Talking Tech With Uber's Daniel Miyares

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Daniel is an Associate Product Manager at Uber, working on fleet operations products for JUMP scooters and bikes. He is a proud graduate of UT Austin, Venture Partner and Operations Group Lead with the Genesis Program, and former Executive Director of the Longhorn Entrepreneurship Agency. In his free time, you can usually find him hosting board game nights, biking, or playing dodgeball or soccer. 

Frederick Daso: What is the most common misconception of your job at a PM?

Daniel Miyares: The two misconceptions I most often hear fall on opposite ends of the perceived spectrum of what I spend my time doing. I either:

 A. Spend all of my time in meetings and get nothing of value done.

 B. Spend most of my time thinking about grand product strategies, articulate my high-minded vision to the team, and eat free food.

 The latter is the fantasized version of what people who don't have direct experience interacting with PMs think, and the former is what people imagine when they've worked with PMs a good deal. 

In reality (cliche-warning), I end up wearing many hats in my job. If we don't have a copyrighting resource assigned to us; I end up writing copy. If we need some help triaging bugs, I'll hop in; and if we need someone to articulate our compliance features to our legal team, I start writing. So, the reality of my job is somewhere in the middle - I do have quite a lot of meetings, and I strive to always think ahead in terms of the product's vision. Still, I believe that great PMs are also gap-filling team players, not just high-minded 'CEOs of the product.' 

Daso: What's unique about being a PM at Uber?

Miyares: While this is likely true for every role at Uber, I find it striking just how tangible the impact of our product decisions can be. In Silicon Valley, you can find dozens of brilliant people who are working on changing the color of a button. At Uber, even the smallest changes (yes, maybe even button color) can directly impact how the world moves. On a more granular level, how a working dad earns a paycheck, how a college student gets his food during finals, and whether an urban professional decides to take a scooter rather than a taxi. That real-world impact is the primary reason I came to Uber, and it's just flat-out fun to have a part in it.

Daso: What ways have you found effective in terms of managing stakeholders from conception to launch of a product?

Miyares: This is a skill I'm certainly working on, so I'm no expert. In any case, I've found much more success looping in stakeholders and soliciting their feedback as early as possible. I want to give them a stake in what comes out of the ideation and iteration process. I've found they're much less likely to say no at the end if they had an opportunity to voice concerns and suggestions at the beginning.  

Daso: What do you hope to accomplish being a PM at Uber?

Miyares: I want to learn how to be a product leader. In college, I discovered that I had a passion for entrepreneurial communities. Still, I didn't quite figure out what I wanted my role to be in that kind of community. As a PM at Uber, I have the chance to build with builders, manage stakeholders from across the spectrum, and work through the entire build-measure-learn cycle with state of the art tools and processes. In doing so, I hope to build a personal toolkit that I can use in whatever role I want to take on in the future.

Daso: What's one thing you would change about the PM role in general based on your experience?

Miyares: Well, 'based on my experience' comprises four months and an internship. It'd be pretty presumptuous of me to think I know what needs to be changed about the role as a whole. However, to go back to my first point, it isn't straightforward to keep your calendar clear of meetings and know when to take time to focus on individual work. So, on a tactical level, I would probably welcome an org-wide commitment to "no-meeting Wednesdays" that I've heard whispered in some fortunate corners of the tech verse. Maybe they'd be every other week - don't want to move quickly and break too many things.

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