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

You've worked at two businesses that have done incredibly well combining product and ops. Uber always have this mentality and Open Door does too of the product and versions twin turbine jet plane where you can like fly the plane on one engine for a little bit if you need to, but it's operating most efficiently and effectively if both are working together. What has having been an ops done to make you a better product leader. Gave him really deep understanding of how the business actually works. It's a pretty good foundation for them going on to say, Okay, we actually want to build in a more uh scalable technology. Something else I've heard that you're very good at is staying very calm under pressure. I've slept on the floor in China before launching Uberpool and like when you reflect the stress onto your teams, everybody tenses out. It counterintuitively doesn't produce better outcomes. Today my guest is Brian Tolkien.

Brian is currently head of product and design at Open Door. Before that, he spent nearly five years at Uber, where he joined as employee one hundred. Before Uber had Uber X or Uber Pool or any kind of shared rides. He actually started on the ops team at Uber, moved into product, ended up leading product and launch of Uber Pool, and then taking it global. He also started the product operations function at Uber before that function was really even a thing, which I didn't know until the chat that we had.

In our conversation, Brian shares a ton of lessons about building products with a heavy operational component. Also, how to run great product reviews, how he implements the Jobs to be done framework at Opendor successfully, the story behind Zillow trying to compete with Opendor, failing and then partnering instead, plus a ton of great stories from the early days of Uber and Open Door, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Brian Tolkien.

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