Brian Tolkin

Effective alignment between centralized product teams and distributed operations requires a formal bidirectional feedback loop.

"There was a bidirectional feedback loop that wasn't super strong and that feedback loop was basically when the EPD teams in San Francisco built new features, how do we effectively put it in global mar..."

Hire for 'person-product fit' by matching a candidate's specific background (technical, ops, or design) to the unique requirements of the product area.

"It's not really about is this person good or bad or whatever, it's is this person's skillset and context to the problem that is really needed... how can we be a little bit more thoughtful about what t..."

Maintaining a calm demeanor under pressure prevents team paralysis and leads to better decision-making outcomes.

"When you reflect the stress onto your teams, everybody tenses up and tightens up. And so it counterintuitively doesn't produce better outcomes. And so I think the other reality to remind ourselves......"

When data volume is too low for statistical significance, rely on intuition and judgment rather than seeking 'false precision' through flawed tests.

"If you're not going to get significance, if there's no other techniques at your disposal, then sometimes you just got to trust your intuition and ship it. And if that's what you believe, then that's w..."

Identify where technology provides the most leverage for the business and concentrate scarce engineering resources there, even if other areas remain manual.

"How do you be really focused on where to invest your time, effort, and energy technically, which is why most of the engineering effort for Uber was on the dispatching system and the pricing system. Th..."

Use the Jobs to Be Done framework to map the user's entire journey, including offline actions and conversations that happen outside of your software.

"The canonical version of it encourages you to think about the context in which the user's operating or the other things outside of your product that they might be going through."

The core of product management is filtering through massive amounts of feedback to find the single most impactful problem to solve.

"Product is finding the kernel of truth in a sea of ambiguity and signals... what is noise? What is a good idea, what is a suggestion and what is back to the jobs to be done for what is really going to..."

Systematically documenting all feedback ensures stakeholders feel heard and creates a searchable repository for future prioritization.

"All these ideas and feedback that comes from everywhere, make sure it's written down for a number of reasons. One, you can then go reference it, but two, part of the job is making sure the people who..."

The guest discusses the birth and formalization of this function at Uber, defining it as the bridge between centralized product teams and distributed operations.

"One solution to that problem, our solution at the time was to start up a new function called product operations who had accountability and reported into operations but physically sat with and operated..."