I am a firm believer in general that the people closest to the problems also have the best context to solve that problem. And so as a more senior voice in the room, often the job is probing, asking questions, throwing out ideas in a way that says like, hey, this is an idea. This is not a mandate, this is a thought.
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor
Featuring: Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
6 quotes · 6 insights
Watch Full EpisodeLeaders probe and facilitate, not dictate
Users hire your product to do a job—understand the job
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 at Opendoor versus say building at Uber... Most people at Opendoor, we don't have homes to sell every week or every month.
Data informs but doesn't decide
If you're not going to get significance, if there's no other techniques at your disposal, then sometimes you just got to trust your intuition and ship it. And if that's what you believe, then that's what you believed and you shouldn't spend time trying to get false precision.
Organizational structure determines product outcomes
There's different types of PMs... it's not really about is this person good or bad or whatever, it's is this person's skillset and context to the problem that is really needed.
Error handling deserves more code than the happy path
The real world has entropy and it's hard and it's messy... Computers are deterministic, but humans aren't, right? And so building products that have a little bit more flex or a little bit more fail safes in case those things happen becomes a little bit more of a paramount.
Team dysfunction starts with leadership
When you reflect the stress onto your teams, everybody tenses out. It counterintuitively doesn't produce better outcomes.