YouSaid · the spoken record

Sachin Kansal

lines on the record: 87
first: 2025-06-01
most recent: 2025-06-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Back to my dog fooding theme, send me feedback. Send me feedback. Hopefully everyone is an Uber user, whether it's rides or whether it's EATS. 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. I was doing this and then this happened. This didn't make sense. This is how you can change it. I think that'll be extremely valuable to me.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Send me a message on LinkedIn. I will say that I've been guilty of not establishing an online presence and writing. Life and work have just taken over. I need to do a better job. Maybe your blog or your podcast will really help me with that. But yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they're delivering food to your home at night. Turn the porch light on Because they've just driven in the dark. They don't know your house. They're trying really, really hard to find your house. And after that, they turn the flashlight on on their phone. And they're trying to find the door where they can place the food. Just turn the light on.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and my kids are sick and tired of hearing this from me now, which is just focus on the inputs. Have input metrics in life and in work, and you have output metrics. You can't really control the output metrics. All you can control is inputs. Whether you're trying to lose weight, whether you are trying to get good grades or become very good at high school sports, or you're trying to ship a great product or you're trying to improve retention or churn or whatever, you can only control the inputs of focus on the inputs.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is the product that makes me or evokes that emotion in me right now is deep research from ChatGPT. Because I've never had a research assistant. And I keep going back to that research assistant. And I think it's an excellent product. I'm sure it will improve further, but that would be my favorite product recently.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite recent TV show is Peeky Blinders. Peeky Blinders is on Netflix. It's based in the 1920s, and now they're in the 1930s. I'm on season six. It's Irish family that's in a town called Birmingham, and they go through all these years. They do all sorts of bad things. But again, it's an amazing story. So I highly recommend watching it.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 what my takeaway is. And I think that takeaway is extremely strong in the books that I talked about. And the Ben Horowitz book, it goes back to my concept of resilience. We have 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 NITA.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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's book. I have read the Ashley Vance one fully. I'm in the middle of the Walter Isaac 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 when everyone wanted to be Steve Jobs and they thought that they can just recreate being Steve Jobs. There was sort of 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 applied their own context to the products that they shipped.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their life is complex. All of our lives are complex. You're just trying to be a part of their lives. You're not trying to take over their lives. You never will.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which means when I wake up in the morning, all I'm thinking about is how can we make our products better for our end users. When end users wake up in the morning, all they're thinking about is, I have to do this at my job, I have many complexities, many problems in my life. And that's what occupies their mind all the time. They're not thinking about you, they're not thinking about your product as much as that may be a hit to your ego. However, for those, and I'm talking about, let's say, Uber rights, for those 15 minutes in the day, when they do think about your product, that is your opportunity to absolutely dazzle them. Like give them an experience that they will not forget, or it will be so seamless for them that they don't have to think about. So next day, when they're again going to work, they just open the Uber app just as muscle memory. But do not expect their life to be centered around your product.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can talk a little bit about how I think about it. I think I've talked a lot about end users. I cannot talk about end users enough. So, in terms of offering my unique take, which may be completely flawed, but that is my unique take, I'll offer this, which is. I don't think our relationship with our end users is reciprocal”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because times will be hard and things will be difficult, and you just have to power through them and you have to keep building for your end users through that and the times will change. So I would say those are the things that I've learned and those are my failures.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three or the number four player or the number two player who may have an innovative idea, who may try a different strategy, who may try a different go-to-market, I just never take the status quo for granted. So that's sort of one learning. And I think the second learning is speed and hustle and resilience. After Palm, I spent time at a couple of startups I mentioned Flywheel, which was a taxi company, which is also not able to scale. But what I learned through that period is that hustle and sense of urgency is extremely important. So when I think of my portfolio of skill sets right now, really that portfolio that I have developed from a lot of failures over my career. And those are, I would say, sense of urgency because you need to move fast because status quo can never be taken for granted. And second is resilience.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The level of hardware quality that we needed to have to be able to effectively compete with the likes of Apple. When you are going through the motions, when you are actually in the moment, you don't always realize what's going to happen. You also think that, oh, we will be able to recover and we will be able to compete. But I think there are many, many things that I learned from that. And I always keep that very close to my heart. In consumer markets, If you are player number three or player number four, it's a little hard because the two top players are going to compete with each other so ferociously that it's especially if they are scale players like Apple and Google, it's difficult for number three and number four to be able to keep up with that unless you have a very, very unique angle. And the way I use that now is I am Lenny always paranoid about the number”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still somehow, when I think about it, I don't end up calling it a fail. But absolutely, you could call it a fail because the product didn't work or the business didn't work and so on. I was at Palm a long time ago. Palm developed the Palm pilot and then it went into the phone business. Some of your listeners may have used them. Some of your listeners may be too young to remember. And then there was a period of time when it was really BlackBerry and Palm were the sort of the two smartphones on the market, especially here in the US. And then Apple announced the iPhone and then soon thereafter Android was announced by Google. And it took us a long time to respond to that. It took us maybe three, four years to respond to that. And in the end, HP bought Pum. We did not have the level of scale.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deep research feature, both Gemini as well as ChatGPT, where you feed them a prompt, you actually present a pretty hard, the other day, we were thinking of a driver feature. It's a driver feature that has been discussed a lot in the past. We still, we haven't done it. I just asked ChatGPT deep research, here's the feature, this is how it would work. Can you let me know if drivers would like it or not like it? Is there anything we can change about that feature to be able for the drivers to like it? And it presented me an answer, which I would say it's an amazing research assistant and it's absolutely a starting point for a brainstorm with my team with some really, really good ideas. So I think that that is making us not just more productive. I think it's actually going to make us better at our jobs.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're using both ChantGPT as well as Gemini quite heavily in the company. Specifically, I end up using ChatGPT a lot for summarization of documents. That's one thing. I mean, all of us have too much to read and we don't have enough time. I've not used notebook LM yet. I know a lot of people who have started using it, and that is the next thing that I'm going to use just to be able to build an audio podcast based on a bunch of information that you can consume. I think that's awesome. What I've been doing is I have been using ChatGPT and Gemini to summarize long user research documents. Some of these reports, they are 50 to 100 pages long. I will never have the time to read them. That's really making me much, much better acquainted with prop. This is what writers in South Africa feel. And this is what's happening in Brazil. This is what's happening in Korea. So that has been a huge enabler. The second thing that I've really, really started liking is the deep research feature.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the team is using a lot of tools now. The team is using tools to build initial prototypes, initial mocks, I should say. The teams using that for user research to be able to process information as well.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, how can we build a product? So I started with let's just build a product that is going to solve every single one of these problems that parents have in terms of safety. So we launched that two years ago. It's been growing really, really well. And in fact, in California for several reasons, we had to turn the product off. And I get emails every single day from parents in California about why did we have to turn that product off. So I would say a lot of the growth pets that we actually make may not have the best data supporting them, but as long as we understand intrinsically what the end user wants and the problems that we need to fix, I think you have to kind of go with your gut. And I would say when it comes to transportation, we still have not solved a lot of problems that people have. And so that's all headroom for us.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 to 15 different cities in New York City, by the way, every single yellow cap is hailable through the Uber app. And that is generating a pretty large amount of revenue for us. And we have taxis all over the world as well. So that was probably another one where the data just didn't support my cut decision. And the last one I would say is Uber for Teenagers. There are so many reasons to not do that, by the way. You go talk to parents. They're like, I am never putting my team in an Uber. And if you talk to the risk people in the company, they're like, we're not going to put teenagers in our cars and there's a lot of liability. I happen to be the father of a 16-year-old and a 12-year-old. And I can tell you that one of the biggest problems in our household is kids transportation. And I'm like, how can that not be a problem? And if anyone is going to solve a transportation problem, shouldn't that be Uber?”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taxi app company, and so I spent three years there. That's what got me into transportation or being interested in transportation and eventually ended up at Uber. And Uber and taxis have always had an issue with each other. We all know the history. And I was saying, no, we should actually launch with taxis. If now, if you look at the data, the data will tell you that the number of taxis is going down, that the taxis are not very reliable, the taxis have antiquated software in them, the taxi drivers may not want to provide the same level of service, so on and so forth. And there's a little bit of a gut feel, and I said, no, look, there are drivers who want to make money who do not always have enough demand. We have a lot of demand. If we put the right incentives in place, we will be able to create a structure where we can work together productively. And today in the US, I think we operate taxis in about”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said, in addition to that, we also need to incorporate a lot of functionality and features and UI in the product, both on the rider side and the driver's side, which is delivering a sentiment of safety and making sure people feel safe. 99.9% of our trips are totally fine from a safety perspective, but that doesn't mean that people are not concerned. So in addition to driving down the incidents, we also have to develop a bunch of features so that they feel safe. And that actually helped a lot because we started hearing from our users that, oh, we measure something called safety sentiment and that safety sentiment has been going up a lot. So I would say that was sort of back in the day that I drove. Another crazy one was I pushed the company to work with taxis. If you look at my resume, I worked at a company called Flywheel, which is a”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And safety is a big issue on the Ubert platform, was a very, very big issue back in 2017. We had not sort of built enough software to be able to manage safety in the physical world. So while safety in terms of incident reduction, look at the number of incidents you're having, and then you just like a growth hacking project, you just drive that number down, needing to do whatever you can.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a few, and each of those could have gotten me fired, Lenny. It was that sort of gut paste. I'll give you a few of those examples. When I joined, I was working on safety.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you're spending enough attention on that, then you get the license to expand out of that core and start to think about other growth bets. By the way, this is where Uber Eats came from back in the day. This is where Uber groceries come from, which is now a very large business for us. And on the right side, Uber Reserve, Uber 14s, which is something I launched a couple of years ago, are focus on taxis. And there are many other growth pets that are now in the billions of dollars in total. That's where it came from because we are making sure that the core is being paid attention to and it's giving us the license to sort of go out of in that concentric circle.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The core is our core product. We do 33 million trips every single day. And if you think of a typical Uber trip or an Uber delivery, there is a multi-point failure possibility all the way from you opening the app to a driver accepting or doing the pickup, doing the drop off, and you're getting a receipt and then similarly there are a number of steps on the each side. And we obsess over making sure that that core is as flawless as possible and also to our point about profitability is as efficient as possible as well. So imagine taking even one cent of efficiency out of 33 million trips every day. The numbers just really start to add up. So you have to make sure that you're spending, you're paying a lot of attention to that. As I go out and dog food, I'm dog fooding the core mostly and making sure that it is as small as in my own little way.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we divested out of two big businesses, which were our self-driving unit, as well as what we call Uber Elevate, and we divested out of both of them during COVID. COVID was a very special time for us, if I could use that term. Our mobility business dropped by 80% overnight. And I think that Dara and the leadership team actually showed tremendous leadership during that time. And one of those was to make those calls to drive us out of those businesses. Now, I think an important part to remember is you could be on the quest to just drive profitability and you may lose your sight on new growth bets, as we call them here. And how do you do that? I have my framework on this, which is I think of our portfolio as concentric circles, the center of that concentric circle.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now we are driving great margin quarter over quarter, but the spirit of making sure that our core is solid in terms of efficiency, it continues to feed the system and continues to allow us to then make more bets that may be outside of the core.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we may have both in the mobility business as well as the delivery business. And it's a grind, Lenny. There was a grind in terms of how do we take inefficiency out of something like that, which is our core marketplace logic. How do we take inefficiency out of how we do promotions? How do we take inefficiencies out of support costs, payment costs, background check costs? There are many, many pockets. And some of that required building new paradigms and building new software. And when you actually save that money and you're able to put that back into the business and become a profitable company so that you don't go under and your stock price goes up, that's actually feels very, very rewarding. So I think that Tara has done an excellent job driving that. And I think the company has done an excellent job responding to that. And I feel that that still goes on today. Yes, we became profitable about two years ago.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was awesome. I think it was a great, great period because if you are taking inefficiency out of your system and you're taking the dollars you saved back into the business or back into the end user's pockets or the driver's pockets, that's just a great feeling. And as you said, doing that is not easy. It's actually very, very hard. But that's where real innovation actually kicks in. Let me give you an example. One of the ways that you would take cost out of the system in the delivery world is to batch trips together. So when a courier is delivering from point A to point B, maybe they can deliver two packages. They pick both of them up at point A and they deliver them to point B and to point C and point B and point C happen to be close together and there we just delivered a lot of efficiency with the career stime. And now you multiply that by a thousand different items.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I think they see, I don't think that it says that this is because it was delivered by an Uber employee. It's a good question. I should go back and see what it says. We do refund it back to them.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have a policy that the money actually is not kept by us. We refund it back to the riders or to the... To the eaters, yeah.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gone, and I've carried crates of water, a flight of stairs, and delivered that to the doorstep. And there are more things that we will do as well. 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.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will answer that in two ways actually. I think for a long, long time there will be a need for humans to drive cars. There are pickup and drop-off spots that AVs can't go to today. There are going to be regulatory hurdles that we have to get across before AVs are everywhere and so on and so forth. Second, we have a mission to make sure that we can provide a great earnings opportunity on the Uber platform. Today that is fulfilled by driving people and delivering food or delivering groceries, but that list is going to continue to expand. And we want to make sure that we offer more and more earnings opportunities on our platform. I mean, you and me going back to dog fooding, about, I think about a year ago, I also started picking up groceries because now we have a pretty large grocery business. And I have”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Delivery has something similar. So we have sidewalk robots with many partners who in a downtown area for a short distance delivery are actually doing thousands of deliveries today.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 ten years till it sees a certain kind of scale across the world, across many, many cities. We are in about 75 countries today. It's roughly about 15,000 cities. So there's a huge geographical landscape for us to capture as well. But that's our strategy. And so far, we recently launched in Austin with VAMO. And that's been going really well. And we have launched, we of course have Phoenix with Vamo. We're going to be launching Atlanta soon. We've also launched internationally in Abu Dhabi with our partner WeRide. And then there are many more launches that are going to come down the road.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that expensive? These are assets that need to be utilized. And if, let's say, a city has 500 AVs. When it is 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday mid morning, we know that demand is going to be really, really low. And you may have a lot of these vehicles actually sit underutilized. Whereas when it is Friday evening at 6 p.m., you don't have enough cars to fulfill the demand that you will have at that point. So if any of these partners try to operate that service themselves, it can definitely work, but you're going to leave either customers dissatisfied or you're going to have underutilization. So our hybrid network really allows them to equalize that because when you don't have enough cars, we are able to send drivers to fulfill that demand. And then given that demand density that Uber brings, we are also able to utilize all the vehicles, even if it is 1030 a.m. on a Tuesday. So that is the value proposition of our network. We are big believers in autonomy. We think autonomy is going to lead to more safety.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we decided that we're going to take a partner oriented approach. And that is the approach that we have taken since then over the last year. We have signed about 15 partners. In fact, we just announced another partner earlier this afternoon called May Mobility. So we have been announcing many, many partners when it comes to AVs. And now that's our strategy. Now, what does that actually mean? What do these partners do? What we are building is we are building a hybrid network. The hybrid network has a hybrid of human drivers and AVs on the same network. And we work with partners. We have a set of APIs that we have built. It's a very rich set of APIs. And we have partners who basically integrate with those APIs and get access to this hybrid network, this hybrid marketplace. And let me explain why that is beneficial.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a big area of conversation internally, externally. So absolutely agree with you on the importance of it. If you rewind back the clock, we actually had our own self-driving unit. And during COVID, we decided to divest of it.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you have so many tools now. We do a lot of brainstorming, we do whiteboarding, you could actually convert summaries of those conversations into the first draft of your PRD. So there are many tools available now. So I don't think PMs or engineers have any excuse to be blocked because of lack of PRDs.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Operate. So, if someone has a product opinion, it doesn't matter whether you're in the product org or the ops team or customer support or engineering or design, I think everyone's opinion matters and is valid. And I welcome that. I welcome their participation. I don't care about org boundaries. Now at the same time, I will have an opinion about how we message our products. I will have an opinion about maybe some engineering architecture to the extent that I understand that or I will have an opinion about an ad campaign or how we operationalize our product. So in that spirit, what I hate is if we are blocked because a certain document was not written to the nth degree of specificity.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Lenny, that's a trick question. He wants to get me into trouble, I'm sure. But let me, I'll tell you, I actually know the answer to this question. What I hate about engineers is when we work on a project and they say, hey, I can't do anything because I do not have a PRD from a product manager. Now, while I consider that to be important for my job security and a PM's job security for a PRD to be required, I also think that the best engineers are the ones who actually don't need to start with a PRD. They can have a whiteboarding session with a PM, with a designer. They should have just an equal seat at the table in terms of what we are going to build. And then they co-create. They should co-create and they should write a document together and they should just build. One of the things that some people like about me and some people probably hate about me is I'm very boundaryless from an org perspective and how.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is going to stay, it's going to continue, but the importance of judgment and, as you mentioned, product sense and the gut feel, it is going to become even more important in the world of AI. And as a result of that, we need to increase that or reduce that cycle time even more so we can develop that product sense and judgment.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of marks doing user research and even storytelling that we talked about. How do I actually tell the story about my product? AI is making all of that much, much easier. And I think that transformation is going to happen very fast. Even in a single country like the US, we have different kinds of end users, whether it's demographics, whether it is socioeconomic status, and for us to internalize what do end users want, AI will definitely speed it up, but for a product manager, it is going to stay constant. The one thing I do think product managers need to be aware of is the importance of knowledge.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are many things AI is changing and AI will change, even if I, you know, what did I work on 24 years ago, or how did I do product management 24 years ago is different than product management today, the way we write PRDs, the way you do designs, the way you make decisions, the fact that you have access to data today didn't really exist 24 years ago. The only data that you had was surveys. And those surveys took six months to run and for data to come back. And now we have instrumentation and telemetry and everything that we ship and we can analyze data. So I would say things have definitely evolved. With AI, things are just going to change even more rapidly. I'm already seeing on a weekly basis, we are introducing a new way of doing things. And if you look at a typical product cycle, all the way from doing market research and user research to writing the first draft of a PRD to doing the first draft.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 are able to make the correct decisions because of the experience that they have had over that time.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the other thing that I strongly believe is what makes a great product manager is not the five amazing strategic ideas you had over those three years. It's the thousand micro decisions that you made, not the five macro decisions that you made, but the thousand micro decisions that you made. Where should I put the button? Should I put this screen there or not? What should the copy say? Do I launch this product in Atlanta or in New Jersey? You go through these and what you want at the end of that is you'll start developing an innate sense of judgment. So you want to increase your cycle time to be able to get to judgment as fast as possible. Because when you make a similar decision the 10th time, you don't even have to think about it. It just happens. And we constantly talk about experimentation versus gut or data versus gut. As you progress in your career,”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is Go to a job where you can ship multiple products as fast as possible. Comes back to cycle time, where you can, let's say over a period of two to three years, you can go through three to five product cycles as fast as possible because you want to put that under your belt. Don't worry too much about how you show up in a room. Don't try to spend too much time on being the smartest guy in the room. define the product, work with your engineering, with your design team, with your data team, and ship that product, rev that product, iterate on that product, ship the next product. What you will find as you do that over those two to three years, three years later, you'll suddenly realize that, wow, I've actually shipped a lot.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ahead of time before the product is ready to launch, because if it is going up on stage, it has to work. Two, what you know, you may ask the same person who asked you this it creates such a sense of pride amongst the product team and the engineering team to actually see their product live on stage and now it's on video and it will stay forever to see the product that they put their blood, sweat and tears into actually working. I think that's a huge moment of pride. And I take it as personal responsibility to make sure that I can help sort of bring that moment. But yes, leading up to that is a lot of work.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my other beliefs is, which I may not have shared before, is no one actually really cares about the feature that you want to talk about. People are way too busy. You're obsessed about your products. Your products are your life, but for your end users, your products are maybe 10 minutes of their life once a week. So their life does not center around your product. They don't care. How do you make them care? You have to tell a story. And that story comes from actually showing the product in action rather than a lot of slideware and pictures. So that is my belief that I don't want to have hubris about my own product. I need to be able to tell a story about how an end user will actually get value out of that. That's my external reason for why I insist on live demos. My internal reasons for why I insist on a live demo is while it is a lot of work, I think it creates a certain level of rigor.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source