Albert Cheng: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes, it was like the bus super thing. The blue commuter shuttles, like 15-person shuttles, they would essentially drive from various neighborhoods into downtown San Francisco. It's a commuting use case across between the public bus system and an Uber and Lyft. So I was there for some time. I led product there and the core service was really loved by its users. It was reliable and fast and affordable enough, but we got pretty interested in this idea that maybe we can improve utilization, maybe we can make the service a little bit more innovative if we offer dynamic routes more similar to Uber and Lyft. How could the drivers are driving these fixed routes? But if they have spare time, they can go out of their way, go pick up somebody at their house or something and keep going. So we tried this, we called the chair direct, really interesting attempt, but I learned a lot of lessons there because ultimately it didn't work out. One lesson is like this was kind of a solution searching for a problem. You never just purely want to chase A, it wouldn't it be nice if we did this as opposed to this is our user and this is the problem that we're solving, this is why it's going to delight them, et cetera, that's one. Second is you got to consider, especially in these more marketplace type businesses, there's more than just one end user and we focus so much of our attention on the writer app without realizing, oh yeah, the drivers are carrying a lot of the brunt of this experience and our operations team is as well. And so when the drivers are confused or disgruntled, that can lead to a challenging overall experience for the product. So that's definitely another one. And the third one is we did a lot of actually PR, prior to the service going out just to get the word out. And PR has its time in place, but I think doing it before you have validation that customers definitely want, the thing is quite risky and it can lead to a lot of sun cost once you get it out because you need to see it through, you want to see it succeed. So yeah, this is a decade ago, honestly, I had a great time at that company, but I still remember that vividly because it contained three or more key lessons that carried forward as I have built many products since then. Yeah, it feels like you went to the complete other end run experiments of everything before you tell anyone about it.…

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