Evidence receipt / preference
Published · transcript-backedBrian Tolkin: preference
4 Aug 2024 Lenny's Podcast Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
“Something that gets me personally to the high bucket category. And then I think the last part, which is some part of experimentation is if you just ship something because it's your intuition or it's where you want to see the product go, do you have a reasonable feedback loop to understand whether or not you are correct?”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Brian Tolkin
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 4 Aug 2024
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…All the time. All the time. And so I think there's definitely a humility to say if you can, if it's relatively easy to test your assumptions or test your hypotheses. That is always better to gut check yourself. And that takes a little bit of humility to say that, but we've all been wrong plenty of times. But if that's just not on the table, I think the reality is you can't pretend it is. And sometimes you got to use taste and judgment and then you say, okay, what is my conviction level and do I have just medium, low or high conviction? And if I have anything low or medium conviction and it's a decision of consequence, I should talk to more customers, check it with another person and see if their intuition matches. Something that gets me personally to the high bucket category. And then I think the last part, which is some part of experimentation is if you just ship something because it's your intuition or it's where you want to see the product go, do you have a reasonable feedback loop to understand whether or not you are correct? So that could be customer support or ticket volume or feature adoption, whatever the case is, it may not be an output metric in the traditional A/B test, but some more rigorous system that says, hey, I had this hypothesis, we just shipped it for x, y, z constraint reason for red. I think that's awesome advice. I agree with everything you're saying. You mentioned this word humility, and it is a good segue to something I want to talk about, which is Zillow. One of the most interesting things that's happened in your space is Zillow basically decided, hey, we're just going to do what Opendoor is doing, they launched it, you're basically frenemies for a while, and then they're like, no, it's not working. Now you partner and now you work with Zillow on this stuff. So are you able to share what went down there with the story of what happened, how it went, and where things are at now?…
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