Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal

1. Practice Extreme Dogfooding

Set aside half a day or a day once or twice a month to personally use your product as an end-user, performing 10-12 sessions. This helps you experience the product’s real-world impact and user emotions, which is crucial for product development.

2. Document Dogfooding Learnings

After dogfooding, take screenshots and write detailed reports (e.g., 40 pages) of issues and suggested fixes, tagging relevant team members. This ensures learnings are not forgotten and provides concrete evidence for product improvements.

3. Follow Through on Dogfooding Feedback

Develop impatience for fixing identified product issues and actively follow up with teams to ensure they are prioritized and resolved quickly. This transforms dogfooding from a fun activity into an impactful process for product improvement.

4. Operationalize Dogfooding Culture

Leaders should model dogfooding behavior, organize company-wide driving/delivering weeks with competitions, and set OKRs (e.g., fix 300 issues per half) to ensure feedback is acted upon and rewarded. This embeds a culture of user empathy and continuous product improvement.

5. Embrace a “Ship, Ship, Ship” Mentality

Focus on shipping actual code in your product as quickly as possible, rather than just documents or designs. This minimizes the cycle time between identifying a problem and delivering a solution to end-users.

6. Minimize Decision-Making Cycle Time

Actively cut down the time spent between development activities (e.g., requirements, design, coding) by making quick decisions, especially for “two-way door” choices. This speeds up the shipping process and reduces unnecessary delays.

7. Prioritize Shipping Experience Early

For early career product people, seek jobs where you can ship multiple products (3-5 cycles) as fast as possible over 2-3 years. This helps develop innate judgment and “product sense” through numerous micro-decisions.

8. Focus on Micro-Decisions for Judgment

Understand that great product management comes from thousands of micro-decisions (e.g., button placement, copy) rather than a few macro-strategic ideas. Rapidly making these decisions builds a strong “gut” or product sense.

9. Deeply Understand End-User Needs

The constant in product management is the need to deeply understand what end-users want, which is harder and requires more effort than typically assumed. This involves going beyond data to grasp their emotions and context.

10. Acknowledge Non-Reciprocal User Relationship

Understand that users’ lives are complex and not centered around your product; they only think about it for brief moments. Your goal is to dazzle them in those brief moments, not to take over their lives.

11. Unblock Teams Proactively

Product leaders should be hands-on when needed, stepping in to write PRDs or run daily stand-ups to remove ambiguity and accelerate decision-making for stalled teams. This helps maintain momentum and ensures critical projects move forward.

12. Insist on Live Product Demos

For product announcements, insist on live demos to tell a compelling story about user value and create rigor among the team before launch. This also provides a moment of pride for the team seeing their work in action.

13. Foster Co-Creation with Engineers

Encourage engineers to co-create products from the start, participating in whiteboarding and document writing, rather than waiting for a fully specified PRD. This leverages their expertise and avoids blocking progress.

14. Balance Core & Growth Bets

Maintain a “concentric circles” framework for your product portfolio, obsessing over the flawless and efficient operation of your core product. This provides the license and resources to expand into new growth bets.

15. Challenge Data with Gut Feeling

Sometimes, pursue big bets or features even if initial data doesn’t fully support them, especially if you intrinsically understand a deep user problem. This requires trusting your developed product sense and judgment.

16. Cultivate Speed, Hustle, and Resilience

Always be paranoid about competitors and never take the status quo for granted, fostering a sense of urgency and hustle. Develop resilience to power through difficult times and continue building for end-users.

17. Use AI for Document Summarization

Leverage AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to summarize long user research documents (e.g., 50-100 pages). This helps product managers quickly get acquainted with diverse user sentiments and regional insights.

18. Utilize AI as a Research Assistant

Use AI’s deep research features as a thought partner to evaluate potential features, identify gaps in thinking, and generate new ideas for brainstorming sessions. This enhances productivity and strategic insight.

19. Dogfood Non-Consumer Products

For non-consumer products, get as close to the customer as possible by sitting next to them to observe product use or setting up test accounts to simulate their experience. This helps identify friction points even in complex B2B flows.

20. Be Respectful to Service Providers

When interacting with service providers (e.g., Uber drivers), ask permission before being on the phone and close car doors softly. This shows respect for their personal space and property, potentially leading to better ratings.

21. Aid Delivery Drivers at Night

If receiving a food delivery at night, turn on your porch light to help the driver easily find your house and doorstep. This simple act improves their experience and safety.

22. Study Iconic Tech Leaders’ Context

Read biographies of iconic tech leaders (e.g., Steve Jobs, Elon Musk) to understand the context that shaped their product decisions and world-changing innovations. Apply these principles to your own context, rather than just imitating their behavior.

23. Learn Resilience from Leadership Books

Read books like “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” to understand the challenges of leadership and how to persist through difficult times. This helps develop the resilience needed to keep building for end-users.