Brian Tolkin
Head of Merchant Product @ DoorDash
Leads merchant product at DoorDash. Previously Head of Product at Opendoor through its IPO.
βLessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor, covering product design, team leadership, and go-to-market execution.β
Career History
Vault Colleagues
Episodes (1)
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Quotable Clips
βExactly. It's too expensive to change and rebrand at this point.β
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
βYou picked your closing date, you move out when you want. Yeah, there's no hassle.β
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
βThis 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.β
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
βYeah. Or just the document depends on what the company culture is, whether you want to record it or just have the document either way.β
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
βI 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...β
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
βCorrect. Yeah. Yeah, we're not math living our template.β
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
βNot 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...β
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
βYeah. I think they're more dogmatic about it.β
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
βYep, 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 ...β
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
βI'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 ...β
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
βShoe dog, Black Swan, Design of Everyday Things, and for a fun one, Shawn Theron.β
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
βI like the sports docu ones on Netflix, so Full Swing, Drive to Survive, Break Points, tennis, golf, F1, all of them.β
Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)