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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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“So, I think they may be talking about when we do product announcements. So when we do product announcements externally, on stage, et cetera, I do insist on actually live demoing the product. Part of this comes from, you know, I grew up as a product manager back in the day in the 2000s at PAM. The Palm Pilot, Palm sort of was cut from the Apple cloth. There were a lot of X Apple people there. And we were in the consumer electronics business. And every single year, the way you would announce your product is you would get up on stage and you show the product working. And leading up to that moment was a lot of massive amount of work to make sure that it actually works on stage. Now, I will say there's an internal reason and an external reason to do this. The external reason to do this is you have to tell a story.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is exactly right, or I would not have time to do hiring, or I would not have time to do performance reviews and so on. But once in a while, I think it's totally fine for product leaders to step in, especially if you're trying to remove ambiguity and you're trying to just speed decisions up. It's okay to step in and be hands-on.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had been written with the best intentions. But thing that was not becoming clear is, hey, what should we actually ship? Because there were a lot of good ideas and not so good ideas. But no one was actually putting it all together to say this is what we're going to ship. So it was one Sunday night and I literally, it took me two hours. And I just wrote down. I'm like, guys, this is my stake in the ground. We can completely change it, but this is the product we will ship, agree or disagree. Now, the product that we eventually shipped was at least 50% different than what I had written down, but it just catalyzed us getting to that endpoint now. If I were to do that every single day or every single week, then I would say there's a problem.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decisions and we shipped a lot. And I think it took us about nine to 12 months, but we were able to come out the other side, having a great number of drivers. And the great thing is that what we did in our driver and career funnel at that time is still paying off because the number of drivers and couriers continues to grow. And now we are worldwide at about an 8 million number. And we are probably close to half of that when we were just out of COVID. So that's an example of where daily standards help. I try to minimize that. The PRD example, yes, I did write a PRD. It was a 15-page PRD. We were working on a pretty big concept and it was a risky concept. And it was a driver facing and there's always sort of high stakes. And we had about, by this time, we had about 20 conversations and brainstorm meetings and documents that have”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I want that to be an exception rather than the rule. But yes, I want to be able to step in or I want all our leaders to be able to step in when needed. I think you have to be hands-on. You have to be hands-on when needed. Those two examples, we were coming out of COVID. We had a massive shortage of drivers on our platform. And we were talking about growth earlier. And we had clear goals on how we grow the number of drivers on our platform all the way from getting new drivers in and improving the funnel, as well as retaining existing drivers. And Lenny, there was no shortage of the number of ideas. But again, there was a problem with cycle time. So I said, great, our cycle time is going to be 24 hours. And so there was, 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.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a two way door, you have to be able to make the call quickly, and you want to make a good call, but if you get it wrong, it's okay. We can turn it back. If it is a one-way door, if it's a massive launch, sure, it's okay for it to take some deliberation. Maybe it even goes to the C-suite and we have a discussion. But my guidance to my team is cut down the decision making that has to happen or to cut down the time required for the decision making between those various steps.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it stems from the cutting down cycle time, which is the time it takes to make decisions. I realize that a lot of the time is not, I mean, all the time that you spend documenting the requirements or designing the product or actually writing code is time really, really well spent, all the time that is spent in between those activities to align, to discuss a decision, to not make up your mind, then have a meeting the next week, or let's regroup two weeks from now. That happens in our companies a lot. The question is, how do you cut that down? And for that, what we do is we have product reviews and as much as possible, we try to come out with decisions in those product reviews. And you have to operate in a one-way door versus two-way door concept.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us to enable that. And I'll say we still are not there. In my opinion, I think we can still be faster. We can still cut a lot of that cycle time. But we are on a constant quest to get as good as we can.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is the only thing that actually ultimately has impact on the end user. So as I mentioned before, I develop a sense of impatience. It's a positive impatience, if you will, that, okay, I just observed a problem for our riders or for our drivers. They have to get a solution to that as soon as possible. And for that, you have to ship, ship, ship. Now, you could interpret ship, ship, ship to be just mindlessly shipping. 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. My biggest enemy is the cycle time of we know it is a good thing all the way to our user seeing it, you have to minimize that time. So that's why ship ship ship has become such a motto for me. And we try to do a lot of things internally operating.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's actually a natural extension of what we just talked about. If we are going to go dog food and experience the pain and we are going to document it, what's next? We have to ship this. I'm a big believer in you don't ship documents, you don't ship brainstorming meetings, you don't even”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And 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.”
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 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 overreach tablet, and I can actually order from that barista. So now your dog fooding being an eater, your dog fooding being a courier, and you can dog food 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 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 say I would ask everyone who's listening, irrespective of the product that they're working on, go to the end.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 dog food? 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.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So fix it, for example, don't get all the resources, but they also don't get zero resources, which may have been the case if we had not set a culture which celebrated this and allocated resources towards this and rewarded this.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a pretty good balanced set of OKRs. So let's say one of our teams has six OKRs just illustratively over the next six months. One of them would be, we call them fix it. So we sign up for 300 fixits for the next six months. In addition to that, we do sign up for a growth goal. We sign up for a retention goal. We sign up for a cost savings goal. And each of them have projects behind them. The executional rigor is a pretty big part of Uber. So for all of those projects, we actually have, and I get engaged in that as well. We have pretty serious executional rigor now. OkRs are not meant to be hit 100%. I think we celebrate if we hit about 75 to 80% because you do want to set stretch targets. And then every half we do planning. And we will allocate resources between all of those OKRs.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rider team will fix 300 of these issues. And same for the Uber Eats team. Now, I don't really care whether it's 300 or 200 or 500. The number actually doesn't matter. But the fact that there is a number is what matters. And we have been hitting those targets every single half over the last two to three years. So these are some of the things that we do to operationalize it and make sure that people understand that this behavior is not just expected, but it's also rewarded.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we have a little bit of a competition. So we have hundreds of employees who go out and drive and deliver. And there's a competition of who can do the most number of trips and who can bring in the most amount of feedback in terms of things to improve. And we have prices and so on. And that's just taken off over the last, I would say, especially the last PB3 years post-COVID because during COVID, I think it was a little bit harder for us to gather everyone together. And then the last thing I'll say is what do you do with all of that feedback? Because that's when the quote-unquote boring part starts. Now you're gathering all these documents. You're taking all those issues. You're putting them in your JIRA tracking or whatever tracker you may be using and you're fixing them. So what we have done is you have set a six monthly OKR. So we have set an OKR that we are going to fix 300 of these issues every team actually. The driver team will fix 300 of those issues.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I do it. Dara does it. So there is definitely just doing by example or teaching by example. We also organize around it because I think creating a little bit of an organization around it just helps. We have a large company now and we try to assist with this by centrally organizing. This means let's make sure that everyone understands what it means to be an Uber driver, how to sign up for an Uber driver. Some people may be on visas and so on. So there is a regulatory part of that. So we make sure that everyone understands how to sign up. Then we also organize every year we”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Existence of you bringing emotion as well as the numbers. And that's what I am trying to create every day, our leadership team is trying to create every day, the product team, the engineering team is trying to create every day. And I think we have done a good job of having a coexistence of those two in the company.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's not an or, it's an and 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 are very important. But you can't just have that because if I mean, we are talking about end users, if it becomes just a mathematical exercise, I don't think that is enough. Because as I mentioned, what they're actually feeling in the moment is something that numbers will never show. And numbers will not bring the level of intensity that emotions will bring. Now, the question is, do you have a culture that allows coexistence of both? Does it allow a coexistence?”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally okay for you to be on the phone. We have to do that. Just ask them for permission. Just say, are you okay if I'm on the phone? They will always say yes, but it will just annoy them a lot less. So that's number one thing that I've learned. Then number two, on your way out, do not slam the door. It is their car. It is their final moment of interaction with you. We'll close the door and do it softly. That will ensure that you actually get good ratings from the driver.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the short or long rides can be very personal. There are some drivers. And the great thing about our driver base is there's a lot of heterogeneity in terms of their preferences. Some of them do like short trips because it keeps them closer to their home. They can make a decision to go back whenever they want. Sometimes we have incentives, which if they do 20 trips, then they get something more. They are able to do that. And some of them just like a long trip because they don't want to do multiple pickups and drop offs. So I think there's a lot of heterogeneity. If you want a tip for what not to do to annoy a driver, I'll give you a couple of tips.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With me. And that has built a level of empathy in my mind for drivers. And I want to make sure that my team understands that's their life and everything we build for them has to have that level of empathy. And I would say that was a big surprise for me. It's not just about the app. Yes, there are many features in the app that we can talk about, which are also surprising. But what does a driver feel day in and day out as they interact with other human beings was a big one?”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was picking someone up. It was a lady. I stopped my car or the curbside. She got in. She was going to the airport. She was going to San Jose Airport. And she had a suitcase, which she left on the curb. And she's inside the car. And I'm like, what's going on? And it suddenly dawned on me that she's expecting me to get out of my car, grab her suitcase, open the trunk, and put the suitcase in the car. But she didn't say anything. And then I suddenly realized that there is an expectation of me as the driver doing that part of the job as well. And since I was very early in my journey, I had not internalized that. And the kind of emotions that ran through me at that time just explained to me, hey, what does a driver actually go through? There was a somber ride for me. That was a somber day for me. And since that day, I have not forgotten what it feels like to be a driver. And I carry that emotion.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. That human touch between the driver and the passenger is something that we don't talk about in the office enough. And if you talk to the driver and when I'm a driver, if the passenger is friendly, it lifts my mood. If the passenger is grumpy, then I'm unsure what to do. If the passenger is route, which has also happened, that can really be demotivating. I want to share one anecdote with you. This was way back like almost eight years ago when I started driving. This was probably my fifth or sixth trips. I was very, very early in my journey of dog fooding. So it was early morning. I think it was a Saturday morning, maybe about 7 a.m.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me start with the surprising, and then I think we'll get to the outrage part of it. And there may be things that you may not expect. The surprising thing, as I mentioned before, was how the app just feels different when it's actually in a moving car at 40 to 60 to 70 miles per hour. That was a surprise for me. The positive surprise is there's a dopamine hit you get when you get an offer. I get an offer, it's 20 bucks. I'm picking someone up from point A. I'm dropping them off at point B. There's a bit of an excitement angle. And I don't want to overplay it. Our nurse drivers work really, really hard to do their job. But I think that part of our product, there's a bit of an excitement to it. That was a surprise to me.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Makes no sense, or there's a lot of stuff that you have to change. So that's sort of what you feel. But then as you are trying to make money doing that, every single little inefficiency, every single flaw is costing me my earnings. And while I don't do it for money, so I don't think I can get to the extreme, extreme end of how drivers feel, I think I can get flows. And the only way for me to feel that emotion is by doing it myself. And I do think that that emotion is very important. I'm a big believer in then bringing that emotion to my work, whether it's an emotion of joy. I have many, many moments of joy and I bring that back and I celebrate that. And that's very motivating for my team and I. But there are many emotions of outreach. And I want to bring that to work as well and make sure that we can use it as a motivator to do better. So those are my reasons to.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way, I can actually see how they use the driver app. So that actually drives me a lot of learning. And every day there's an aha moment that, oh, this is what he just did. A text message came in and then he left the driver app and then he went and addressed the text message and so on. So this is a lot you love. All of that is great. However, until I get behind the wheel or I'm a passenger or I am using Uber Eats, what I miss is the visceral reaction that you get when something happens. So now think about it. I sit in my office, my team and I, we design these amazing features. They look so good on my MacBook or on a Zoom screen. And then you get in the car and you have a phone which is sitting three feet away from you. You're driving at 45 miles per hour. The word just changes. This thing that was looking so great in an office setting now maybe make...”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understanding do they like A? Do they like B? Do they like C? Which is also very, very valuable. Then you get into a little bit to the center. Maybe I have a room of 10 drivers and I'm asking them. It's a focus group. It's a discussion. And for an hour, I learn a lot from them. It becomes very interesting. We do this anytime I go to a Brazil office. I go to our India office. I go to a UK office at a minimum, I do one or two roundtables with drivers. I also do roundtables with riders. It's just extremely valuable to hear from them directly. You move one step further and now I may have a one-to-one conversation with one of them. By the way, in the rides that I take every single day, it's such an amazing opportunity for me to do two things as a passenger. I'm talking to the driver for 30 minutes off my commute, and I'm basically one-on-one interviewing them. And because the driver app is placed in a certain”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's my framework of how we think about end users. Of course, end user feedback is important. Everyone would agree with that. Every product manager, every product leader would agree with that. How do you get that end user feedback? I think falls on a spectrum. There's the extreme quantitative end of the spectrum, and there's the extreme qualitative end of the spectrum. And I like to believe that you need to be across that spectrum. So on the extremely quantitative part, we all love data. We all look at charts. And in those charts, every user is an MAU or a DAU. Every user is a number. And collectively, as those numbers, users are showing certain behaviors. And we learn a lot from that. And that's a very valuable exercise, right? You move a little bit to the left of that spectrum, and now you may go into things like surveys where you're actually sending out surveys to thousands of riders, you're quantitatively”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we don't want the culture to be that every individual product manager should be going out and dog fooding their own feature. We want the culture to be that every leader is doing that as well. And that's why I don't want to be shy about or want to shy away from writing these documents because I want everyone to. And now there are many, many documents written by many, many people at Uber. And honestly, it's making our products better. I would say even more important than the specific features that we fix or we add, it's the culture of, you know, we're not just going to accept certain problems in our products. We are actually going to fix them. That's really, really important.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lenny, I get when I find those issues in our app, I develop a bit of impatience because if I faced it in my 10 trips that day, we have 8 million couriers and drivers in the world. So imagine the number of times that thing may have happened to our customers, which are drivers and couriers. So I develop a bit of an impatience that we have to fix it. Now, some things are small, some things are big. I develop different levels of impatience for different things depending on the level of severity. And then if I don't follow up or my team doesn't follow up, and if we don't fix it, then it's a moot point. Then I'm just doing it for fun, which is not bad. It's great for me to be doing it for fun. But I want to do it for impact. And I also want to do it for setting an example with my team as well. Now, again, I'm not the only one dog fooding. We have hundreds to thousands of people at Uber. We want it to be a part of the culture.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think from a driving and delivering perspective, in the 700 to 800 range now, and I don't know as a passenger how many trips I have done, I can't count that. And same for Uber Eats. But driving and delivering is many hundred trips.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back 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, 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. I'm not the only one dog footing 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 sort of the end-to-end journey of dog fooding for me in my work.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Makes a great product manager is not five amazing strategic ideas, it's the house and micro decisions that you made. Where should I put the button? Should I put the screen there or not? What should the copy say? Go to a job where you can ship multiple products as fast as possible.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we are going to go dog food and experience the pain and we're going to document it, what's next? You have to ship this. You don't ship documents. You don't ship brainstorming meetings. What you ship is code in your product.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once or twice a month, I will set aside half a day and then I'll go out and I'll drive and deliver. My team and I, we design these amazing features. They look so good. And then you get in the car and you have a phone which is sitting three feet away from you. You're driving at 45 miles per hour. The world just changes. This thing that was looking so great in an office setting now maybe makes no sense.”
2025-06-01 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source