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

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
Everyone's always promoting dog fooding. It feels though that you take this to a whole other level.

**Sachin Kansal** (0:04)
Either once or twice a month, I will set aside half a day, and then I'll go out and I'll drive and deliver. My team and I, we designed these amazing features, they look so good. And then you get in the car, and you have a phone, which is sitting three feet away from you. You're driving at 45 miles per hour. The world just changes. This thing that was looking so great in an office setting, now maybe makes no sense.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:26)
When I was asking people about you and what you're amazing at, a motto came up again and again. It was ship, ship, ship.

**Sachin Kansal** (0:31)
If you're going to go dog food and experience the Spain, and you're going to document it, what's next? You have to ship this. You don't ship documents. You don't ship brainstorming meetings. What you ship is code in your product.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:43)
What are some of the most impactful pieces of advice that you share with early career product people?

**Sachin Kansal** (0:49)
What makes a great product manager is not five amazing strategic ideas. It's the thousand micro decisions that you made. Where should I put the button? Should I put the screen there or not? What should the copy say? Go to a job where you can ship multiple products as fast as possible.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:09)
Today my guest is Sachin Kansal. Sachin is Chief Product Officer at Uber where he's been for over eight years and where he leads product management, design and product operations. Prior to Uber, Sachin was Chief Product Officer at Flywheel, a VP of product at Lookout. He also spent the early part of his career at Palm where he was Director of Product Management focused on Palm's Mobile Operating System, WebOS and their mobile apps. In our conversation, we go deep into his passion for dogfooding and how he makes this a big part of the product culture at Uber. He's personally done hundreds and hundreds of drives as an Uber driver and also as an Uber Eats delivery person. I've had a lot of people come on this podcast talk about dogfooding. I've never met anyone that takes it to the extreme that Sachin does. Much of what the product team works on at Uber comes from what he and his team discover from these experiences. We also talk about why it's important to always have a ship, ship, ship mentality, PM career advice for early career PMs, how Uber is planning for a future with increasingly autonomous cars, and what changes over time, what he's learned from Uber's shift to efficiency and profitability, also a bunch of really good tips for how to avoid annoying your Uber driver and Uber Eats delivery person. This episode is full of wisdom for anyone who wants to build better products, teams and cultures.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of world-class products, including Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Perplexity, Granola and more. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Sachin Kansal. Many of you are building AI products, which is why I am very excited to chat with Brandon Fu, founder and CEO of Paragon. Hey, Brandon.

**Brandon Fu** (2:52)
Hey, Lenny. Thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:54)
So integrations have become a big deal for AI products. Why is that?

**Brandon Fu** (2:59)
Integrations are mission critical for AI for two reasons. First, AI products need contacts from their customers' business data, such as Google Drive files, Slack messages or CRM records. Second, for AI products to automate work on behalf of users, AI agents need to be able to take action across these different third-party tools.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:17)
So where does Paragon fit into all this?

**Brandon Fu** (3:19)
Well, these integrations are a pain to build, and that's why Paragon provides an embedded platform that enables engineers to ship these product integrations in just days instead of months, across every use case, from rag data ingestion to agentic actions.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:34)
And I know from firsthand experience that maintenance is even harder than just building it for the first time.

**Brandon Fu** (3:38)
Exactly. We believe product teams should focus engineering efforts and competitive advantages, not integrations. That's why companies like u.com, AI21, and hundreds of others use Paragon to accelerate their integration strategy.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:52)
If you want to avoid wasting months of engineering on integrations that your customers need, check out Paragon at useparagon.com/lenny.