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Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal

1 Jun 2025 30 published claims 2 attributable people
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Speakers in the public record

Sachin KansalLenny Rachitsky

Claim mix

belief 11recommendation 6commitment 4uncertainty 3preference 3evaluation 2prediction 1

Evidence policy

Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.

Claim ledger

The useful parts, with receipts.

30 published records

01 / recommendation

Recommends Steve Jobs. Recommends Elon Musk book. Recommends Hard Thing About Hard Things.

“Maybe a boring answer, but these are the books I believe in. I recommended the Steve Jobs book by Walter Isaacson. I have recommended Elon Musk book. I have read the Ashlee Vance one fully. I'm in the middle of the Walter Isaacson one and I have recommended Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. These are the three books. I think that there was a period of time in Silicon Valley maybe 10 years ago, and maybe this is still true, but everyone wanted to be Steve Jobs and they thought that they can just recreate being Steve Jobs. There was this fever in the valley, and the reason why you want to listen or read that book is you need to understand the context of what makes up the entire person. Yes, the person part is important, but how they apply their own context to the products that they ship and they change the world is important because not that I or anyone else can recreate what they did or what they're doing, but take the learnings from them and see how you can apply the same principles to your context. You're not going to behave the same way that they did. You're not going to build products the same way that they did, but you're going to give it your absolute freaking best because that's what your end users deserve and you're not going to compromise on that. That's sort of what my takeaway is, and I think that takeaway is extremely strong in the books that I talk about. And the Ben Horowitz book, it goes back to my concept of resilience. Some people have this really optimistic view of how life is in the corporate world or in the product world or in the CEO office. It's not so. These are lonely jobs, these are hard things, and how do you persist through that? I felt that that book was amazing at teaching me that.”
Speaker
Sachin Kansal
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

06 / belief

A few things I heard that you do that you didn't mention that I think helped with this, one is that there was a period where you ran daily stand-ups with cross-functional teams during COVID just to keep things moving.

“A few things I heard that you do that you didn't mention that I think helped with this, one is that there was a period where you ran daily stand-ups with cross-functional teams during COVID just to keep things moving.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

09 / uncertainty

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

12 / belief

We have a partnership with Walmart where we may send a courier who may pick up 15 different bags and deliver it to 15 different homes. So the need for human drivers on our platform or human earners I would say is just going to continue to increase because we're going to have multiple earning opportunities for them over time.

“We have a partnership with Walmart where we may send a courier who may pick up 15 different bags and deliver it to 15 different homes. So the need for human drivers on our platform or human earners I would say is just going to continue to increase because we're going to have multiple earning opportunities for them over time.”
Speaker
Sachin Kansal
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

13 / belief

Essentially it's a thought partner on strategy and helping you find gaps in your thinking. And I think for Uber, it's easier because these crawlers can learn a lot about what Uber is.

“Essentially it's a thought partner on strategy and helping you find gaps in your thinking. And I think for Uber, it's easier because these crawlers can learn a lot about what Uber is.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

14 / uncertainty

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 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.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

16 / belief

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

17 / belief

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Sachin Kansal
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

18 / uncertainty

Sort of along those lines, there's a question I got from, I don't know if he's the CTO of Uber, CTO of part of Uber, Praveen who I believe you work with at Uber.

“Sort of along those lines, there's a question I got from, I don't know if he's the CTO of Uber, CTO of part of Uber, Praveen who I believe you work with at Uber.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

19 / evaluation

Send me feedback of how we can get better as a product, and the more detailed your feedback, the better it is. It's very easy to say this doesn't work or that doesn't work, but if you actually describe and say, "Hey, this is what happened.

“Send me feedback of how we can get better as a product, and the more detailed your feedback, the better it is. It's very easy to say this doesn't work or that doesn't work, but if you actually describe and say, "Hey, this is what happened.”
Speaker
Sachin Kansal
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

20 / belief

As you progress in your career, you want to develop that gut as fast as possible, because in my opinion, that's what differentiates a good product manager from a great product manager, that they have developed some extra level of gut and they're able to make the correct decisions because of the experience that they have had over that time.

“As you progress in your career, you want to develop that gut as fast as possible, because in my opinion, that's what differentiates a good product manager from a great product manager, that they have developed some extra level of gut and they're able to make the correct decisions because of the experience that they have had over that time.”
Speaker
Sachin Kansal
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

21 / recommendation

I do think that obsessing over your metrics, especially when it's funnel metrics and understanding all the points of friction, numbers do tell the story. So I think you do need to have the experience points whether they are observed anecdotally or they come through some other means as well as understanding the points of friction because of drop off in your conversion funnel, they're very important.

“I do think that obsessing over your metrics, especially when it's funnel metrics and understanding all the points of friction, numbers do tell the story. So I think you do need to have the experience points whether they are observed anecdotally or they come through some other means as well as understanding the points of friction because of drop off in your conversion funnel, they're very important.”
Speaker
Sachin Kansal
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

23 / evaluation

This is where Uber Groceries come from, which is now a very large business for us. And on the right side, Uber Reserve, Uber for Teens, which is something I launched a couple of years ago, our focus on taxis and there are many other growth bets that are now in the billions of dollars in total.

“This is where Uber Groceries come from, which is now a very large business for us. And on the right side, Uber Reserve, Uber for Teens, which is something I launched a couple of years ago, our focus on taxis and there are many other growth bets that are now in the billions of dollars in total.”
Speaker
Sachin Kansal
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

24 / preference

I will go into a few individual features, but even at a more meta level, the thing that surprised me the most is we obsess about our app and our app is the center of our universe, but when a passenger gets in the car, the center of the driver's universe is that interaction with the passenger.

“I will go into a few individual features, but even at a more meta level, the thing that surprised me the most is we obsess about our app and our app is the center of our universe, but when a passenger gets in the car, the center of the driver's universe is that interaction with the passenger.”
Speaker
Sachin Kansal
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

26 / commitment

So I said, "Great, our cycle time is going to be 24 hours." And so I think there was a period of about six months when we did do daily stand-ups and they were extremely helpful to unblock the teams on making certain decisions and we shipped a lot.

“So I said, "Great, our cycle time is going to be 24 hours." And so I think there was a period of about six months when we did do daily stand-ups and they were extremely helpful to unblock the teams on making certain decisions and we shipped a lot.”
Speaker
Sachin Kansal
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

27 / recommendation

No, this is not about mindlessly shipping, but once you know that you're working on something that is important, that is solving a problem, it could be a big feature or a small feature, then you have to cut down the cycle time.

“No, this is not about mindlessly shipping, but once you know that you're working on something that is important, that is solving a problem, it could be a big feature or a small feature, then you have to cut down the cycle time.”
Speaker
Sachin Kansal
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

29 / prediction

It is going to take some time. So as we project out, we don't know if it is going to be five years or 10 years until it sees a certain kind of scale across the world, across many, many cities.

“It is going to take some time. So as we project out, we don't know if it is going to be five years or 10 years until it sees a certain kind of scale across the world, across many, many cities.”
Speaker
Sachin Kansal
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast
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