YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Tolkin

lines on the record: 78
first: 2024-08-04
most recent: 2024-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Super kind. They can find me online on Twitter or LinkedIn on both just Brian Tolkien, my name. In terms of being useful, if you have a home to sell, feel free to go on to Open Door. If you have feedback on the product, would love to hear it. Otherwise, any feedback on what people liked or would love to learn more about from what we chatted about would be super great. So I'd love to hear from you.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The door opens, and the person sees that I'm trying to continue, continue. It was very good, also pretty intense conversation with Travis that definitely set the expectations.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of a simulation of the job, if you will. And so some of that was building models on the computers and it was sort of writing potential emails to drivers. And if she had the driver come in and you did shout. So I was in this room sort of by myself typing away on the first part, which I was building the model. And here I'm knocking on the door and Travis comes in and yeah, we have a he just sits down and says, you know, I am Travis. I'm Brian. And we have a 45 minute chat, or maybe it's been about half an hour, 45 minutes. And clearly, I'm not producing the work that I'm supposed to of the interview, right? I'm supposed to be building this model. I'm supposed to email it back to the person who sent it to me. Clearly, I've done nothing. Chatting with the CEO and hear a knock on the door.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Travis was involved in the interview. She was one of the, I think there were four or five people, the two who are generally guiding my interview process and Travis and one other person starting that day. And part of the gauntlet interview was.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was probably five hour gauntlet interview on July 4th from noon to five and missed my July 4th barbecue. And it was quite the experience, but I think maybe set the stage for some of the early days chaos. I'm very glad I didn't cancel my barbaric.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The full enchilada one works. And this was postgraduation. I was helping out some companies but didn't have full-time job size. And hey, I'm pretty flexible. How about next Tuesday? Great. So we scheduled it. And then on Friday or Saturday over the weekend, I looked and I'm like, oh, Tuesday's July 4th. And like I scheduled my interview for July 4th. And so I called my buddy. I'm like, hey, I'm so sorry. I don't want to make people come in on July 4th, which I cancel. Should I reach out? Like everyone sort of accepted. And then whatever you do, do not cancel your interview. Okay, I'll be there on July 4th. And so I went in to the office on July 4th. And there was a very small handful of people there. It was actually launching that day, was launching Uber's second ever product type, which was Uber SCV. And I sort of had this.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I can. Long story short, I was starting a company my senior spring before graduation and we had to go our separate ways. And so I hadn't done traditional recruiting ever. And my buddy called me up and was like, hey, we're looking for smart, hardworking people at this Uber thing. Are you interested? Quick a side note. I had actually done some very early diligence work on these taxi apps back in 2011 looking at the time was Uber Cab and Cabulus and Taxi Medicine, probably something I'll mean nothing these days. So I knew what Eber was. And so I said, yeah, sure, let's love to. And so I had the first round of interview went well and they said, great. And then that stage has come off.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the people who inspired me very early on in my product journey, I've been fortunate to have a number of very good mentors and obviously we talked about earlier while I was founders of books or whatever. I sort of read a lot from other people's journey. But one person who was personally important to me early in my product journey and very supportive was this guy named Jeff Holden, who was the chief practice officer at Uber back in the day and is sort of like a young PM transfering into product really, you know, took me under his wing and I think I'm forever grateful for that, for Jeff, for helping grow my career, but also kind of pay it forward a little bit in terms of people who are going to care. That was around me and adventure for me.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we just got a puppy and we are about to have our first child. And so all of my purchases recently are puppies and children focus. We've been, my buddy gifted us the fi collar for our dog. And so we've been really, really enjoying that.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More technical PMs who grew up in Minute Engineering discipline their people who came from ops and there are people who came from design and grew up in sort of more user experience background. And one thing that I've been as you build out the team is thinking similar to a product roadmap is like it's not really about like is this person good or bad or whatever it's this person's skill set and context matched to the problem that is really needed. And so back to that conversation on, hey, where do we get tech leverage? It's like, hey, is this person who has this unique skill set as a PM well suited for this problem type? I don't know if that's helpful, but it's something I've been spending a lot of time thinking about, especially in this field, job posting, product manager. It's actually like, well, like, how can we be a little bit more thoughtful about what?”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was great. We covered quite a bit of ground. I think the only, I don't know if this is a generalized wisdom, but something I've been thinking about as my career has progressed a little bit, especially Bombay, probably. Especially as more tools come online, it's very clear that there's different types. And we spent a lot of time talking about ones we could operate in the physical and the digital, or the product and operations world. But even within that,”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Delivery. That was, by the way, an example of fully distributed. The benefit of having those early petri dishes, someone, a local marketing manager, say, hey, this would be fun. Yeah, that would be really fun. The platform can support it. And those promotions were fantastic, right? And it started out, I can't remember if the first one was ice cream or puppies. I think it was ice cream. But yeah, it branched into all sorts of stuff, boats, ice cream puppies, kittens, I think. And all credit goes to sort of like local ideas of inspiration, just being focused on trying to grow within.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the next thing. And obviously, we did that and then spent a lot of our time and effort trying to say, okay, what are the bounds of liquidity and driving liquidity that we can do to understand what the most important or what the sort of limits of the product are. So as an example, we launched, and maybe people in San Francisco remember this, sort of $5 anywhere in San Francisco, the work will promotion, which is obviously a great deal. Obviously, it costs a lot of money. But the whole idea here is like, okay, liquidity is what really matters. If we were to juice that and really drive liquidity, how high can our metrics gather and then we can go chase or sustain ways to do that? But it was an interesting fail case from launching and learning to say, hey, this initial strategy just isn't going to work. We got to go. And a part of it was a hedging strategy.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For commuters, this is very, very early days. And so part of the launch was, okay, we're going to beta it with just some popular sort of commuting corridors with specific companies or, you know, maybe the marina to Google or whatever, right? And try and match people according to what their companies have liquidity. And we very quickly realized that back to sort of like what the kernel truth is here is like liquidity is the only thing that matters. And there just wasn't enough. There was never going to be enough to sort of do this like company basic thing. That wasn't the strategy that was going to work for us. And so, you know, the reason I don't know if it's like a full failure is like maybe this is true. All failures is you learn from it. You pit it and you go on.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can talk about the very early days of Uber pool and kind of be like first launch, if you will, in San Francisco. So carpooling product, multiple riders and waste car. And we had this idea that it would be effective to”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen different companies do it differently, but wherever you tend to try and keep a backlog, whether that's a Google Sheet or your actual backlog in Joe. But at least it feels like okay, the context was captured and the idea is.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The things, and so pouring fuel on the fire may not be super efficient there. So I think that's like a very good generalized example. One other tip that maybe is helpful here that I frankly constantly work on and try to get better at is all these ideas and feedback that comes from everywhere. make sure it's written down for a number of reasons. One, you can then go reference it. But two, part of the job is making sure the people who present those ideas are heard and respected and know that it's at least somewhere where it was considered, right? And then you can look at it all and say like, okay, but what actually really, really, really, really matters here. That's another tip”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think back in the Uber days, I think it was like, hey, we're not going to build sophisticated tooling infrastructure. We're not going to build essentialized growth team. We're not going to build any of that because if you think about the early Uber network from the simplest form, you've got a rider and a driver, and you need to connect them, price the transaction. Issue some receipts probably. I'm going to collect payment. So it's like, Do we do that really well? And until we do that really well, like all the other stuff is noise, right? It's actually, it's immaterial how efficiently we answer support tickets. That's not. Critical, right? And so now it's super critical, right? But like in the early days, it's not that critical. And like even the customer acquisition costs may not be like super critical in this case.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back to the job, so you've done fair. Like, what is really going to move the customer forward? And unfortunately, that means saying no to maybe what sounds like some good ideas along the way. But if you can really figure out like this is really what matters, that's the core part of the job. And it dovetails even back to our earlier conversation. You know, if you don't in the early days of building. And ops companies is where's the tech leverage? Like it's the same question, where's the kernel of what really matters that tech can uniquely solve and must go do that and be comfortable with other fires maybe burning? That's what really, really, really matters. It's a hard discipline.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, I think in most organizations, and to do the job effectively, you're going to get signals from everywhere, right? And good ideas come from everywhere. It may be your CS team or CX team. It may be a customer directly. It may be a conversation you had. It may be a YouTube video you watch that sparked an idea and maybe feedback from an executive. It may be You went out and did a field visit. Like, you are going to get a lot of inputs around what people think about your product, what people think you should do next. And I think the core job is to understand what really matters, right? Like what is noise? What is a good idea? What is a suggestion? What is and what is.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think exposing yourself to other people's stories or however you may learn is really, really helpful. So, yeah, again, like whether it's your podcast or books or biographies or one of the podcasts that I love is Founders podcast, which talks about historical famous entrepreneurs. And obviously these are elevating very famous people already, but there's a lot to learn from a lot of these stories as well and understanding that the journey in the path is non-linear. It never is for anybody, right? And so I think being able to expose yourself to other stories that even may, if you don't have those personal experiences and then understanding how others navigate.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that unfortunately is sort of a reality is you kind of got to be in some stressful situations to also have the perspective that the cycles past, the things pass, and that remaining calm is what matters. And so maybe the advice there is. Reflecting on one of these situations happen, exposing yourself to them, not running from them, and then learning from them so that the next time it comes around, you can say, hey, I've been here before. I've slept on the floor in China before launching Uber pool and thinking we're going to miss a launch deadline. And like, what were the tools in my toolbox and my toolkit that showed me that in terms of getting it done or not?”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think part of this may have been. Sharpened in the early days of Uber, where everything felt like a fire and girl all the time. And so the only way to operate. But I think you almost hit the nail on the head in the question, which is like a little bit of an intellectual answer of when you reflect the stress onto your teams, everybody tense is up and tightens up, right? And so it doesn't, it counterintuitively doesn't produce better outcomes. And so I think the other reality to sort of remind ourselves, and these are a bunch of like mantras that just are helpful in these moments, is you're never as good as you think you are. You're never as bad as you think you are. And so sort of that more even peeled demeanor, I think allows you to have a clearer head when you're operating under the pressure and to think more clearly. I think one of the maybe least helpful.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market is fully centric. This is the same thing back in the Uber days as well. It was like transportation is almost infinitely large, you know. And so, yes, it feels like there's heated competition between Uber and Lister and whatever back in the day. But the reality is there's plenty of trips that happens and people need to get around the city in plenty of different ways. That's neither Uber nor Lyft and staying focused on how you can go. For your customer, I think it's the best way”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's certainly stressful. I think in general, we try to live by Zillow or anybody else being competition aware but not necessarily competition focused and the reality is a vast, vast, vast in our space, a vast majority of people still move the traditional way. And so this isn't something like the size of the prize isn't particularly large enough or anything like that. It's the largest asset classroom in the United States. And if we just super focused on like, hey, who are the customers that we serve really well that we talk to every day? There's a little bit of confidence that comes from being able to stay focused on that, grab us in the competitive environment. Again, because it's not like.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Challenging and it's complex from a number of different dimensions, right? It's not a traditional software only product, but you have to be really good at pricing. You have to be really good at product. You have to be really good at the operations. You have to be really disciplined at risk. You have to be really good in the capital markets. And so you have to put all of these functions together to build a vertically integrated product. And that's the reality. And so that is something that's been in OpenSource DNA from day one because we started with a vertically integrated product. And so we can't deliver unless you have all of those things. And so I think that's something that continues to help us to this day is that vertical integration requires all of those pieces coming together.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly on the seller side. And so there's just a pretty nice symbiotic relationship there with the Zimbabwe and the wretch ends of the world. And so both of those things have been great partners.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we do partner with Zillow. Zillow has been a fantastic partner for us, and we've really enjoyed sort of a working relationship with them. I think when you think about it, they have tremendous amount of reach and all the ends and all reach of online platforms have tremendous reach or an audience. And we happen to have a fairly unique selling solution. And so there's sort of a nice, not to use a business will word, but there's a nice synergy, so to speak, between a high intended audience who's doing a lot of browsing and searching and discovery and starting their process on one of these online platforms. And what we offer, which is transaction services that allow people to actually move.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 AB test, but like some more rigorous system that says, hey, I had this hypothesis. We just shipped it for XYZ constraint reason.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the time, right? And so I think there's definitely a humility to say, you know, if you can, if it's relatively easy to test your assumptions or test your hypotheses, that is always better to check yourself. And yeah, that takes a little bit of humility to say that. But we've all been wrong plenty of times. But if that's just like 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 lower or medium conviction and it's a decision of consequence, I should, yeah, talk to more customers, go 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.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, at Open Door, for example, I would say on the relative spectrum, we're quite data driven. And then it's when we come into this challenge where we say, okay, let's, that is another technique or tool in the toolbox. I think the generalized version of that is customers' products people can surprise you, right? And so this happens all the time for people who build.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, exactly, totally. And some of the calculators are great where you can also plug in the traffic and your acceptable runtime. And it will tell you the minimum. Impact, and then you can gut check your own intuition. So you can play array around with it.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do a long term holdout to match your intuition. And so there's a lot of other techniques to hone your intuition. There's a lot of other techniques to build conviction and confidence. And so we try to be very creative on doing that. And then the last last bit I would say is if you're not going to get significance, if there's no other techniques at your disposal, then sometimes you just gotta trust your intuition and ship it. And if that's what you believe, then that's what you believed. You shouldn't spend time trying to get false precision.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the third thing is experimentation is all about increasing your conviction in The problem, or the solution. So the generalized version of the statement is if there are parts of your funnel or flow that are low end and you can't run a canonical AB test, how might you otherwise increase your conviction in the solution that you're building? And turns out there a decent number of other ways to do that. The first that's most obvious is talk to more customers. But there are other sort of statistical techniques that, again, aren't as rigorous or good, but maybe possible. You may be able to use observational data. We do a diff and diff. You may be able to look at it in sister cities or twin cities. You may be able to segment by geo, you may be able to reduce your power and say, hey, we're going to run at 80% confidence for all of our experiments instead of this traditional 95% because that's a worthy trade-off. And if we're wrong one more time out of 10, that's okay.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just force yourself into A-B testing without running the power analysis and say, like, hey, are we going to get results? What is the size that will detect? And what is the runtime of that experiment? And is that, and be honest, like, is that acceptable for there are certain, a second lesson here, is there are certain experiments that are important enough and it's hard to triangulate signal in any other way that you may say six month runtime is an acceptable outcome. And we're going to start it in June and we will be smarter for it for 2025 planning. And we're going to set it and forget it. And we're grateful we did, right? And that's okay. But the only mistake here is thinking you'll get an answer in a month when you won't and then pretending you do and then waking up a month later and being like, well, it was insignificant and this and that. We could have known.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very hot topic of conversation. We do A B test. It is obviously the gold standard. And so we do as much as we can of AB testing. There are parts of our funnel and flow that have more volume than others. So top of quality just in a little bit easier than down funnels. A-B testing surely product or tech features, it's easier than A-B testing processes, operational processes. But you're totally right. We are not doing hundreds of millions of transactions a year. And so experimentation can be more challenging. And so I think one way to think about it is, A, knowledge the problem, right? Which is to say don't, and we've made this a mistake many, many times. DO.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that probably, and I don't know if Kayvon were going to do this, I imagine he would. The generalized version of like, uh, Pick the right framework for the right job. And if you say, you know, there's one framework to rule them all on, this is the only framework that works. And of course, every prompt to it, then we jump.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not about jobs to be done. We have, I point people, I do a lot more pointing people towards internal examples of where I saw other DMs maybe do this well or blogs and stuff, but your blog is a common one to pass around. Not about jobs to be done, but just about many topics.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe an early day version would be like the job to be done is to get an offer from Open Door. And it's like, well, kind of, but like the broader job to be done might be like price discovery for the customer, right? And so you can have And so that's like, okay, the template might be the same, but like it's actually the content that takes a little bit of cultural instantiation.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recognizing that correctly implementing a framework, any framework, but Jobs View Don in particular we can talk about takes a little bit of time and getting used to and understanding. And so I don't think you can just like, okay, we're going to make the template and then that makes the content better. That just takes people's content and they wedge it into the template. It's actually the cultural internalization of like, hey, this might be phrased as the job to be done, but like, is this actually the job to be done? Like, let's talk about why the customer might be in that situation or not be in that situation. Or I think the job can be done might naturally be something else. You might say, hey, the job to be done is, you know.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, that specific framing, I would have to go remind myself on the template itself. But generally, it looks like context problem, potential solution risks, risk slash pre-mortal and measurement of success. And then we also try to sort of bucket our product reviews by stage. So you could be in the ideation stage, which might look very different than at the very end of the process like, hey, we're getting ready to ship now for a whole new piece. Those two artifacts will also.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. Pre filling it up. Sorry, prefilling it out. And again, I think we are not sticklers about always using that template. But I think the beauty of a template is yes, it sets expectations of what you expect, but it's also just easier often for people to be able to work off something. And so, yeah, it's part of our product review template and then part of our planning process as well. Because we've used it for a while, I think there's been an internalization of the culture where people also just start commenting about it or writing about it and saying like, hey, what is the job to be done here? Or what is the user trying to do, which is another colloquial phrase of it. And so, yeah, I think there's a cultural seeping that has had to do with it.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we do have, I would say we're medium rigorous on sort of template standardization or adherence. So we do have a template, the standard product review template talks about jobs to be done and sort of has a section for like what is the problem statement and what are the jobs to be done.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quarter journey with a lot of complexity and a lot of conversations outside of our product. Maybe talking to an agent, you may be talking to a friend, you may be driving around the city trying to find a house. And the framework is very flexible and encouraging of saying what is actually the job to be done of this user when they're thinking about our product and what is the context in which they're operating.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's a little bit harder to be a customer. I took Uber every day. You probably used Airbnb a number of times a year. And so, you know, in some senses for some of those companies, you can build for yourself. You would intuit the job to be done because you're just kind of doing it for yourself. We don't necessarily have that context. And so a framework that forces us to be really thoughtful and intentional about how a customer might perceive or product is really helpful. The other thing that I like about it is sort of the canonical version of it. Encourages you to think about the context in which the user is operating or the other things outside of your product that they might be going through. And in our case, the home buying or selling journey often is certainly multi-week, if not multi-month or multi-”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, like all frameworks, the right answer is to pick your set of frameworks, have more tools in your toolbox, and then actually understand when to apply them. So we try to avoid being a hammer and everything's a nail. We try to force the framework if it's not working. But I think what I really like about it is it forces you to put yourself in the customer's shoes, I think, in a slightly deeper way and be a little bit more empathetic when I think about building an open door versus, say, building an Uber when you're building at Airbnb is we are not, most people at Open Dor are not, we don't have homes to sell every week or every month, nor do we buy homes every week or every month, right? This average in the US is something people do once every seven years. I'm sure the average at Open Doors is something similar.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, obviously scouts are with the size of the company for us right now, what's working well is our, yeah, sign up cadence. We have two slots a week that anyone can sign up for as their product area needs it. And then if there's something that we would love to see that we haven't seen in a bit, we do a little bit of all-intelling to make sure that the work is generally cycling through a quarterly basis.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, or just the document depends on what company culture is, whether you want to record it or just have the document either way.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, good question. We, I would say, have oscillated over time, but in general, big subscribers of the best conversations happen when they're relatively small. So try and keep it under 10. Could be wide distribution of the document. The artifacts created are actually really powerful and they're powerful for the whole team to understand and sort of secret power is they're very powerful for new people who are onboarding to be like, here, here are the last 20 product reviews. You'll get a pretty good idea of what's going on, right? But generally the conversation itself trend keeps relatively tight. We try and keep it under time.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pleaded you. This was actually explained to me. I don't think I've seen the original source, so I'll go back. But this was explained to me as a system. I'm actually a big fan. I think that's great.”
2024-08-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source