Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)

The most important thing to figure out when dealing with any decision is actually figuring out how important that decision is. You should spend all your time on those very few important decisions and for all other decisions, just go with your gut or delegate it.

Before you even get into technical or design execution of any platform area, really think about the principles behind the platform you're building and the stack rank of constituents.

As a platform PM, your psychology has to really change around validation. The cycles are five to ten times longer. You're not designing the end user's experience - you're designing a canvas for developers to build their own creative ideas on.

We don't put the product org on a pedestal as the only people that can have an opinion about the product. There's an understanding that everyone at the company from engineers to support to sales, everyone's responsible for product thinking.

Writing externally and getting momentum externally was a better way to influence internally what was happening at Shopify. There's so much noise that it's hard to tell a 200 person PM org to stop and pay attention to an idea.

To grow beyond entry level PM, domain expertise can take you a little further, but ultimately to have the highest trajectory, you have to lean into those founder skills - being a great storyteller, getting the most out of people around you, making really hard high conviction decisions that can't be solved analytically.

Do a legitimate side hustle, found a company on the side and learn everything else. You forget what it means to sell something to a customer, support a product, ship something and get destroyed because it doesn't work.