processes. But, uh, but you're totally right. Um, we are not doing hundreds of millions of transactions a year. Um, and so experimentation can, can be, uh, more challenging. And so I think one, one way to think about it is, A, knowledge the problem, right? Which is to say, don't... And we, we've made this mistake, uh, many, many times, but don't just force yourself into A/B testing without running the power analysis and say like, "Hey, are we going to get results?" What is the, the size that we'll detect and, uh, what is the runtime of that experiment? And is that... And be honest, like, is that acceptable? For there are certain... So a, a second lesson here is there are certain experiments that are important enough and it's hard to try and get a signal in any other way that you may say a six-month runtime is an acceptable outcome and we were gonna start it in June and we will be smarter for it for 2025 planning and we're gonna set it and forget it and we're grateful we did, right? And that, that's okay. The, what... The, the only mistake here is like thinking you'll get an answer in a month when you won't, and then pretending you do and then waking up a month later and being like, "Well, it was insignificant and this and that." And it's like, "Well, okay. We could have known that."

  10. 42:23 – 44:33

    Increasing conviction in solutions

    1. BT

      Right? And so... And then the third thing is like, experimentation is all about increasing your conviction in the, the, the problem or the solution, right? So the generalized version of the statement is, if there are parts of your funnel or flow that are low end and you can't run a canonical A/B test, how might you otherwise increase your conviction in, in the solution that you're building? And there... Turns out there-... a decent number of other ways to do that. The first, best, most obvious is talk to more customers. But, you know, there are other sort of statistical techniques that, again, aren't as rigorous or good but, but maybe possible. You may be able to use observational data, you may be able to do a diff-in-diff. Um, you may be able to, you know, look at ci- um, uh, uh, sister cities or, or, or twin cities. You may be able to, to segment by GL. You may be able to reduce your power and say, "Hey, we're going to run at 80% confidence for all of our experiments instead of the traditional 95%". Because that's a worthy trade-off, and if we're wrong one more time out of 10, that's okay. You can do a long-term holdout to, to, to match your intuition. And so there's a lot of other techniques to, sorry, to hone your intuition. Um, there's a lot of other techniques to build conviction and confidence. And so we're, we try to be very creative (laughs) on doing that. And then the last, last p- bit I would say is if you're not gonna get significance, if there's no other s- uh, techniques at your disposal, then sometimes you just gotta trust your intuition and ship it. And if that's where, if that's what you believe, then that's what y- what you believe, and, um, you shouldn't spend time trying to get false precision when you don't...

    2. LR

      I wanna spend more time on that last point, (clears throat) but real quick, the power analysis you talked about, there's ... People don't know there's calculators out there that you could just plug in, "Here's how much traffic I'm getting. Here's how much of a impact difference I want to see. Here's how long it'll take to, to find out."

    3. BT

      Yep, exactly. Totally. Um, and, uh, uh, some of the calculators are great where you can also plug in the traffic and your acceptable runtime and it will tell you the minimum detectable impact, and then you can gut check your own intuitions. You can, you can play around with that.

    4. LR

      Awesome. We'll try to link to one of those in the show

  11. 44:33 – 47:07

    Leveraging intuition in product decisions

    1. LR

      notes. So, um, on the intuition piece, is there anything more there, just like how you think about when you, you know, you run the product team, just how you recommend people leverage intuition versus not, 'cause some companies are like, "We're, we're just gonna trust the data. I don't really trust your opinion." You don't know. Like, uh, like, you don't know, you don't know this customer exact- ... Like you talked about Opendoor. I'm not buying houses myself, so I don't know how much I can trust my intuition. Just what's your general advice to your product team of how to think about their intuition and when to rely on it versus not?

    2. BT

      So at Opendoor, for example, I would say on, on the relative spectrum, we're quite data-driven, and then, then it's when we come into this challenge, right, where we say, "Okay, like let's ... That is another technique or tool in the toolbox." I think the generalized version of that is, uh, customers, products, people can surprise you, right? And so, uh, this happens all the time for, for, for people who build, build products. I'm sure you've got great stories from Airbnb where you saw something, you put it out there and it just was very

    3. LR

      All the time. (laughs) All the time.

    4. BT

      All the time, right? And so I think there, there's definitely a humility to say, you know, if you can, if it's relatively easy to test your assumptions or test your hypotheses, that is, that is always better to gut check yourself. And yeah, that takes a little bit of humility to say that, but like, we've all been wrong plenty of times. But if that's just like not on the table, I think the reality is you can't pretend it is, and sometimes you gotta use taste and judgment, and, and then you say, "Okay, what is my conviction level, and do I have, you know, just medium low or high conviction? And if I have anything low or medium conviction and it's a decision of consequence, I should, yeah, talk to more customers, gut check it with another person and see if their intuition matches, something that gets me personally to the high, high bucket category." And then I think the, the, the last part, which is some part of experimentation, is if you just ship something because you're ... it, it's your intuition or it's where you wanna see the product go, do you have a reasonable feedback loop to understand whether or not you are correct? Right? So that could be customer support or ticket volume or feature adoption, whatever the case is. It may not be an output metric in the traditional A-B test, but like some more rigorous system that says, "Hey, I had this hypothesis. We just shipped it for X, Y, Z constraint reason. Are we right?"

    5. LR

      I think that's awesome advice. I agree with everything you're saying.

  12. 47:07 – 52:55

    Partnering with Zillow

    1. LR

      You mentioned this word humility.

    2. BT

      Yeah.

    3. LR

      And may- ... It is a good segue to something I want to talk about, which is Zillow.

    4. BT

      Okay. (laughs)

    5. LR

      One of the most interesting things that's happened in your space is Zillow basically decided, "Hey, we're just gonna do what Opendoor is doing." They launched it. You were basically frenemies for a while, and then they're like, "No, we ... We're not, we're, we're ... It's not working." Now you're partner and say now you work with Zillow on, on this stuff. So are you able to share what went down there with the story of what happened, how it went, and-

    6. BT

      Yeah.

    7. LR

      ... where things are at now?

    8. BT

      Yeah. Uh, I mean, we, we do partner with Zillow. Um, Zillow's been a fantastic partner, um, um, for us, and we've really enjoyed, um, sort of a working relationship, uh, with them. I think when you think about it, they have, um, tremendous amount of, of, of reach and, and audience and, uh, uh, all these sort of like online platforms, um, have tremendous reach, uh, and audience, and we happen to have a fairly unique selling solution. And so, um, there's s- there's sort of a nice, uh, not to use a business school word, but there's a nice synergy, so to speak, between, um, uh, a high intent audience who's doing a lot of browsing and, and, and, and searching and, and discovery and starting their process on one of these online platforms and what we offer, which is, you know, transaction services that allow people to actually, uh, move particularly on the seller side. And so there's, there's, there's just a, a, a pretty nice symbiotic relationship there with the Zillows and their, and their entrance ??? So both of those companies have been, been great partners for us.

    9. LR

      What do you think Zillow maybe underestimated or didn't get about the space that made it harder than they anticipated? 'Cause it se- it seems obvious. Of course, let's go down funnel. Let's just do it all.... and they're like, oh shit, not working. Uh, what do you think they didn't get, or what do you think they missed?

    10. BT

      Um, I guess continuing on the humility point, I, I won't necessarily pretend to, to, to be in their shoes, but I will say, like, the business is challenging and it's complex from a number of different dimensions, right? It's not a traditional software-only product. You have to be really good at pricing. You have to be really good at product. You have to be really good at, at the operations. You have to be really disciplined at risk. You have to be really good in the capital markets, right? And so, you have to put all of these functions together to build a vertically integrated product and, uh, that's the reality. And so that, that is something that's been in Opendoor's DNA fr- from day one because we started with a vertically integrated product. And so, you know, we can't deliver unless we have all of those things, right? And so, I think that, that's something that, uh, continues to help us to the, to this day is that vertical integration, um, requires all of those pieces come together

    11. LR

      That makes a lot of sense, and I think it's a good reminder of there are adjacent markets and businesses that always feel like, "Oh, we could expand to that someday. Such a big opportunity. This business could be so much bigger." And then you realize your business is completely not set up to operate this way. Zillow's very software-driven, right? Like-

    12. BT

      Mm-hmm.

    13. LR

      ... just the web, like, I'm not gonna simplify what they do, but it's like a website, very, uh-

    14. BT

      Yeah.

    15. LR

      ... software. Yeah. And obviously as we talked about Opendoor, it's a huge operational component. And then as you said, the pricing piece and the, the debt stuff.

    16. BT

      Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

    17. LR

      Yeah. So I think it's a really good reminder that just like when you're taking on something completely different, uh, you may, it, it may not fit into the way your company operates and partnering makes sense. Anything else there that's interesting to share around the Zillow thing? I guess one is maybe it was just like, I imagine it was very stressful. Zi- Zillow's getting into it. Oh shit, what are we gonna do? They got all the traffic.

    18. BT

      Yeah.

    19. LR

      Anything there?

    20. BT

      Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's certainly stressful. Um, I think in general we, we try to live by, well, Zillow or anybody else, um, being, um, competition-aware but not necessarily competition-focused. And, and the reality is a vast, vast, vast, in our space, a vast majority of people still move the traditional way. And so this isn't something where it's like, um, the size of the prize is- isn't particularly large enough or, or anything like that. The reality is they, it's the largest asset class in the, in the United States, and if we just stay super focused on, like, hey, who are the customers that we serve really well that we talk to every day, there's a little bit of confidence that comes from being able to stay focused on that regardless of the competitive environment, again, because it's not like the market is fully saturated. This is the same thing back in, in the Uber days as well, whereas, like, transportation is, like, almost infinitely large, you know? And so yes, there's, it feels like there's heated competition, you know, between Uber and Lyft or whatever back in the day, but the reality is there's plenty of trips that happen (laughs) and people need to get around the city in plenty of different ways that's neither Uber nor Lyft, and staying focused on, on how you can build, um, sort of for, for your customer, um, I think is the best way to focus.

    21. LR

      There's a p- a podcast that will come, come out before this episode with, uh, Jeff Weinstein from Stripe who's building Stripe Atlas. They had a similar experience with AngelList Launched, direct competitor to Angel... to Atlas, and then they realized Atlas is so much better. Forget it. We're just gonna send everyone to Atlas.

    22. BT

      Really? Wow.

    23. LR

      And... Yes. And I think it's the same exact lesson that if you just stay focused on jobs to be done, let's say of what is the job to be done and do the best possible job, and knowing that the market is much bigger, that you're not really competing with someone else, another company. It's like m- m- it's the default behavior in your case. It's like people are just buying our house the old-fashioned way.

    24. BT

      Correct.

    25. LR

      That's the actual competition.

    26. BT

      Exactly. Yep.

    27. LR

      Yeah. Oh, okay.

  13. 52:55 – 56:25

    Staying calm under pressure

    1. LR

      So, kind of along these lines, something else I've heard that you're very good at is staying very calm under pressure.

    2. BT

      Mm-hmm.

    3. LR

      And staying very level-headed when things are really crazy. This is something that a lot of people, uh, are not good at, especially leaders. They stress everyone out. Things go crazy. They don't create a good vibe. And then two, something people want to get better at-

    4. BT

      Yeah.

    5. LR

      ... leaders and non-leaders alike. Any lessons? Anything you've learned about just how to develop this skill?

    6. BT

      You know, I th- I think, um, part, part of this may have been, um, uh, sharpened in the early days of Uber where everything felt like a fire drill all the time, and so it was the, the only way to, to operate. But, you know, I, I, I think you almost hit the nail on the head, um, in the question, uh, which is, like, a little bit of an intellectual answer of when you reflect the stress onto your teams, everybody tenses up and tightens up, right? And so it doesn't... It counterintuitively doesn't produce better outcomes. And so, I think the other reality is to, to sort of remind ourselves, and these are a bunch of, like, mantras that just, like, are helpful in these moments, is you're never as good as you think you are. You're never as bad as you think you are. And so, sort of that, that more even keeled demeanor I think allows you to have a clearer head when you're operating under the, the, the pressure and to think, think more clearly. I think one of the, like, maybe least helpful answers, but un- unfortunately is sort of a reality, is you kind of got to be in some stressful situations to also have the perspective that cycles pass, that things pass, and, and that remaining calm is, is, is what matters. And so maybe the, the advice there is, uh, reflecting on when these situations happen, um, exposing yourself to them, not running from them, and then learning from them so that the next time it, it comes around you can, you can say, "Hey, I, you know, I've been here before, you know. I've, I've slept on the floor in China before launching, you know, UberPool and thinking we're going to miss a launch deadline. And, like, what were the tools in my toolbox, in my toolkit that worked for me then, um, in terms of..."... getting it done, um, or not and what were the lessons learned.

    7. LR

      I love that. So part of it is just go through this experience many times and you will start to realize, okay, it's not actually gonna be as bad as people may think. Uh, you mentioned this toolkit instead of tool. Is there anything else there that you come back to that ends up being helpful? You mentioned this mantra of like, it's not, it's never as bad as people think it is, never great as people think it is.

    8. BT

      Yeah, I mean, I th- I think, um, exposing yourselves to other people's stories, um, or however you, you, you may learn, um, is, is really, really helpful. So, yeah, again, like, um, whether it's your podcast or books or, or biographies or, uh... I mean, one of the podcasts that I, I love is Founders Podcast-

    9. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    10. BT

      ... um, which talks about o- obviously historical, uh, f- famous entrepreneurs and, and obviously these are elevating, like, very famous people already, but there's a lot to learn from a lot of these stories as well and understanding that the journey and the path is, is nonlinear. It never is for anybody, right? And so I think being able to expose yourself to other stories that even may... if you don't have those personal experiences and then understanding how others navigate.

    11. LR

      Got it. So just hearing of other people's crazy experiences and kind of building on this muscle of like, okay, they've gone through crazy stuff, things'll work out.

    12. BT

      Yeah, totally.

    13. LR

      We'll make it, we'll make it through.

    14. BT

      Yeah.

    15. LR

      Okay, I have this note here that I think either someone mentioned about you

  14. 56:25 – 1:00:21

    Finding the “kernel of truth” in product management

    1. LR

      or may- you ha- you may, may, may have mentioned that product is finding the kernel of truth in a sea of ambiguity and signals. Does that mean anything to you?

    2. BT

      Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, um, in most organizations and to do the job effectively, you're gonna get signals from any- everywhere, right? And good ideas come from everywhere. It may be your CS team or CX team. It may be a customer directly, it may be a conversation you had, it may be a YouTube video you watched that sparked an idea. It may be feedback from an executive. It may be whatever. You went out and did a field visit. Like, you are going to get a lot of inputs around what people think about your product, what people think you should do next. And I think the, the core job is to understand what really matters, right? Like, what is noise? What is a good idea? What is a suggestion? What is, uh... and what is, um, you know, back to the jobs to be done for, like, what is really gonna move the customer forward? And unfortunately that means, you know, saying no to maybe what sounds like some good ideas, you know, along the way. But if you can really figure out, like, this is really what matters, that, that's the core part of the job. And it, it dovetails even back to our earlier conversation, you know, if you don't... In the early days of building, you know, uh, tech and ops companies is where's the tech leverage? Like, it's the same question, right? Where's the kernel of what really matters that tech can uniquely solve? And let's go do that and be comfortable with other fires maybe burning. That's what really, really, really matters. Um, it's a, it's a hard discipline.

    3. LR

      I love that. Uh, if there's not an example, that's totally fine, but when you talk about this finding this kernel where tech could be highly leveraged, is there any example that comes to mind of that working out really well?

    4. BT

      I mean, I think back, back in the... In, in the Uber days, I think it was like, Hey, we're not going to build sophisticated tooling infrastructure. We're not going to build a centralized growth team. We're not gonna build any of that. Because, like, if you think about the, the early Uber network from the, the simplest form, you've got a rider and a driver and you need to connect them, price the transaction, and issue some receipts probably, you know, and collect payment. So it's like, okay, do we do that really well? And until we do that really well, like, all the other stuff is noise, right? It's actually... It's, it, it's immaterial how efficiently we answer support tickets. Like, that's not critical, right? And so now it's super critical, right? But like in the early days, it's not that critical. And, like, evenly, like, customer acquisition costs may not be, like, super critical, right? 'Cause you... In, in this case it was growing rapidly and - Mm-hmm.

    5. LR

      ... all those things. And so, you know, pouring fuel on the fire may, may not be super efficient there. So I think that's, like, a good... a very good generalized example. Um, one other tip that, that maybe is helpful here, uh, that, um, I fre- frankly constantly work on and try to get better at is all these ideas and feedback that comes from everywhere, like, make sure it's written down for a number of reasons. One, you can then go reference it. But two, part of the, the d- the job is making sure the people who present those ideas are heard and respected and know that it's, it's at least somewhere where it was considered, right? And then you can look at it all and say like, okay, but what actually really, really, really, really matters here. And, uh, yeah, that's, uh, another tip. When you say written down, is it... Is there, like, tools you find really helpful here or is it just, like, put it in a big doc that we're keeping? Is there anything you find to actually operationalize that?

    6. BT

      I've, I've seen different companies do it, do it differently, but wherever you tend to try and keep a backlog, whether that's, yeah, a Google Sheet or your actual backlog in Jira or LinQ or whatever you use, but at least it feels like, okay, the context was captured and the idea is there.

    7. LR

      Awesome. Okay, I'm gonna

  15. 1:00:21 – 1:06:11

    Failure corner: Early days of Uber Pool

    1. LR

      take us to, uh, a recurring segment on this podcast called Failure Corner.

    2. BT

      Okay.

    3. LR

      Is there a story you can share of a time you failed in your career, had a big failure, and how that experience made you better?

    4. BT

      We can talk about, like, the very early days of UberPool and, and kind of the, like, first launch, if you will, um, in, in San Francisco. So, um, carpooling product, uh, multiple riders in, in, in the same car. And we had this idea that it would be effective to, um, uh, for commuters. Uh, this was very, very early days. And so part of, part of the launch was, okay, we're gonna...... beta it with just some, um, popular sort of commuting corridors with specific companies or, you know, maybe, uh, the Marina to, to Google or whatever, right? And, and try and match people according to, you know, what their company is and that, that's how we'll drive liquidity. And it, um... We very quickly realized that, uh, back to sort of like what the kernel of truth is here is, like, liquidity is the only thing that matters. Um, and there just wasn't enough. Um, there was never going to be enough to sort of do this, like, company-based thing, and that wasn't the strategy that was going to work for, from us. And so, you know, I, the reason I, I don't know if it's, like, a full failure is, like, maybe this is true of all failures, is you learn from it, you pivot, and you go on to the next thing. And, and obviously we, we, we did that and, um, then spent a lot of our time and effort trying to say, "Okay, what are the bounds of liquidity and driving liquidity that we can do to understand what the, the most important, uh, or what the sort of limits of the product are?" So as an example, we launched, and, and maybe people in San Francisco remember this, sort of a $5 anywhere in San Francisco Workpool promotion, which is obviously a great deal, obviously cost a lot of money. But the whole idea here is like, oh, okay, if liquidity is what really matters, if we were to juice that and really drive liquidity, how, how high can our metrics gather? Then we can go chase, you know, more sustainable ways to do that. But it was a, a sort of a interesting fail case from, from, from launching and learning to say, "Hey, this initial strategy is just, like, isn't gonna work." We, we gotta go, we gotta go... And then, you know, part of it was a hedging strategy with a, with a small audience and there'll be a beta population and it's like, well, this one, you just gotta go.

    5. LR

      I think a lesson there is also don't overthink it, don't try to get too cute. Just, like, this is a... Yeah, the, we're, uh, we're trying to make a perfect beta test versus, like, uh, realizing, okay, we just need a lot more people in it.

    6. BT

      Yep. Totally.

    7. LR

      Uh, also, your, uh, $5 promotion made me think of, uh, the early promotions of, like, the ice cream and the bunnies delivery and all that stuff.

    8. BT

      Yeah. Um, that was, by the way, uh, a example of, like, fully distributed the, the benefit of having those early Petri dishes. Um, someone, uh, a local marketing manager was like, "Hey, this would be fun." I was like, "Yeah, that would be really fun (laughs) and the platform can support it." And those promotions were fantastic, right? And, uh, and it started out, I can't remember if the first one was ice cream or puppies. I think it was ice cream. But yeah, and bran- branched into all sorts of stuff. Boats, ice cream, puppies, kittens, I think. And, uh, you know, all, all credit goes to sort of, like, local ideas and inspiration, just being focused on trying to, to grow those things.

    9. LR

      I love that we've circled back to the beginning of our conversation, product and ops working together, the benefits of both. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Any last nuggets of wisdom that you think might be useful to people when they're trying to build product, companies, teams?

    10. BT

      Um, this was great. We covered, we covered, uh, uh, quite a bit of ground. I think the, the only, um, I don't know if this is a generalized wisdom, but something I've been thinking about, um, as, as my career has progressed a little bit, uh, especially building out, uh, you know, pro- product organizations. Especially as, uh, more tools come online, it's very clear that there's different, um, types of, of PMs and we spent a lot of time talking about ones who can operate in the physical and the digital, or, you know, the product and, and, and operations worlds. But even within that, there's, um, uh, more, you know, technical PMs who grew up in the engineering discipline. There are people who came from ops and there are people who came from, from design and grew up in, in sort of a more user experience background. And, uh, one thing that I've been, been on as he, as he built out, um, the team is thinking, you know, similar to a, to a product roadmap is like, it's not really about, like, is this person good or bad or whatever. It's, is this person's skill set and context matched to the problem that is, is, is really needed? Um, and so back to that, you know, conversation on, hey, where do we get tech leverage? It's like, hey, is this person who has this unique skill set as a PM well-suited for this problem type? I don't know if that's, that's helpful, but it's something I've been spending a lot of, uh, time thinking about, especially this job posting that should be like product manager or whatever, but it's actually like, well, like, how can we be a little bit more thoughtful about what, what the actual skill set needs are for this type of role?

    11. LR

      Awesome. It's kind of like a person-product fit.

    12. BT

      (laughs) There you go.

    13. LR

      And I think it's... 'Cause a lot of companies hire a generalist and they're just like, "We'll hire someone smart and ambitious and with experience and general experience and then we'll put them on different things." So I think these are two different philosophies and it probably makes a lot of sense for an Opendoor where it's, like, very unique type of business with very specific skills that are necessary to be really good there. Okay. Amazing.

  16. 1:06:11 – 1:14:40

    Lightning round and final thoughts

    1. LR

      Brian, with this, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

    2. BT

      Let's do it. Can't wait.

    3. LR

      Let's do it. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

    4. BT

      Shoe Dog, Black Swan, um, Design of Everyday Things, and for a fun one, Shantaram.

    5. LR

      Amazing. Four books.

    6. BT

      Lovely.

    7. LR

      Four books for the price of two to three. I love it.

    8. BT

      Apologies. I'll stick to the rules.

    9. LR

      No, no. There's no rules. There are no rules.

    10. BT

      There you go.

    11. LR

      Next, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed?

    12. BT

      I like the sports sort of docu ones on Netflix, so Full Swing, Drive to Survive, Breakpoint, tennis, golf, F1, all of them.

    13. LR

      And wasn't there that Nike documentary recently with Ben Affleck?

    14. BT

      There is, which I have not seen. So, uh, if it's good, uh, I don't know if that's a recommendation or just an acknowledgement.

    15. LR

      It's worth watching. If you like Shoe Dog, I feel like you'd enjoy it.

    16. BT

      There you go.

    17. LR

      It was entertaining. Michael Jordan, uh, things like that.Next question. Do you have a favorite product that you have recently discovered that you really love?

    18. BT

      So we just got a puppy and, uh, we are about to have our first, uh, child and so all of my purchases recently are puppies and- and children focused. Uh, we've been, uh, my buddy gifted us the- the Fi collar for- for our dog, and so we've, uh, been really, uh, really enjoying that. Um, another one, uh, as I'm getting busier for- for news and stuff is, uh, Particle which, uh, is great news- news aggregation tool, AI news tool.

    19. LR

      Kayvan's wife's business. I- we've- I am a huge fan actually. They- I think it just came out of beta, now it's like a full app that anyone can download. Uh, I've been- I just actually installed it yesterday again and I love it. Uh, I get these pushes every- every few to- like I don't know, it's like a couple times a day of just like, "Here's what's happening in the news." Uh, also congratulations I should have said on your pending child.

    20. BT

      Thank you. Thank you.

    21. LR

      Uh, lucky for you, I have a newsletter post with all the products you should buy. It's called New Parent Gift Guide For Product Managers.

    22. BT

      Love it. I will, um, definitely probably buy all of them. (laughs)

    23. LR

      (laughs) If you don't already have them all and now everyone's probably sending you their spreadsheets of all their favorite stuff, right?

    24. BT

      Exactly.

    25. LR

      Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, share with people either in work or in life?

    26. BT

      Well mostly just stay curious.

    27. LR

      Stay curious. I love it. Two more questions. Who has most influenced you in the course of your career?

    28. BT

      One of the people who, uh, inspired me very early on in my product journey, there- I've- I've been fortunate to have a number of very, um, good- good mentors and obviously we talked about earlier about founders of books or whatever sort of lead a lot from- from other people's journey, but one- one person who's personally important to me early in my product journey and very supportive, um, was this guy named- named Jeff, Jeff Holden, who was the chief product officer at Uber back in the day and is sort of like a young PM transferring into product, really, you know, took- took me under his wing and I think I'm forever grateful for- for that, um, for- for Jeff for helping, um, grow my career but also, um, kind of pay it forward a little bit in terms of people who are earlier in their career that was really meaningful for me.

    29. LR

      Last question, I hear that your interview at Uber was pretty wild. Can you tell...

    30. BT

      (laughs)

Episode duration: 1:14:39

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