Product @ Uber Speed
A lot of people ask me what it is like to build products for our most exciting, fastest growing markets in the world on the International Growth team.
I wanted to dedicate my response to Mike Pao, who shaped this team and let us run with it! Thank you, Mike. (the guy with the red hat)
When you are working on one of our teams it’s really about massive impact at crazy speed with incredible learning that redefines your ‘redline’. Lets take each one at a time.
Massive Impact
Impact is a word from Physics. You should feel it. An excel graph can show you how great your team did, but how did it feel?
At Uber, unlike at many consumer companies — we have an operations team that will come and hug you (literally), if we ship something that dramatically changes the way they work with riders and driver partners. It’s great to see your feature moving some key metric up and to the right, but hugs are better. On International Growth, everyone is encouraged to spend as much time as they can in our key markets.
Our product teams are welcomed with open arms to all of our cities and the discussions we have with the city team leaders are super interesting and gets us to really connect bits with atoms. From Beijing to Chengdu, from Mumbai to Bangalore, from Jakarta to Ho Chi Minh City.
And so, we celebrate the cities. Everything we do is to improve a city and take it to the future. Working with amazingly hardworking city teams makes everything we do have even more meaningful impact. Take that excel.
Crazy Speed
I love riding motorcycles, despite my mom’s emotional pushback. You get fast on a bike when you can ‘focus far ahead’, your hands and feet can work independently, you can trust your tires will stick and you can get very good at evaluating risk.
Get this wrong and you crash. Get this right and you have a fun day on a winding road. Our International markets are amongst the most winding and challenging. We have to be incredibly fast as we face fast moving competitors. And we have to get even faster. So how do we roll here on the International team?
Focusing Far Ahead. Our teams boil entire mission down to a single sentence with a couple of key metrics (god metrics) that they are going to move up and to the right. This focus drowns out the noise and other shiny objects that might distract them. Every member on the team knows this mission and they all feel like they own it. We seek owners, not renters.
Independence. We want people to be able to do what they want, when they want to, without getting blocked on someone else. This problem plagues almost everyone in technology and I think at Uber, we’ve cracked it with minimal side effects. How? We let builders build. We have just the right amount of process that streamlines things but not so much that it fosters bureaucracy. We also encourage a little toe-stepping! We break down approval gates and let our teams move as quickly as possible towards our destination. We do step back once in a while to make sure we’re going in the right direction.
Sticky Tires. We trust our principles. When faced with difficult product choices we lean on our principles to guide the way. That is our way of giving people some basic truths so they can focus on building stuff and can trust that their principles will stick. Just like the tires. For example our teams constantly hear about the need for ‘scheduling’ as a feature but we stick to our principles of ‘on demand and efficiency’ and it’s always been the right answer. In Chengdu, Shanghai and Wuhan, where we are piloting our latest innovation around UberCommute, we are finding success in letting commuters share a car — on demand — and staying away from the urge to build in scheduling (like our competitor did).
Risk Arbitrage. Risk can freeze you up. Getting good at handling risk means we are able to do things most other companies just cannot. They freeze up. Taking too much risk can jeopardize the mission, but taking too little means less speed. Our teams are making these calls day in and day out and guess what — we get really good at it. Every good skier and motorcyclist knows that feeling of going really fast, negotiating those turns and just making the whole thing look easy. You stop, take that helmet off and show the world that big grin. That’s what our week feels like… ask my mom.
Incredible Learning
We are constantly bringing in new incredibly smart people onto our teams. Many on our team have the potential to run a Fortune 500 company in the future — our bar is incredibly high. But each future leader needs training. At work, I feel like I am among a league of the best technology entrepreneurs in the valley.
People are motivated to give their time to make each other even better. Travis Kalanick and Ed Baker will personally invest entire evenings that go late into the night to help a team make their ideas and plans even better. On International, we seek out these opportunities as often as we can and we get really good at leading complicated executions — high stakes, high visibility, high impact.
We also have a wonderful and lightweight T3/B3 process — which is used to highlight the top 3 things and bottom 3 things a person or team did. An open culture that prioritizes learning and encourages direct feedback is really awesome. At Uber you will get a lot of feedback. And you will give a lot of feedback. It will make you a better entrepreneur and you will go faster.
Faster, ultimately is more fun.
Redefining your ‘redline’
The ‘redline’ is a useful way to think about your skill limits. Its when you are about to crash your bike. You’re not comfortable at your redline. At Uber you will regularly test and redefine your redline. It’s how personal development and growth happen. PMs will face incredibly tough presentations, managers will face difficult choices, engineers will face incredibly tough problems and almost impossible deadlines. In the face of these obstacles, only the champions push through and end up redefining their redline. If you’re counting your career in terms of years of experience you are doing it all wrong. It’s all about where your redline is and how much you can do with it.
If this sounds like the kind of place you’d like to work at I’d encourage you to look at roles on our India and China teams and come join the ride.
