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

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2025

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sachin Kansal is chief product officer at Uber, where he oversees the Rider, Driver, Delivery, Grocery, and New Verticals product lines used for 33 million daily trips worldwide. He’s been in product for over 25 years (at Google, Palm, Flywheel, and now Uber). He is known for his “extreme dogfooding” ethos—personally completing almost a thousand Uber driving and delivery trips to sharpen his product insight and user empathy—and his “ship, ship, ship” mantra, which drives rapid iteration across Uber’s global teams.

What you will learn:

1. Dogfooding at scale

2. “Ship, ship, ship” as a cultural mantra

3. Obsession with inputs over outputs

4. Uber’s hybrid marketplace vision for autonomy

5. How Uber changed its culture to focus on profitability

6. What to do when data says “no” but your gut says “yes”

7. Career advice: maximize cycles

8. AI as a research assistant, not an oracle

9. Uber rider etiquette tips

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Brought to you by:

• Paragon—Ship every SaaS integration your customers want

• Stripe—Financial infrastructure to grow your revenue

• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace

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Where to find Sachin Kansal:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sachinkansal/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Sachin’s background

(05:00) Dogfooding in practice

(11:24) Empathy and understanding drivers

(20:18) Balancing metrics and user experience

(22:04) Operationalizing dogfooding

(24:26) Challenges and solutions in dogfooding

(29:49) The motto: “ship, ship, ship”

(36:37) Product announcements and live demos

(40:49) Career advice for product managers

(43:51) The evolution of product management with AI

(46:55) Collaboration between engineers and product managers

(49:36) Uber’s vision for self-driving cars

(55:59) Uber’s path to profitability

(01:01:58) Balancing data and gut decisions

(01:07:21) AI tools in product management

(01:10:14) Failure corner

(01:13:48) Lightning round and final thoughts

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Referenced:

• Uber: https://www.uber.com/

• Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/

• Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/en/

• Fivetran: https://go.fivetran.com/

• Uber for Business: https://www.uber.com/us/en/business

• McDonald’s: https://www.mcdonalds.com/

• Domino’s: https://www.dominos.com

• PalmPilot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot

• Praveen Neppalli Naga on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pneppalli/

• May Mobility: https://maymobility.com/

• Uber strikes deal with May Mobility to deploy ‘thousands’ of robotaxis: https://www.theverge.com/news/659563/uber-may-mobility-autonomous-ridehail-partnership

• Waymo: https://waymo.com/

• WeRide: https://www.weride.ai/

• Uber and Avride Announce Autonomous Delivery and Mobility Partnership: https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2024/Uber-and-Avride-Announce-Autonomous-Delivery-and-Mobility-Partnership/default.aspx

• Dara Khosrowshahi on X: https://x.com/dkhos

• Uber Elevate: https://www.uber.com/us/en/elevate/vision/

• Uber AV: https://www.uber.com/us/en/autonomous/

• Uber Reserve: https://www.uber.com/us/en/ride/how-it-works/reserve/

• Uber for teens: https://www.uber.com/us/en/ride/teens/

• Flywheel: https://www.flywheel.com/

• ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/

• Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/app

• NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google/

• Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/googles-notebooklm-raiza-martin

• BlackBerry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry

• Peaky Blinders on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80002479

• Deep research: https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/

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Recommended books:

• Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies: https://www.amazon.com/Blitzscaling-Lightning-Fast-Building-Massively-Companies/dp/1524761419

• Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t: Why That Is And What You Can Do About It: https://www.amazon.com/Nobody-Wants-Read-Your-Sh-ebook/dp/B01GZ1TJBI

• Steve Jobs: https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648537

• Elon Musk: https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1982181281

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers―Straight Talk on the Challenges of Entrepreneurship: https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp/0062273205

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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Everyone's always promoting dog fooding.
0:02.0	It feels though that you take this to a whole other level.
0:05.0	Either once or twice a month, I will set aside half a day,
0:08.0	and then I'll go out and I'll drive and deliver.
0:10.0	My team and I, we design these amazing features, they look so good,
0:14.0	and then you get in the car, and you have a phone, which is sitting three feet away from you,
0:18.0	you're driving at 45 miles per hour. The world just changes.
0:21.8	This thing that was looking so great in an office setting, now maybe makes no sense.
0:26.6	When I was asking people about you and what you're amazing at, a motto came up again and again.
0:30.4	It was ship, ship, ship.
0:31.5	If we are going to go dog food and experience the Spain and we're going to document it, what's next?
0:37.0	You have to ship this.
0:38.2	You don't ship documents. You don't ship brainstorming meetings. What do you ship is
0:42.2	code in your product. What are some of the most impactful pieces of advice that you share with
0:47.8	early career product people? What makes a great product manager is not five amazing strategic ideas.
0:53.9	It's the thousand micro decisions
0:56.2	that you made. Where should I put the button? Should I put the screen there or not? What should
1:00.8	the copies say? Go to a job where you can ship multiple products as fast as possible.
1:08.9	Today, my guest is Saatchen Console.
1:11.4	Saatchen is chief product officer at Uber,
1:13.6	where he's been for over eight years
1:14.9	and where he leads product management,
	...

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