Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Lenny, 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. 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 different things depending on the level of severity, and then if I don't follow up or my team doesn't follow up, and if you 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 written by many, many people at Uber and honestly it's making our products better. And I would say even more important than the specific features that we fix or we add, it's the culture of we are not just going to accept certain problems in our products, we are actually going to fix them. That's really, really important. So let's talk about just why this is so important to you. I want to talk about how you operationalize this in the culture of it at Uber, but just as a CPO, I don't know of many that go draw people off hundreds of times deliver food to people's houses hundreds of times. I imagine you have many things you got to do day to day. There's hiring, there's drama, fires, all these things. Why do you prioritize this so highly? 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 MAU 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. 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're 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 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 anytime I go to a Brazil office, I go to our India office, I go to a UK office, at a minimum I do one or two roundtables with drivers. I also do roundtables 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 off 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 aha moment that, "Oh, 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 there's a lot to [inaudible 00:13:54]. All of that is great. However, until I get behind the wheel or I'm a passenger or I'm 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 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 word 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 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.…

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