Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

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

August 4, 2024

AI Summary

5 min read

Brian Tolkin, head of product and design at Opendoor and former Uber product leader, discusses building products in ops-heavy businesses. Drawing from scaling Uber's uberPOOL globally and Opendoor's iBuying platform, he emphasizes harmonizing product and operations through feedback loops, focused tech investments, and frameworks like jobs to be done.

Product-Ops Integration

Tolkin's ops start at Uber (employee 100) gave him ground-level insight into business drivers like customer interactions and local nuances, informing scalable product decisions. He views product and ops as twin engines: ops excels at fast iteration and qualitative data from distributed teams, while product scales it. At Uber, he formalized product operations to bridge centralized SF engineering with global ops, ensuring features launch effectively and incorporate field feedback. Early examples include manual surge pricing by city GMs (due to events, tech limits) and driver onboarding evolving from in-person sessions to OCR tech for scale, freeing ops for new experiments.

Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.

Read Full Summary →

Free • No credit card required

Listen to Audio Summary Open in App

What you'll learn

1 **[00:03] Ops Background Boosts Product Leadership**
2 **[07:50] Inventing Product Operations at Uber**
3 **[12:17] Wild Uber Scaling Stories**
4 **[16:51] Opendoor Overview & Product-Ops Lessons**
5 **[20:52] Ops Evolution to Product Scale**
6 **[25:38] Running Effective Product Reviews**
7 **[32:17] Implementing Jobs to be Done (JTBD)**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Brian Tolkin is the Head of Product at Opendoor. Previously, he was one of the early employees at Uber, where he was instrumental in launching and growing UberPool, UberHop, and UberExpress and started one of the first product operations teams in tech. In our conversation, we dive into:

• How to enable product and ops to work well together

• How to run great product reviews

• How to make good decisions with limited data

• How he uses the jobs-to-be-done framework at Opendoor

• How to stay calm under pressure as a leader

• Wild stories from his time at Uber

• Challenges faced at Opendoor during the pandemic

• Much more

—

Brought to you by:

• Pendo—The only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application

• Explo—Embed customer-facing analytics in your product

• Attio—The powerful, flexible CRM for fast-growing startups

—

Find the transcript and references at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/scaling-uber-and-opendoor-brian-tolkin

—

Where to find Brian Tolkin:

• X: https://x.com/briantolkin

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briantolkin/

—

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

—

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Brian’s background

(02:14) Career beginnings at Uber

(02:49) Transitioning from product operations to product management

(06:47) Product and operations synergy

(10:00) Surge pricing at Uber

(12:18) Scaling challenges, and stories

(15:47) Opendoor and Covid adaptations

(25:38) Product reviews and Jobs to Be Done

(40:30) The challenges of A/B testing

(42:23) Increasing conviction in solutions

(44:33) Leveraging intuition in product decisions

(47:07) Partnering with Zillow

(52:55) Staying calm under pressure

(56:25) Finding the “kernel of truth” in product management

(01:00:21) Failure corner: Early days of Uber Pool

(01:06:11) Lightning round and final thoughts

—

Production and mark