from Gergely Orosz | by Gergely Orosz

One of the things working at Uber has taught me is appreciating the non-tech folks at a tech startup. As much as I'd like to think that technology made Uber huge, in reality, just as much (if not more) of a success came from things outside tech: making things work on the ground.

Uber had city launcher teams who did incredible work with whatever resources they had. The "ops" people would build DIY tools, and hack around things when the engineering team had no bandwidth to build. E.g. we shipped iDEAL on Rides with zero new code, all powered by "hacks".

I now see some early-stage startups hire operations folks who do exactly this. They sort things for customers, hacking around, doing manual work, using Google Sheets, Zapier etc. When the work is too manual *and it's needed* only then do these teams build automated solutions.

You'd think that doing things manually is inefficient. On the contrary: it helps teams focus on what *really really* needs to be built. As engineers, we tend to not admit the truth: the most expensive solution to any problem is to build it yourself, from scratch.

Another thing I remember is "faking" things to see if there's customer demand. Instead of building the feature to encourage people to order quickly so we can batch, we just shipped a counter that gave $5 discount if you ordered within 5 minutes. Then observed what happened.