Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I think from a driving and delivering perspective, in the seven to 800 range now and I don't know as a passenger how many trips I have done. I can't count that. Same for Uber Eats, but the driving and delivering is many hundred trips. Wow. Yeah, I think on riding on Uber and getting food delivered, that's not so hard. To your point, the real hard part is driving and delivering people's foods and taking them places. Also on the docs, I think you're also underselling yourself when your colleagues or Ricky told me that you write 40-page reports on what's broken with screenshots and suggested fixes. And then like you said, you follow up on all these fixes. You don't just put them out there and then hope people do something with it. You actually stay on top of them and make people feel accountable. 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.…

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