Four years at Uber told through a two-friend-lens

Today is my four-year Uberversary. But today, I want to talk about Max Wenneker.

The purpose of this post isn’t to talk about Uber as a company or to make any points, really. All I want to do is reflect on the past four years by sharing a bit about the coworker, boss, and friend I’ve shared most of those years with.

I joined the Uber Baltimore team in March 2014, a week after Max. Unlike me, Max added immediate value. Within weeks he was a top SQL-writer at the company. But what struck me wasn’t the query he wrote; it was the query he saved. After delivering the data our team needed, Max would go back and save a slightly modified version of the query, one that could easily be discovered and modified by anyone else in the Uberverse, even if he or she didn’t have any SQL skills. Rather than carve out a talent-niche for himself, Max gave it away for free.

Max and I bonded the same way our Maryland Team and all early Uber Operations teams bonded: holed up in hotel conference rooms for hours on end, helping drivers in-person, one by one.

But it wasn’t until the run-up to our first New Year’s Eve that I got to work on my first major project with Max — centralizing the emails we send to drivers in the funnel. These are the emails that help drivers finish setting up their account so they can start driving. Prior to our project, every city on the East Coast had their own version of these emails, and each team would spend hours every week manually querying, uploading, and sending. I taught myself how to dynamically code the comms so that each city’s drivers would get the right version, localized both for their city’s particular requirements as well as for a given driver’s particular status within their city’s funnel. Max then wrote this massive query to pull all those variables in a format the dynamic code could read. As far as I know, this was the first fully centralized Ops process at Uber.

Soon after, I was invited to HQ for my first special project sync with Matt Byrd, Uber’s first CRM hire. Matt had some awesome ideas for how we could take these funnel comms to the next level (shoutout to Zee, Robbie, and Azita who did the same for Central and West).

I’d love to go! But you have to invite Max, too.

Thus began a new chapter for Max and me: building relationships between HQ and our local territory teams. Most importantly, we discovered the delicious macarons of Chantal Guillon.

By October 2015, I got an offer to join Byrd in SF on the Global CRM Team and said goodbye to Team Maryland and to Max.

Hey man, I really enjoyed working with you. The Yin/Yang nature of our projects was awesome to be a part of. Whatever happens down the line, whether we’re still at Uber or not, just know that I’d gladly work for you (I knew it wouldn’t be the other way around: Max had management potential written all over him). I don’t need to know what the job is. If you say I’m the right person for the job, that’s all I need to know.

A year later, Max is visiting SF and we’re swapping stories. I’ve spun up India CRM and gotten incredible insights into the Product world as part of the India Growth team. Max was a Nomad in Brazil for three months, got promoted to Senior, and then quickly transferred to become a manager on the newly formed LatAm Regional Ops team, based in Mexico City. We talked about hitting the three-year mark, and wondered if we would make it to four. The first year of a job at Uber is really exciting, I observed. Everything’s new and I feel like I’m really learning.

“Do you want to start your fourth year with another transfer?” asked Max. Yeah, I think so. And besides, I really don’t like living in San Francisco. I think I’ll take a management role on the CRM team in Amst —

“Have you thought about Mexico City?”

Since June of 2017, I’ve been a manager reporting to Max on the LatAm Regional Operations team. I’ve seen him more than double the team’s headcount, creating the most diverse group of any team at Uber, globally. Beyond the nuts and bolts of good people and project management, Max takes innovative strides to help his managers become better managers (most of us are first-timers). He doesn’t have all the answers, but he hosts forums to discuss common challenges and frequently shares articles on the subject of people management. Soon after I arrived in LatAm, he gifted First, Break All the Rules to his directs.

Reuniting with Max and spending my fourth year at Uber here in Mexico City wasn’t the cakewalk I wanted it to be. But what a blessing it was to learn from Max and watch him crush it as a manager and as a leader. We started as Individual Contributors, relative experts in our given “fields” who built cool things at scale with our complementary talents. Now, we’re leaning on an entirely different skillset to manage and develop people, giving each other feedback to get better along the way.

There are a few common oversimplifications that are used to describe Uber. One of the most popular is: Fastest Growing Company. And that’s true. But there are so many nuances that don’t get attention, stories that don’t get told.

I think when we look back at Uber with the benefit of hindsight, an entirely different type of growth will be highlighted: People Growth.

Uber was my first job, and Max’s second. It’s been hard working here at times. But being challenged and growing together has been the personal and professional opportunity of a lifetime. We were encouraged to tackle the gnarliest problems regardless of our resumes with the freedom to fail and the expectation to learn, with access to the granular data we needed to run experiments and monitor our results, week over week. What other company would have given an analyst and an IR-major chances like this?

So thank you, Uber. Thank you; teams Maryland, CRM, India Growth, and LatAm Regional Ops. And thank you, Max, for the exponential growth in you and in me over these past four years.