Sachin Kansal: preference

Transcript context

…When we were exploring what to chat about and where to spend our time, there's a bunch of themes that came up both in our conversations and also when I was talking to people that work with you at Uber and other places. And the theme that came up over and over is dogfooding. And dogfooding is something that comes up a bunch on this podcast. Everyone's always promoting dogfooding. It feels though that you take this to a whole other level and you do this better than anyone I've ever spoken to. You're basically world-class at dogfooding. There's a lot I want to talk about here, but before we get into it, just give us a sense of what dogfooding looks like in your world. What is the scale that you go to, to dogfood Uber? I mean call it dogfooding, call it just obsession about the products that we ask our end users to use and we should be using it ourselves. So in my world, what it looks like. There are a few apps in my world. There's the Rider app that everyone's familiar with. There's the Uber Eats app and let's not forget there's a driver and a courier app as well. So dogfooding looks like the following for me in general, on an average, I end up taking maybe five to 10 trips or Uber rides every week, which just happens because I'm an Uber rider. Now, when I'm traveling, that's probably even more. I end up placing maybe three orders, three Uber Eats orders every week. Sometimes that's too much. And again, when I'm traveling, that could increase. If I'm traveling with family, it can be a lot. It could be literally all our meals. So those are probably more explainable, more understandable. The volume goes up and down. But then, how do you test the driver app? So I actually go out either once or twice a month. I will set aside half a day or a day and then I'll go out and I'll drive and deliver here in the Bay Area. So I've been doing that for many, many years now. I will say that's probably one of the best parts of my job. I really, really enjoy it doing trips as well as doing deliveries, and maybe every time I go out, I'll do about 10 to 12 rides and deliveries. So that's what dogfooding looks like at the outset. That's the fun part. The painful part then is, "Okay, what did I learn?" Because it's very easy for me to do this and then just completely forget about it, not document it, use it anecdotally in some conversation but not be able to go into a lot of detail. So what I do after each of these instances, whether it's using the Rider app or whether it is driving, I take a lot of screenshots and then I come back and I write documents or I add to an existing document. So I have a driver document, I have a Rider app document, I have an Uber Eats document and I'll come back and I'll just write everything that I learned that is probably not ideal. I'll add a lot of screenshots to that doc. I will tag people because I know who works on what and then I'll just send people my thoughts on what we think we can improve. And after that, we have a process internally which where we go through all of those issues, we prioritize them, not everything that I thought is a great idea is necessarily a great idea. So we go through all of that and then we fix issues. And I'm not the only one dogfooding in the company, but I do follow through on the things that I reported and make sure that things that should be fixed get fixed and as quickly as possible. So that's the the end-to-end journey of dogfooding for me in my work. How many trips have you taken? How many rides have you driven? How many food delivery trips have you done total? What are the numbers here just over your time at Uber?…

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