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Brian Tolkin

Head of Merchant Product @ DoorDash

Leads merchant product at DoorDash. Previously Head of Product at Opendoor through its IPO.

β€œLessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor, covering product design, team leadership, and go-to-market execution.”

Career History

CompanyRoleYears
DoorDashHead of Merchant Product~2023-present
OpendoorVP of Product (prev. Senior Director)~2020-~2023
Candid Care CompanyInterim VP of Product~2019-~2020
UberSenior Product Manager II (10th Engineer, led Shared Rides)~2010-~2019

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Episodes (1)

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Quotable Clips

β€œExactly. It's too expensive to change and rebrand at this point.”
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Brian Tolkin

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

13:31
β€œYou picked your closing date, you move out when you want. Yeah, there's no hassle.”
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Brian Tolkin

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

17:45
β€œThis was actually explained to me. I don't think I've seen the original source, so I'll go back and watch it, but this was explained to me as I'm actually a big fan. I think that's great.”
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Brian Tolkin

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

29:17
β€œYeah. Or just the document depends on what the company culture is, whether you want to record it or just have the document either way.”
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Brian Tolkin

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

30:20
β€œI would say we're medium rigorous on template standardization or adherence. So we do have a template, the standard product review template talks about jobs to be done and has a section for what is the...”
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Brian Tolkin

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

34:40
β€œCorrect. Yeah. Yeah, we're not math living our template.”
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Brian Tolkin

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

36:47
β€œNot about jobs to be done. I do a lot more pointing people towards internal examples of where I saw other PMs maybe do as well or blogs and stuff. But your blog is a column when we pass around, not ab...”
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Brian Tolkin

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

38:38
β€œYeah. I think they're more dogmatic about it.”
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Brian Tolkin

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

39:11
β€œYep, exactly. Totally. And some of the calculators are great where you can also plug in the traffic and your acceptable runtime and it will tell you the minimum detectable impact and then you can gut ...”
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Brian Tolkin

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

44:17
β€œI've seen different companies do it differently, but wherever you tend to try and keep a backlog, whether that's a Google sheet or your actual backlog in Jira, whatever you use, but at least it feels ...”
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Brian Tolkin

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

1:00:03
β€œShoe dog, Black Swan, Design of Everyday Things, and for a fun one, Shawn Theron.”
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Brian Tolkin

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

1:06:23
β€œI like the sports docu ones on Netflix, so Full Swing, Drive to Survive, Break Points, tennis, golf, F1, all of them.”
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Brian Tolkin

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

1:06:50