Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Absolutely, absolutely. Some people hearing this just as a final question along this area are going to feel like, "Okay, Uber so easy to dogfood. Of course, I order Uber Eats every day. I'll go and ride. So good. This is what a dream. I'm dogfooding like crazy." But a lot of people work at Oracle and Snowflake and I don't know, Fivetran, all these companies where it's much less, non-consumer product essentially where it's more difficult to dogfood. Just any advice for folks that want to create a culture of dogfooding and up their dogfood game at a product that isn't consumering. So first of all, we thought the same when we thought about the driver app as well because it was a little bit distant for people. Now, I would say while it is more difficult than just ordering food and taking a ride, it is not as difficult as perhaps some of the other products that you mentioned. But I do think that you just stretch that even further. We do have a product we call Uber for Business where it's a business admin using it. We do have our merchant product. So Uber Eats is actually three sides of the marketplace. The eater, the consumer, the courier who's bringing your food and there's a restaurant. Now, how do I dogfood the restaurant product, for example. So these questions are very, very valid. So my guidance would be, and what I try to do is try to get as close to that customer as possible. So in the case of a merchant, we go spend time at restaurants. I'll give you a latest one. So we have a cafe here at Uber on campus. We also have a barista. So we enable the barista to be an Uber Eats restaurant, and they have an Uber Eats tablet and I can actually order from that barista. So now you're dogfooding being an eater, you're dogfooding being a courier and you can dogfood being a merchant. So some of my product team, they actually will go to the barista, they'll stand behind the counter and they'll experience what it feels like for these orders to come in. We have very close relationships with our big customers such as McDonald's or Domino's and all of them. We also have a lot of small-medium business restaurants and we have relationships with them which allows us to go and spend days with them so that we can observe what life is like behind the counter for a restaurant worker, for a kitchen worker, how does our product show up, and we learn a lot of stuff, Lenny. And I would ask everyone who's listening, irrespective of the product that they're working on, go to the nth degree of how much you can stretch. And if it's really an IT admin at your customer who's using your product, I would do two things. A, go to that IT admin and sit next to them and observe them using the product. B, set up what we call test accounts and try to pretend to be an IT admin and set up that account. I went through our merchant setup flow, which I can just do by setting up a test account and I learned so many things of all the points of friction that we are putting in that flow. So I think there is still a lot that you can do even if you do not have a consumer product.…

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