Sachin Kansal: Why Uber's CPO ships 300 fix-its every half

1. 0:00 – 5:00

   Sachin’s background

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky0:00

      Everyone's always promoting dogfooding. It feels though that you take this to a whole other level.

   2. SKSachin Kansal0:05

      Either once or twice a month, I will set aside half a day and then I'll go out and I'll drive and deliver. My team and I, we design these amazing features, they look so good. And then you get in the car and you have a phone which is sitting three feet away from you, you're driving at 45 miles per hour, the world just changes. This thing that was looking so great in an office setting now maybe makes no sense.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky0:26

      When I was asking people about you and what you're amazing at, a motto came up again and again. It was, "Ship, ship, ship."

   4. SKSachin Kansal0:31

      If we are going to go dogfood and experience this pain and we're gonna document it, what's next? You have to ship this. You don't ship documents. You don't ship brainstorming meetings. What you ship is code in your product.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky0:43

      What are some of the most impactful pieces of advice that you share with early career product people?

   6. SKSachin Kansal0:49

      What makes a great product manager is not five amazing strategic ideas. It's the house and micro decisions that you made. Where should I put the button? Should I put the screen there or not? What should the copy say? Go to a job where you can ship multiple products as fast as possible.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09

      Today my guest is Sachin Kansal. Sachin is Chief Product Officer at Uber, where he's been for over eight years and where he leads product management, design and product operations. Prior to Uber, Sachin was Chief Product Officer at Flywheel, a VP of product at Lookout. He also spent the early part of his career at Palm where he was Director of Product Management, focused on Palm's mobile operating system, webOS, and their mobile apps. In our conversation, we go deep into his passion for dogfooding, and how he makes this a big part of the product culture at Uber. He's personally done hundreds and hundreds of drives as an Uber driver and also as an Uber Eats delivery person. I have had a lot of people come on this podcast talk about dogfooding. I've never met anyone that takes it to the extreme that Sachin does. Much of what the product team works on at Uber comes from what he and his team discover from these experiences. We also talk about why it's important to always have a ship, ship, ship mentality, PM career advice for early career PMs, how Uber is planning for a future with increasingly autonomous cars and what changes over time, what he's learned from Uber's shift to efficiency and profitability. Also, a bunch of really good tips for how to avoid annoying your Uber driver and Uber Eats delivery person. This episode is full of wisdom for anyone who wants to build better products, teams and cultures. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of world-class products, including Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Perplexity, Granola and more. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Sachin Kansal. Many of you are building AI products, which is why I am very excited to chat with Brandon Fu, founder and CEO of Paragon. Hey, Brandon.

   8. NANarrator2:52

      Hey, Lenny. Thanks for having me.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky2:54

      So, integrations have become a big deal for AI products. Why is that?

   10. NANarrator2:59

       Integrations are mission critical for AI for two reasons. First, AI products need context from the customer's business data such as Google Drive files, Slack messages or CRM records. Second, for AI products to automate work on behalf of users, AI agents need to be able to take action across these different third-party tools.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky3:17

       So where does Paragon fit into all this?

   12. NANarrator3:19

       Well, these integrations are a pain to build, and that's why Paragon provides an embedded platform that enables engineers to ship these product integrations in just days instead of months, across every use case, from RAG data ingestion to agentic actions.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky3:34

       And I know from firsthand experience that maintenance is even harder than just building it for the first time.

   14. NANarrator3:38

       Exactly. We believe product teams should focus engineering efforts on competitive advantages, not integrations. That's why companies like You.com, AI21 and hundreds of others use Paragon to accelerate their integration strategy.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky3:52

       If you want to avoid wasting months of engineering on integrations that your customers need, check out Paragon at useparagon.com/lenny. Last year, 1.3% of the global GDP flowed through Stripe. That's over $1.4 trillion. And driving that huge number are the millions of businesses growing more rapidly with Stripe. For industry leaders like Forbes, Atlassian, OpenAI and Toyota, Stripe isn't just financial software. It's a powerful partner that simplifies how they move money, making it as seamless and borderless as the internet itself. For example, Hertz boosted its online payment authorization rates by 4% after migrating to Stripe. And imagine seeing a 23% lift in revenue like Forbes did just six months after switching to Stripe for subscription management. Stripe has been leveraging AI for the last decade to make its product better at growing revenue for all businesses, from smarter checkouts to fraud prevention and beyond. Join the ranks of over half of the Fortune 100 companies that trust Stripe to drive change. Learn more at stripe.com.

2. 5:00 – 11:24

   Dogfooding in practice

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky5:01

      Sachin, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

   2. SKSachin Kansal5:07

      It is great to be here, Lenny. Thank you for having me.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky5:10

      When we were exploring what to chat about and where to spend our time, there was like a bunch of themes that came up both in our conversations and also when I was talking to people that work with you at Uber and other places. And, uh, the theme that came up over and over is dogfooding. And dogfooding's something that comes up a bunch on this podcast. Everyone's always promoting dogfooding. It feels though that you take this to a whole other level and you do this better than anyone I've ever spoken to. You're basically world-class at dogfooding. Uh, there's a lot I want to talk about here. But before we get into it, just, like, give us a sense of what dogfooding looks like in your world. What is the scale that you go to to dogfood Uber?

   4. SKSachin Kansal5:49

      I mean, call it dogfooding, call it, uh, you know, just obsession about the products that we ask our end users to use and we should be using it ourselves. So in my world what it looks like, there are a few apps in my world. There's the rider app that, uh, everyone's familiar with. There's the Uber Eats app.And let's not forget, there's a driver and a courier app as well. So dogfooding looks like a following for me, in general, on an average, I end up taking maybe five to 10 trips, uh, or Uber rides every week, which is, you know, just happens because, uh, I'm an Uber rider. Now, when I'm traveling, that's even- that's probably even more. I end up placing maybe three orders, three Uber Eats orders every week. Sometimes that's too much. Uh, and again, when I'm traveling, that could increase. If I'm traveling with family, it can be a lot. It could be literally all our meals. So those are probably more explainable, more understandable. The volume goes up and down. But then, how do you test the driver app? So I actually go out either once or twice a month. I will set aside half a day or a day, and then I'll go out and I'll drive and deliver here in the Bay Area. So I've, uh, I've been doing that for many, many years now. I will say that's probably one of the best parts of my job. I really, really enjoy it, you know, doing trips as well as doing deliveries. And I'll do maybe every time I go out, I'll do about 10 to 12 rides, uh, and deliveries. So that's what dogfooding looks like at the outset. That's the fun part. The painful part then is, okay, what did I learn? Because it's very easy for me to do this, uh, and then just completely forget about it, not document it, use it anecdotally in some conversation, uh, but not be able to go into a lot of detail. So what I do after each of these instances, whether it's using the rider app or whether it is driving, I- I take a lot of screenshots and then I come back and I write documents or I add to an existing document. So I have a driver document, I have a rider app document, I have an Uber Eats document, and I'll come back and I'll just write everything that I learned that is probably not ideal, I'll add a lot of screenshots to that doc, I will tag people because I know who works on what, and then I'll just send people my thoughts on what we think we can improve. And after that we have a process internally which, you know, where we go through all of those issues. We prioritize them. Not everything that I thought is a great idea is necessarily a great idea. So we go through all of that, and then we fix issues. And I- I'm not the only one dogfooding in the company, but I do follow through on the things that I reported and make sure that things that should be fixed get fixed, uh, and as quickly as possible. So that's the sort of the end-to-end journey of dogfooding for me, uh, in my work.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky8:47

      How many, uh, trips have you taken? How many rides have you driven? How many, uh, food delivery trips have you done total? Like, what are the numbers here of just like over your time at Uber?

   6. SKSachin Kansal8:57

      I think from a driving and delivering perspective in the seven to 800 range now. Uh, and I don't know as a passenger how many trips I have done. I can't count that.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky9:08

      (laughs)

   8. SKSachin Kansal9:09

      And same for- same for Uber Eats. But the driving and delivering is many hundred trips.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky9:14

      Wow. Yeah. I think on the riding on Uber and, uh, getting food delivered, that's not so hard. I- I- to your point, the- the real hard part is driving and delivering people's foods and taking 'em places. Uh, also on the docs, uh, I think you're also underselling yourself. One of your colleagues, Ricky, told me that you write 40 page reports on what's broken with screenshots and suggested fixes, and then you, like you said, you follow up on all these fixes. Like, you don't just put them out there and then hope people do something with it. You actually, uh, stay on top of them and make people feel accountable.

   10. SKSachin Kansal9:45

       Lenny, I get, uh, when I find those issues in our app, I develop a bit of impatience because if I faced it in my 10 trips that day, we have eight million couriers and drivers in the world, right? So imagine the number of times that thing may have happened to our customers, which are drivers and couriers. So I develop a bit of an impatience that we have to fix it. We can't... Now some things are small, some things are big. I develop different levels of impatience for- (laughs) for- for different things depending on the level of severity. And then if I don't follow up or my team doesn't follow up and we don't fix it, then it's a moot point, then I'm just doing it for fun, which is not bad. It's great for me to be doing it for fun, but I want to do it for impact, and I also want to do it for setting an example with my team as well. Now again, I'm not the only one dogfooding. We have hundreds to thousands of people at Uber. We want it to be a part of the culture, but we don't want the culture to be that every individual product manager should be going out and dogfooding their own feature. We want the culture to be that every leader is doing that as well. And that's why I don't want to be shy about or want to shy away from writing these documents, because I want everyone to. And now there are many, many documents (laughs) written by many, many people at Uber. And honestly, it's making our products better. And even more, I would say even more important than the specific features that we fix or we add is the culture of, you know, we are not just gonna accept certain problems in our products. We are actually gonna fix them. Uh, that's really, really

3. 11:24 – 20:18

   Empathy and understanding drivers

   1. SKSachin Kansal11:24

      important.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky11:25

      So let's talk about just why this is so important to you. I want to talk about how you operationalize this and the culture of it at Uber. But just, you know, as a CPO, I don't know of many that go drop people off, you know, hundreds of times, deliver food to people's houses hundreds of times. I imagine you have many things you gotta do day to day. There's hiring, there's, you know, drama, fires, all these things. Why do you prioritize this so highly?

   3. SKSachin Kansal11:47

      Here's my framework of how we think about end users. Of course, end user feedback is important. Everyone would agree with that. Every product manager, every product leader would agree with that. How do you get that end user feedback I think falls on a spectrum. There's the extreme quantitative end of the spectrum and there's the extreme qualitative end of the spectrum, and I like to believe that you need to be across that spectrum.So on the extremely quantitative part, we all love data. We all look at charts. And in those charts, every user is an NAU or a DAU. Every user is a number. And collectively, as those numbers, users are showing certain behaviors, and we learn a lot from that, and that's a very valuable exercise, right? You move a little bit to the left of that spectrum, and now you may go into things like surveys, where you're actually sending out surveys to thousands of riders. You are quantitatively understanding, do they like A, do they like B, do they like C? Which is also very, very valuable. Then you get into a little bit, you know, to the center. Maybe I have a room of 10 drivers, and I'm asking them... It's a focus group, it's a discussion, and for an hour I learn a lot from them. It becomes very interesting. We do this e- you know, anytime I go to a Brazil office, I go to an India office, I go to a UK office. At a minimum, I do one or two round tables with drivers. I also do round tables with riders. It's just extremely valuable to hear from them directly. You move one step further, and now I may have a one-to-one conversation with one of them. By the way, in the rides that I take every single day, it's such an amazing opportunity for me to do two things as a passenger. I'm talking to the driver for 30 minutes of my commute, and I'm basically one-on-one interviewing them, and because the driver app is placed in a certain way, I can actually see how they use the driver app. So, that actually drives me a lot of learning, and every day there's an ah-ha moment that, oh, I, uh, you know, this is what he just did. A text message came in, and then he left the driver app, and then he went and addressed the text message and so on. So this is what you learn. All of that is great. However, until I get behind the wheel, or I am a passenger, or I am using Uber Eats, what I miss is the visceral reaction that you get when something happens. So, now think about it. I sit in my office. My team and I, we design these amazing features. They look so good on my, on my, you know, MacBook or on a Zoom screen. And then you get in the car and you have a phone which is sitting three feet away from you, you're driving at 45 miles per hour. The world just changes. This thing that was looking so great in an office setting now maybe makes no sense, or there's a lot of stuff that you have to change. So that's sort of what you feel. But then, as you are trying to make money doing that, every single little inefficiency, every single flaw is costing me my earnings. And while I don't do it for money, so I thi- I don't think I can get to the extreme, extreme end of how drivers feel, I think I can get close, and the only way for me to feel that emotion is by doing it myself. And I do think that that emotion is very important. I'm a big believer in then bringing that emotion to my work, whether it's an emotion of joy, I have many, many moments of joy, and I bring that back, and I celebrate that, and I, that's very motivating for my team and I. But there are many emotions of outrage, and I want to bring that to work as well and make sure that we can use it as a motivator to do better. So, those are my reasons, uh, to, to be dogfooding.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky15:28

      What's an example of, uh, something that super outraged you, uh, that you experienced as a driver especially, uh, and/or something that maybe is the most, like, surprising that you learned as a driver?

   5. SKSachin Kansal15:40

      Let me start with the surprising and then I think we'll get to the outrage part of it. And there's, there may be things that you may not, uh, you may not expect. The surprising thing, as I mentioned before, was how the app just feels different when it's actually in a moving car at, you know, 40 to 60 to 70 miles per hour. That was a surprise for me. The positive surprise is there's a dopamine hit you get when you get an offer. I get an offer. It's 20 bucks. I'm picking someone up from point A. I'm dropping them off at point B. There's a bit of an excitement angle. Uh, and I don't want to overplay it. You know, uh, our nurse drivers work really, really hard to do their job, but I think that part of our product, there's a bit of an excitement to it. That was a s- that was a surprise to me. I will go into a few individual features, but even at a more meta level, the thing that surprised me the most is we obsess about our app, and our app is the center of our universe. But when a passenger gets in the car, the center of the driver's universe is that interaction with the passenger. That human touch between the driver and the passenger is something that we don't talk about in the office enough. And if you talk to the driver, and when I'm a driver, if the passenger is friendly, it lifts my mood. If the passenger is grumpy, then I'm unsure what to do. If the passenger is rude, which has also happened, that can really be, uh, that can really be demotivating. I want to share one anecdote with you. This was way back, like, almost eight years ago when I started driving. I- this was probably my fifth or sixth trip, so I was very, very early in my journey of, of dogfooding. So it was early morning. I think it was a Saturday morning, maybe about 7:00 AM. I was picking someone up. It was a lady. I stopped my car, o- at the curb side. She got in. She was going to the airport, she was going to San Jose Airport, and she had a suitcase, which she left on the curb, and she's inside the car. And I'm like, "What's going on?" And it suddenly dawned on me that she's expecting me to get out of my car, grab her suitcase, open the trunk, and put the suitcase in the car. But she didn't say anything. And then I suddenly realized that there is an expectation of me as the driver doing that part of the job as well. And since I was very early in my journey, I had not internalized that. And the kind of emotions that ran through me at that time just explained to me, hey, what does a driver actually go through? That was a somber ride for me. That was a somber day for me. And since that day, I have not forgotten what it feels like to be a driver, and I carry that emotion with me, and that has built a level of empathy in my mind for drivers...And I want to, I want to make sure that my team understands, that's their life and everything we build for them has to have that level of empathy. And I would say that was a big surprise for me. It's not just about the app. Yes, there are many features in the app that, uh, we can talk about which are also surprising, but what does a driver feel day in and day out as they interact with other human beings was a big one for me.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky18:43

      I, I love that. I want to talk about how you actually, uh, disseminate this culture within the product team. But out of curiosity, I always wonder what pisses off a driver as a rider. For example, do drivers like short rides or do they like long rides? Does it not matter?

   7. SKSachin Kansal18:58

      I think the short or long rides can be very personal. There are some drivers... And the great thing about our driver base is there's a lot of heterogeneity in terms of their preferences. Some of them do like short trips, because it keeps them closer to their home. They can make a decision to go back whenever they want. We... Sometimes we have incentives which, you know, if they do 20 trips and they get something more, they're able to do that.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky19:22

      Okay.

   9. SKSachin Kansal19:22

      And some of them just like a long trip, they... Because they don't want to do multiple pickups and drop-offs. So I think there's a lot of heterogeneity. If you want a tip for what not to do-

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky19:31

       Yes.

   11. SKSachin Kansal19:31

       ... to annoy a driver, I'll give you a couple of tips. It's totally okay for you to be on the phone if, you know, we have to do that. Just ask them for permission. Just say, "Are you okay if I'm on the phone?" They will always say yes, but it will just annoy them a lot less. So that's, that's number one thing that I've learned. The number two, on your way out, do not slam the door. It is their car. It is their final moment of interaction with you. Close the door, uh, and do it softly. That will ensure that you actually get good ratings from the, from the driver.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky20:06

       These are great tips. Uh, I know you can check your actual rating now in the Uber app as a ri- as a passenger. And so, uh, it's not 5.0 for most people, including myself, so this is good to know what might have caused that. (laughs)

4. 20:18 – 22:04

   Balancing metrics and user experience

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky20:18

      Oh, man. Uh, okay, one other just thread I want to follow here is, like, you spending so much time on the experience implies that that is a huge, uh, lever for growth and retention and long-term success. A lot of people in growth and product don't see it that way. They focus on what's a metric we can drive, what's, like, a conversion opportunity here. They're not just like, "How do we just make this experience better?" Can you just talk about that insight of just, like, we... Why you believe just making that experience better is so important?

   2. SKSachin Kansal20:50

      I think it's not an or, it's an and. I do think that obsessing over your metrics, especially when it's funnel metrics, and understanding all the points of friction, numbers do tell the story. So I think you do need to have the experience points, whether they are observed anecdotally or they come through, you know, some other means, as well as understanding the points of friction because of drop-off in your conversion funnel. They are very important. But you can't just have that, because if... I mean, you're talking about end users. If it becomes just a mathematical exercise, I don't think that is enough. Because as I mentioned, what they're actually feeling in the moment is something that numbers will never show. And numbers will not bring the level of intensity that emotions will bring. Now, the question is, do you have a culture that allows coexistence of both? Does it allow a coexistence of you bringing emotion as well as the numbers? And that's what I am trying to create every day, our leadership team is trying to create every day, the product team, the engineering team is trying to create every day. I, I think we've done a good job of having a coexistence of, of those two, uh, in.

5. 22:04 – 24:26

   Operationalizing dogfooding

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky22:04

      Okay. And then so how do you operationalize this and make this a part of the culture at the, at the company? Uh, clearly part of it is modeling it and just doing a lot of it yourself. What else do you do to help product people build this empathy and dog food as much as you do or to some ex- extent?

   2. SKSachin Kansal22:20

      I mean, I do it. Tara does it. So there is definitely, you know, uh, just doing by example or teaching by example. Uh, we also organize around it, because I think creating a little bit of an organization around it just helps. We are a large company now and we try to assist with this by centrally organizing. This means let's make sure that everyone understands what it means to be an Uber driver, how to sign up for an Uber driver. Some people may be on visas and so on. So there is a regulatory part of that, so we make sure that everyone understands how to sign up. Then we also organize. Every year, we organize. Every quarter, we organize one week of driving and delivery. And we have a little bit of a competition. So we have hundreds of employees who go out and drive and deliver, and there's a competition of who can do the most number of trips and who can bring in the most, the most amount of feedback in terms of things to improve, and we have prizes and so on. And that's just taken off over the last, uh, I would say especially the last two to three years post-COVID. Because during COVID, I think it was a little bit harder for us to gather everyone together. And then the last thing I'll say is, what do you do with all of that feedback? Uh, because that's when the, quote unquote, "boring part" starts. Now you're gathering all these documents. Uh, you're taking all those issues. You're putting them in your Jira tracking or whatever tracker you may be using and you're fixing them. So what we have done is we have set a six monthly OKR. So we have set an OKR that we are gonna fix 300 of these issues. Every team, actually. The driver team will fix 300 of those issues. The rider team will fix 300 of these issues. And same for the Uber Eats team. Now, I don't really care whether it's 300 or 200 or 500. The number actually doesn't matter, but the fact that there is a number is what matters. And we, we have been hitting those targets every single half, over the last two to three years. So these are some of the things that we do to operationalize it and make sure that people understand that this behavior is not just expected, but it's also rewarded.

6. 24:26 – 29:49

   Challenges and solutions in dogfooding

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky24:26

      I imagine what's challenging about this is there's also work to do that will clearly drive growth, will clearly cut down, like c- support tickets, will help with infrastructure costs. So these OKRs, there's like, "Just fix these things that we know suck. We don't know what good they'll do, but we know they're not good." How do you kind of balance that in resource and prioritization versus, like, all these other things on the roadmap that you know are gonna drive the metric?

   2. SKSachin Kansal24:51

      We have a pretty good balance set of OKRs. So let's say one of our teams has six OKRs. Just illustratively over the next six months, one of them would be... We call them fix-its. So we sign up for 300 fix-its for the next six months. In addition to that, we do sign up for a growth goal, we sign up for a retention goal, we sign up for a cost savings goal. And each of them have projects behind them, and the executional rigor is a pretty big part of Uber. So for all of those projects, we actually have... And I get engaged in that as well, uh, we have pretty serious executional rigor. Now, OKRs are not meant to be hit 100%. I think we celebrate if we hit about 75 to 80%, because you do want to set stretch targets. And then, you know, every half we do planning, and we will allocate resources between all of those OKRs. So fix-its, for example, don't get all the resources, but they also don't get zero resources, uh, which may have been the case if we had not set a culture which celebrated this and allocated resources towards this and rewarded, uh, rewarded this.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky26:02

      Awesome. Okay. Like, clearly, eh, 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.

   4. SKSachin Kansal26:20

      Absolutely.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky26:20

      Okay.

   6. SKSachin Kansal26:20

      Absolutely.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky26:22

      Some people hearing this, just as a final question along this area, uh, are gonna feel like, "Okay, Uber or so easy to dogfood, of course. I'll order Uber Eats every day. I'll go and ride. So good. This is... What a dream." (laughs) And they're dogfooding like crazy. But a lot of people work at, like, you know, Oracle and s- and, uh, Snowflake and, like, I don't know, Fivetran, all these companies where it's much less, you know, non- non-consumer product essentially, where it's more difficult to dogfood. Just any advice for folks that want to create a culture of dogfooding and, and kind of up their dogfood game at a product that isn't consumery?

   8. SKSachin Kansal26:57

      So 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. Um, now, I would say, while it is more difficult than just ordering food and, uh, 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 even further. We do have a product we call Uber For Business, where it's a business admin using it. We do have our merchant products. So Uber Eats is actually three sides of the marketplace. The eater, the consumer, uh, the courier who's bringing your food, and there's a restaurant. Now, how do I dogfood 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, uh, that customer as possible. So in the case of a merchant, we, we go spend time at restaurants. I'll give you a latest one. So we have... We have a cafe here at Uber, eh, uh, 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 you're dogfooding being an eater, you're dogfooding being a courier, and you're... You can dogfood being a, a merchant. So 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 come in. We have very close relationships with our big customers such as McDonald's or Domino's and, uh, uh... And all of them. We also have a lot of small medium business restaurants. And we have... We... Uh, relationships with them which allows us to go and spend days with them, uh, 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, Lenny. And I would s- I would say, um, I would ask everyone who's listening, irrespective of the product that they're working on, go to the nth degree of how much you can stretch, and if it's really an IT admin at your customer who's using your product, I would do two things. A, go to that IT admin and sit next to them and observe them using the product. And B, 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.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky29:35

      Awesome. So the advice there is just, uh, find a way, get as close as you can. You may not be able to ride an Uber, drive an Uber card, get an Uber ride, but, uh, there's some way you can get really close. It may not be exactly... Do the thing.

7. 29:49 – 36:37

   The motto: “ship, ship, ship”

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky29:49

   2. SKSachin Kansal29:49

      Exactly.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky29:49

      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, uh, 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, uh, encourage everyone to always think about?

   4. SKSachin Kansal30:11

      I think it's actually a natural extension of what we just talked about. If we are going to go dogfood and experience this pain and we are 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 Figma. 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, 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 as soon as possible. And for that, you have to ship, ship, ship. Now 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 users seeing it, you have to minimize that time. So that's why ship, ship, ship has become such a motto, uh, 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, in 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, uh, to get as good as we can.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky31:42

      What does this look like in practice other than just reminding people ship, ship, ship, ship, ship, ship, just, you know, repeating this mantra? How do you help people ship faster, to your point, not just work all night and all day-

   6. SKSachin Kansal31:53

      Yeah.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky31:53

      ... you know, shipping, uh, long, staying long hours? Just what are some ways to actually operationalize this?

   8. SKSachin Kansal31:59

      I think, uh, it stems from the cutting down cycle time, which is, uh, the time it takes to make decisions. I, I realize that a lot of the time is not n- 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. All 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. If it is a one-way door, if it's a massive launch, sure, it's, it's okay for it to take some deliberation. Maybe it even goes to 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 cut down the time required for the decision-making between those various steps.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky33:22

      A few things I heard that you do that you didn't mention that I think help with this, one is that there was a period where you ran daily standups 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 unblock a stalled team. Feels like these are kind of a look for opportunities to unblock essentially.

   10. SKSachin Kansal33:42

       Yeah. Well, I, I want that to be an exception rather than the rule. But yes, uh, 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. Uh, you know, those two examples, we were coming out of COVID. We had a massive shortage of drivers on our platform, and we were, 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. And 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 gonna be 24 hours." (laughs) And so there was, I think there was a period of about six months when we did do daily standups, and they were extremely helpful to unblock the teams on making certain decisions. And we shipped a lot, and, uh, 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 courier funnel at that time is still paying off because the number of drivers and couriers continues to, uh, continues to grow. And now we are worldwide at about an eight million, uh, number, and we were probably close to half of that, uh, when, uh, when we were just out of COVID. So that's an example of where daily standups help. I try to minimize that. The PRD example, yes, I did write a PRD. It was a 15-page PRD. We were working on a pretty big concept, and it was a risky concept, and, uh, it's, it was driver facing and that's always sort of high stakes. And we had about... By this time we had 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?" Because there were a lot of good ideas and not so good ideas, but no one was actually putting it all together to say, "This is what we're gonna 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, you know, us getting to that end point. Now, if I were to do that every single day or every single week, then I would say there's a problem. (laughs)

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky36:15

       Yeah. You wouldn't have time to deliver food and, uh, give rides.

   12. SKSachin Kansal36:18

       That is exactly right, or I would not have time to do hiring or I would not have time to do performance reviews-

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky36:24

       That's true.

   14. SKSachin Kansal36:24

       ... and so on, so. Uh, 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.

8. 36:37 – 40:49

   Product announcements and live demos

   1. SKSachin Kansal36:37

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky36:37

      Another tactic that I heard that, uh, I think, that I want to ask you about, someone anonymously...... uh, said that you ask for live demos. And here is the question. You always insist on li- doing live demos that make everyone nervous when they present. Uh, the question is, why?

   3. SKSachin Kansal36:53

      So I think they may be talking about, uh, when we do product announcements. So we do, when we do product announcements, externally, you know, on stage, et cetera, I do insist on actually live demo-ing the product. Part of this comes from, you know, I grew up as a product manager back in the day, in the 2000s at Palm. Palm built the Palm Pilot. Palm sort of was cut from the Apple cloth. There were a lot of ex-Apple people there. And you know, you are 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. Now, I will say there is an internal reason and an external reason to do this. Um, the external reason to do this is you have to tell a story. One of my other, um, 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 are 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 product. 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. So that is my belief, that I don't want to have hubris 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, while it is 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 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, and now it's in, on video, and it will stay forever. To see the product that they put their blood, sweat, and 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.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky39:28

      (laughs) A lot of stress. Uh, okay. 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. It's where I put the questions that I plan to ask every guest that's coming on the podcast. It's where I put my community resources. It's how I manage my work flows. Here's how Coda can help you. Imagine starting a project at work, and your vision is clear. You know exactly who's doing what and where to find the data that you need to do your part. In fact, you don't have to waste time searching for anything, because everything your team needs, from project trackers and OKRs to documents and spreadsheets, lives in one tab, all in Coda. With Coda's collaborative all-in-one workspace, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI, all in one easy-to-organize tab. Like 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 you're a 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/lenny today and get six months free of the team plan for startups. That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash Lenny to get started for free and get six months of the team plan. Coda.io/lenny.

9. 40:49 – 43:51

   Career advice for product managers

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky40:49

      I'm gonna shift our conversation a bit to general career advice. Uh, I've got a bunch of questions. I actually asked the community, my, uh, newsletter Slack community what to ask you, and they had a few really good questions that I want to run by you. So one is just, what are some of the most impactful and, uh, 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?

   2. SKSachin Kansal41:19

      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 two 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. Just 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, you know, over those two to three years, three years later, you'll 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. Where 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, you know, 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 what 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- over- over that time.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky43:23

      Uh, another way to- to label what you're describing is 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 just ship over and over and over, and that keeps 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, that's probably not a good place to be starting your career.

   4. SKSachin Kansal43:49

      That's- that's right. That's right.

10. 43:51 – 46:55

    The evolution of product management with AI

    1. SKSachin Kansal43:51

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky43:51

       Another question from the community. This is from James Conway. He asked that, okay, so you've been in product for about 25 years, something like that at this point, right?

    3. SKSachin Kansal44:00

       That's right. 20... 24 years. 24 years.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky44:04

       24, okay. Almost 25. (laughs) Uh, 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?

    5. SKSachin Kansal44:21

       I think there are many things AI is changing and AI will change even if I, you know... What did I work on, uh, 24 years ago or how did I, uh, 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. The 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 in 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'm already seeing on a weekly basis we are introducing a new way 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? AI is making all of that much, much easier and I think that transformation is gonna 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 what my end user wants. 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, you know, 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. I mean, at- 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, you know, demographics, whether it is socioeconomic status, and for us to internalize what do end users want, AI will definitely speed it up, but for a product manager, it is gonna 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 gonna continue, but the importance of judgment, and as you mentioned, product sense and the gut feel, that is gonna become even more important in the world of AI. And as a result of that, we need to in- increase that or reduce that cycle time even more so we can develop that product sense and judgment.

11. 46:55 – 49:36

    Collaboration between engineers and product managers

    1. SKSachin Kansal46:55

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky46:55

       Uh, sort of along those lines, there's a question I got from, uh, I don't know if he's the CTO of Uber, uh, CTO of part of Uber, Pravin, who I believe you work with at Uber?

    3. SKSachin Kansal47:05

       Yeah.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky47:05

       Okay. Uh, so the question here was, ask him what he hates from engineers. Does that ring any sort of bells? (laughs)

    5. SKSachin Kansal47:12

       I think- I think, Lenny, that's a trick question. He wants to get me into trouble, I'm sure. For me-

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky47:17

       Let's get you into trouble. Let's do it. (laughs)

    7. SKSachin Kansal47:20

       (laughs) But let me- let me, uh... I'll- I'll tell you, I- I actually- actually know the answer to this question. What I hate about engineers is when we work on a project and they say, "Hey, I can't do anything because I do not have a PRD from a product manager," now while I consider that to be important for my job security and a PM's 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 white 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 co-create. They should co-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 org perspective in how I operate. So 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, I... At- at the same time, I will have an opinion about how we message our products. I will have an opinion about, you know, maybe some engineering architecture to the extent that I understand that or I will have an opinion about an ad campaign or how we operationalize our products. So in that spirit-Uh, you know what I hate is if we are blocked because a certain document was not written to the Nth degree of, uh, specificity.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky48:58

       Uh, I love that you, uh, answered the question. That's great. And I think what's also interesting along those lines is it's a lot easier now to write a, a good version of a PRD slash one-pager with AI tooling, where you're 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."

    9. SKSachin Kansal49:17

       And you have so many tools now. You know, we do a lot of brainstorming. We do whiteboarding. You could actually convert summaries of those conversations into the first draft of your PRD. Uh, 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 PRDs.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky49:35

        All right. Amazing.

12. 49:36 – 55:59

    Uber’s vision for self-driving cars

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky49:36

       I wanna 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 does Uber become as self-driving emerges? You know, we see all these self-driving cars around. Uber's 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?

    2. SKSachin Kansal50:00

       Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a big area of conversation internally, externally. Uh, so absolutely agree with you on the importance of it. If you rewind back the clock, we actually had our own self-driving unit. And during COVID, we decided to divest off it.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky50:16

       I remember that.

    4. SKSachin Kansal50:16

       And we decided that we are gonna 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, uh, called May Mobility. Uh, so we have been announcing many, many partners when it comes to AVs. Uh, and I... That, that... 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. The hybrid network has a hybrid of human drivers, uh, 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 gonna be really, really low. And you may have a lot of these vehicles actually sit under-utilized. Whereas when it is Friday evening at 6:00 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, it can definitely work, but you're gonna leave either customers dissatisfied or you're gonna 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. So 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. Uh, so as we project out, we don't know if it is gonna be five years or 10 years till it sees a certain kind of scale across the world, across many, many cities. We are, uh, in about 75 countries today, roughly about 15,000 cities. So there's a huge, you know, geographical landscape, uh, for us to capture as well. But that's our strategy, and so far, we recently laun- launched in Austin with Waymo, and that's been going really well. Uh, and we have launched, uh... We of course have Phoenix with Waymo. We are gonna be launching Atlanta soon. We've also launched internationally in Abu Dhabi with our partner, WeRide. And then there are many more launches that are gonna come down the road. So, uh, we're very excited. And by the way, I talked about mobility. Delivery has something similar. So we have sidewalk robots with, uh, with many, uh, with many partners who, in a downtown area, for a short distance delivery, are actually doing thousands of deliveries today.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky53:15

       Oh, wow. I've seen those robots. They're very cute. I, I never... I always, like, wonder how they get to the... where they're going (laughs) . But clearly, it's working. The Waymo thing, I've totally noticed, that Waymo basically, in some form, has decided to move away from their own app in many cities. And Uber is how you get a Waymo, which I don't think a lot of people understand. So what I'm hearing is essentially the strategy is just be the super app for getting around and getting food, and Uber drivers are a part of that, and part of that is autonomous vehicles. And is the idea over time, it will stay that way? There will always be a need for humans to drive cars for a long time?

    6. SKSachin Kansal53:51

       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 pick-up-and-drop-off spots that AVs can't go to today. Um, there are going to be regulatory, uh, hurdles that we, you know, have to get across before AVs are everywhere and so on and so forth. Second, 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, you know, delivering food or delivering groceries. But that list is gonna 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, uh, 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 their doorstep, and you know, and there are more things that we will do as well. We have a partnership with Walmart where, you know, we may send a courier who may pick up 15 different, you know, bags and deliver it to 15 different homes. So...... the need for human drivers on our 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.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky55:15

       I love that visual of you carrying up- m- big jugs of water to some random person's house.

    8. SKSachin Kansal55:19

       I think they tipped me well. I think that was a good tip.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky55:22

       By the way, what do you do with the, the money you earn from this? Is it you just keep it or it's like, you give it somewhere?

    10. SKSachin Kansal55:27

        It's, uh... So we have a policy that the money actually is not kept by us. We refund it back to the riders or to the, um-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky55:38

        Oh, wow.

    12. SKSachin Kansal55:39

        ... to the, uh, to the eaters. Yeah.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky55:40

        And you just... How do you, how do... (laughs) What do they see when they get this refund? They're just like, like, "Enjoy."

    14. SKSachin Kansal55:45

        Actually, that's a good question. I think they see... They, they, they... I don't think that it says that, you know, this is because it was deli- delivered by an Uber employee.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky55:53

        Yeah.

    16. SKSachin Kansal55:53

        It's a good question. I should go back and see what it says.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky55:56

        Look at us.

    18. SKSachin Kansal55:56

        But we, we do refund it back to them. Yeah.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky55:57

        We're dogfooding right here.

13. 55:59 – 1:01:58

    Uber’s path to profitability

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky55:59

    2. SKSachin Kansal55:59

       Yeah.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky56:00

       Okay. Another question that, uh, that I want to touch on is, Uber... It feels 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 cashflow, profitability. We 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 it? Blitzscaled, as Reid Hoffman called it, and then making a big change like that, uh, I imagine was very hard. What was that experience like, just kind of switching cultures from just raise money, go crazy, to profitable cashflow sort of business?

    4. SKSachin Kansal56:47

       I think it was awesome. I, I, I think it was a great, great period because, uh, if you are taking inefficiency out of your system and you're taking the dollars you saved back into the business or back into the end users' pockets or the drivers' pockets, that's just a great feeling. And, 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 courier 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 courier's time. 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, and 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 c- company so that you don't go under and your stock price goes up, that's actually feels very, very rewarding. So I, I think that, uh, Dara 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 over 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.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky58:55

       I imagine a lot of companies are going through this s- same sort of experience now, trying to cut costs, trying to be efficient, the government, (laughs) you know, the US government's going through this. Uh, it's very difficult to do well without, you know, cutting things that are really dear to people, especially, like, at a product company, big bets that are gonna maybe pay off in 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?

    6. SKSachin Kansal59:27

       Yeah, I think, uh, we divested out of two big businesses, which were our self-driving unit as well as what we call Uber Elevate, uh, which, uh... And we divested out of both of them during COVID. COVID was a very special time for us, if I could use that term. Uh, our mobility-

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky59:43

       (laughs)

    8. SKSachin Kansal59:43

       ... business dropped by 80% overnight. Uh-

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky59:46

       Great.

    10. SKSachin Kansal59:46

        ... and I think that Dara and the leadership team actually showed tremendous leadership during that time. Uh, and one of those was to make those, those calls to, 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, I have my framework on this, which is, I think of our portfolio as concentric circles. The center of that concentric cir- the core is our core product. We do 33 million trips every single day. And if you think of a typical Uber trip or an Uber delivery, there is a multipoint failure possibility, all the way from you opening the app, to a driver accepting, r- or doing the pickup, doing the drop-off, and you getting a, a receipt, and then similarly, there are a number of steps on the eat side. And we obsess over making sure that that core is as flawless 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. It just... The numbers just really start to add up. So 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 am dog fooding the core mostly and making (laughs) 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 bets. By the way, this is where Uber Eats came from back in the day. This is where Uber Groceries come, uh, from, which is now a very large business for us. And on the right side, Uber Reserve, Uber for Teens, which is something I launched a couple of years ago, our focus on taxis, and there are many other growth bets that are now in the billions of dollars, you know, 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, uh, of that- in that concentric circle.

14. 1:01:58 – 1:07:21

    Balancing data and gut decisions

    1. SKSachin Kansal1:01:58

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:58

       There's another area of Uber that it feels like it's shifting a bit. So historically, I know a lot of people that have worked at Uber over the years where Uber has this reputation of being very data-driven, very, like, ruthless with prioritization. Uh, a lot of what you've been talking about is feels like the opposite of just, like, anecdotes and, like, experiences, empathy. So 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, you know, big bet that ended up being successful.

    3. SKSachin Kansal1:02:31

       I have a- I have a few, and each of those could have gotten me fired, Lenny. Uh, it was that sort of gut-based. Uh, I'll give you- (laughs) I'll- I'll give you a few of those examples.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:41

       Oh, man. That's good.

    5. SKSachin Kansal1:02:41

       When I joined, I was working on safety. And, you know, safety is a big issue on the Uber platform, was a very, very big issue back in 2017. We had not sort of built enough software to be able to manage safety in the physical world. Um, 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. I 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's side and the driver's 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." So I would say that was sort of back in the day that I drove. The... Another crazy one was I pushed the company to work with taxis. If you look at my resume, I work at a com- 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, the taxis have antiquated software in them, the taxi drivers may not want to provide the same level of service, so on and so forth. And there's a little bit (laughs) of a gut feel and 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 hailable through the Uber app, uh, and that is generating, you know, 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, (laughs) uh, my gut decision. And the last one I would say is Uber for Teenagers. There are so many reasons to not do that, by the way. Uh, y- you go talk to parents, they're like, "I am never putting my teen in an Uber." Uh, 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, uh, in our household is kids transportation. And I'm like, "How can that not be a problem?" And how can... If- if anyone is going to solve a transportation problem, shouldn't that be Uber? And 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, uh, in terms of safety, so we launched that two years ago. It's been growing (laughs) 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 bets 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. And 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 head room for us.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:44

       Very cool. On the, uh, taxis point, uh, I've always thought, like, taxis are, like, great in so many ways. They just know exactly how to get places, they're so, like... They're, like, very knowledgeable and they just gets it 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 it.

    7. SKSachin Kansal1:07:02

       Yeah.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:03

       It reminds me also, my wife always jokes there's all these startups that, like, come in, disrupt the whole industry, like Airbnb is another example, and then they end up just kind of (laughs) providing the same service.Oh, okay, cool. Now we got taxis again. (laughs) Here we go.

    9. SKSachin Kansal1:07:14

       Exactly.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:14

        Okay.

    11. SKSachin Kansal1:07:14

        They're very efficient. They know the city like the back of their hand.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:17

        Yeah, especially in, in the, the UK, their whole knowledge

15. 1:07:21 – 1:10:14

    AI tools in product management

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:21

       thing. Okay, I'm gonna take us to a couple 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?

    2. SKSachin Kansal1:07:36

       I would say the team is using a lot of tools now. The team is using tools to, uh, build initial prototypes, uh, initial mocks, I, I should say. The team's using, um, that for user research to be able to process information as well.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:53

       What are some of the tools, if you can name 'em?

    4. SKSachin Kansal1:07:55

       We are using both ChatGPT as well as Gemini, uh, quite heavily in the company. We have, you know, close relationships with, uh, with both the companies. Specifically, I end up using ChatGPT 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 NotebookLM 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 ChatGPT and Gemini to summarize long user research documents. Some 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, what's happening in Brazil, this is what's happening in Korea. So that's, uh, 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 ChatGPT, where it, you know, you feed them a prompt. You actually present a pretty hard... The other day I was, um, we were thinking of a driver feature. It's a driver feature that has been discussed a lot in the past. We still don't... We haven't done it. I just asked ChatGPT 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 to be able to, for the drivers to like it?" And it presented me an a- an answer, which I would say it's an amazing research assistant, and it's a- absolutely a starting point for a brainstorm with my team, with some really, really good ideas. So, I think that that is making us not just more productive. I think it's actually gonna make us better at our jobs.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:48

       That is an incredible use case. Essentially, it's a thought partner on strategy and helping you find gaps in your thinking. And be-

    6. SKSachin Kansal1:09:56

       That's right.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:56

       I think for Uber it's easier, 'cause these, uh, these, uh, crawlers can learn a lot about what Uber is. For some products they won't know as much, but, uh, clearly there's th- um, something you could do there, whatever your product is. And by the way, it's cool that you guys give access to ChatGPT. A lot of companies don't. Like a lot of companies only have Gemini or something like

16. 1:10:14 – 1:13:48

    Failure corner

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:14

       that. Okay. I'm gonna take us to another cor- uh, corner on the podcast I call fail corner. And what fail corner is about is people come on this podcast, they share all these wins, "Cool, taxis worked and teams worked and safety worked. And look at this, we got profitable." Everything'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?

    2. SKSachin Kansal1:10:40

       I still somehow, when I think about it, I don't end up calling it a fail. Uh, but absolutely, you know, you, 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 long time ago. Uh, Palm, you know, developed the PalmPilot, uh, and then it went into the phone business. Uh, some of your listeners may have used them. Some of your listeners may be too young to, to remember. And when, uh, d- there was a period of time when it was really BlackBerry and Palm were the sort of the two smartphones on the market, especially here in the US. And then Apple announced the iPhone, and then soon thereafter, Android, uh, 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, you know, HP bought Palm. Uh, our, we did not have the level of scale, uh, or the level of hardware quality that we needed to have to be able to effectively compete with the, 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 gonna happen. You 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, uh, from that. Uh, and I always, you know, 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 gonna compete with each other so ferociously that it's v- especially if they're 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, right? So, 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. So, that's sort of, you know, uh, one learning. And I think the second learning is speed and hustle and resilience. Uh, after Palm, I spent time at a couple of startups. I mentioned Flywheel, which was a taxi company, which was also not able to scale, but what I learned through, through, through that, uh, period is that hustle and sense of urgency is extremely important. So, when I think of my portfolio of skillsets right now, really they... That's portfolio that I have developed from a lot of failures over my career.And those are, you know, 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. And 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, uh, those are my failures.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:41

       I can see where this motto of ship, ship, ship came from. It all connects.

    4. SKSachin Kansal1:13:45

       It is absolutely a causation there.

17. 1:13:48 – 1:17:52

    Lightning round and final thoughts

    1. SKSachin Kansal1:13:48

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:48

       Sachin, is there anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

    3. SKSachin Kansal1:13:55

       I can talk a little bit about how I think about... I think I've talked a lot about end users.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:00

       Mm-hmm.

    5. SKSachin Kansal1:14:00

       But I cannot talk about end users enough.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:02

       (laughs) That's true.

    7. SKSachin Kansal1:14:02

       Um, so in terms of offering my unique take, which may be completely flawed, but that is my unique take, I'll-

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:09

       Hmm, intriguing.

    9. SKSachin Kansal1:14:09

       ... I'll offer, I'll offer 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. Like give them an experience that they will not forget, or it'll 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 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.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:22

        I love this advice. There's a, there's a book that I loved that, uh, is for riding and, uh, the title is Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit.

    11. SKSachin Kansal1:15:33

        (laughs) Yes.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:33

        And that's- it applies exactly to products. Marc Andreessen has this quote where, I think it's, um, "Everyone's time is already allocated." They don't have time for your product. (laughs) They have stuff to do in their day.

    13. SKSachin Kansal1:15:43

        Exactly.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:44

        And to hit that bar is very high.

    15. SKSachin Kansal1:15:46

        Exactly.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:46

        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. Uh, I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

    17. SKSachin Kansal1:15:55

        I am.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:56

        Number one, what are two or three books that you have recommended most to other people?

    19. SKSachin Kansal1:16:02

        Maybe a boring answer, but, uh, these are the books I believe in. I recommended the Steve Jobs book by Walter Isaacson. I have recommended the Elon Musk book. I have, I have read the Ashley Vance one fully. I'm in the middle of the Walter Isaacson one. And I have recommended Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. Um, these are the three books. Uh, I think that there was a period of time in Silicon Valley, uh, maybe 10 years ago, and maybe this is still true, when everyone wanted to be Steve Jobs, and they- 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 applied 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. You're not gonna behave the same way that they did, you're not gonna build products the same way that they did, but you're gonna give it your absolute fricking best because that's what your end users deserve and you're not gonna compromise on that. That's sort of what my takeaway is. And I think that takeaway 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, uh, uh, office. It's not so. These are lonely jobs, these are hard things, and how do you persist through that? I- I felt that that book was amazing at, uh, teaching, teaching me that.

Episode duration: 1:21:56