The Importance of Having a Product Team in Uber

At Uber at the time, there was nothing that we were looking at externally. We were totally inward focused about what should this be? Like, how are we going to solve that problem? And one of the first things that the company tried was to have city operations teams on the ground running each city. But as you had many more cities coming up, hiring brand new people into those cities and then many product teams coming up, it was a collaboration and communication nightmare.