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Brian Tolkin: preference

4 Aug 2024 Lenny's Podcast Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)

“We try to for course the framework if it's not working. But I think what I really like about it is it forces you to put yourself in the customer's shoes.”

— Brian Tolkin

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Speaker
Brian Tolkin
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
preference
Recorded
4 Aug 2024
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Attio. A radically new type of CRM. There's a world where your CRM is powerful, easily configured, and deeply intuitive. Attio makes that a reality. Attio is built specifically for the next era of companies. It syncs with your data sources, easily configures to their unique structures and works for any go-to-market motion from self-serve to sales led. Attio automatically enriches your contacts, syncs your email and calendar, gives you powerful reports and lets you quickly build Zapier style automations. The next era of companies deserves more than an inflexible one size fits all CRM. Join modal, replicate 11 labs, and more, and scale your startup to the next level. Head to attio.com/lenny and you'll get 15% off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O.com/lenny. Adjacent topic. I hear you're a big fan of drops to be done, which is okay, so it's a fun recurring topic on this podcast. We've had many people that love it, many people that hate it. I love seeing both sides of it. I love that you find it helpful and you implement it at Opendoor. I'd love to hear just how you actually apply it at Opendoor, what you've learned about how to apply jobs to be done effectively. Yeah. I think like all frameworks, the right answer is to pick your set of frameworks, have more tools in your toolbox, and then actually understand when and how to apply them. So we try to avoid being a hammer and everything's a nail. We try to for course the framework if it's not working. But I think what I really like about it is it forces you to put yourself in the customer's shoes. I think in a slightly deeper way and be a little bit more empathetic when I think about building at Opendoor versus say building at Uber or when you are building at Airbnb is we are not... Most people at Opendoor, we don't have homes to sell every week or every month, nor do we buy homes every week or every month. On average in the US is something people do once every seven years. I'm sure the average at Opendoor is something similar, and so it's a little bit harder to be a customer. I took Uber every day. You probably use Airbnb a number of times a year. And so in some sense for some of those companies, you can bill for yourself, you would intuit the job to be done because you're just doing it for yourself. We don't necessarily have that context. And so a framework that forces us to be really thoughtful and intentional about how a customer might perceive our product is really helpful. The other thing that I like about it is the canonical version of it encourages you to think about the context in which the user's operating or the other things outside of your product that they might be going through. And in our case, the home buying or selling journey often is a certainly multi-week, if not multi-month or multi quarter journey with a lot of complexity and a lot of conversations outside of our product. You may be talking to an agent, you may be talking to a friend, you may be driving around the city trying to find a house, and the framework is very flexible and encouraging of saying what is actually the job to be done of this user when they're thinking about our product and what is the context in which they're operating. I'd love to go one level deeper to talk about how you actually implement it. Do you have templates of, you have a startup project as a blank, I blank, blank, blank? How do you...…

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