Brian Tolkin

I am a firm believer in general that the people closest to the problems also have the best context to solve that problem. And so as a more senior voice in the room, often the job is probing, asking questions, throwing out ideas in a way that says like, hey, this is an idea. This is not a mandate, this is a thought.

What I really like about it is it forces you to put yourself in the customer's shoes. I think in a slightly deeper way and be a little bit more empathetic when I think about building at Opendoor versus say building at Uber... Most people at Opendoor, we don't have homes to sell every week or every month.

If you're not going to get significance, if there's no other techniques at your disposal, then sometimes you just got to trust your intuition and ship it. And if that's what you believe, then that's what you believed and you shouldn't spend time trying to get false precision.

There's different types of PMs... it's not really about is this person good or bad or whatever, it's is this person's skillset and context to the problem that is really needed.

The real world has entropy and it's hard and it's messy... Computers are deterministic, but humans aren't, right? And so building products that have a little bit more flex or a little bit more fail safes in case those things happen becomes a little bit more of a paramount.

When you reflect the stress onto your teams, everybody tenses out. It counterintuitively doesn't produce better outcomes.