What have you recently been up to?

So my name is Jose Sandi. I'm 38 years old right now. I have been in product at Uber since around eight years ago.

Tell us about your career journey!

The very first job that I had was in a call center while studying, started at the very beginning of my time in college. 

I first grew into different roles in the call center industry: phone agent to team lead to program manager. 

And the other piece was my experience in non profits. I was a construction director for a volunteer organization here in Costa Rica building houses for families in poverty. I did that for two or three years – working with volunteers, finding communities in my country, and making a difference in people's lives by significantly improving their living conditions. 

How did you make your way from the contact center to tech?

After working in call centers and non profits I was actually in New York at the time looking for a job. 

I heard about Uber. They wanted to open in Latin America. I found the job post on a website used in Costa Rica and some other countries to post jobs (el empleo.com). LinkedIn and Glassdoor had not become a job posting place yet so these other websites were used to post jobs.

I didn't know anyone since Uber was very much in it's early stages in LatAm and there weren't any people hired in Costa Rica.

So it was literally me applying for a job that I felt capable of doing since I had learned about it from previous roles in Customer Service, learning about the company and feeling like I could be a good candidate

They chose me to be the first operations manager building the Uber contact center for the entire Spanish-speaking region of Latin America because of my call center experience and non profit experience. 

And then you moved into product? Why/how? 

When I was working in customer service, I found that it was very uncomfortable to always be on the reactive side of things, especially when addressing preventable emergency situations at Uber. I was thinking it would be so much easier if I could just change our systems to proactively reduce incidents and incident response time. With Uber still very much in the startup phase at the time my mindset was: “I can actually do this. This is something that I can actually have an influence on. I understand this other issue and there's nobody doing it right now.” 

I wanted to do something where I could just like literally change the way things and have a real world impact on people's lives. 

I knew that I wanted that. I just didn't know how or where. So I started having conversations with two of my mentors who were my manager and his manager. I said “there has to be something else I can do.” 

At the time the first ever safety product operations manager was actually looking for his first hire for the area. And he reached out to the different folks across like the different places in the world and since Latin America was such a hotspot for safety and since I had the know-how of users, he accepted the recommendation from my mentors to include me into the hiring pipeline. He did eventually say that the CS experience was a big part of this for sure. 

I didn't know anything about tech but I applied. I did the exercise and it took me a very long time, but after doing it I actually saved it just to look at it and see that I was way ahead of the stuff that I was thinking about that I just had no idea.

What did you learn when you first joined Product Operations from Call Center leadership?

Product operations is like that intermediate role where you're able to translate tech to ops, where you still need to speak with ops people but you're also speaking to tech and to engineers and you have exposure to that.

I was thrown into some of the most complicated problems that required interventions based models made with machine learning. And I knew nothing about machine learning.

So I did two things. One thing was working closely with the people on the team starting to learn. Then the second thing that I did was I took it upon myself to be the person that took notes in our meetings and at night I went back to these notes to understand them.

The third thing was I had to adjust not needing to do everything.

First, they were like, “you don't need to do querying. Look, you have applied scientists and data scientists for that.” Then it was, “You don't have to do design, you have designers for that.”

“You don't need to do this. You don’t need to do that.” 

And so this was a very terrifying moment. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do because I’ve grown to be a jack of all trades, with a broad, extremely useful and adaptable, but ultimately shallow understanding of things. Then all of a sudden, all of that stuff is handled by somebody that's gone to school for 10 years to learn about it. 

Eventually I learned to ask: how do you connect people?

What were some of the challenges that you faced while trying to jump into this role? 

I'd say that the very very first thing is just self confidence. 

It was very intimidating when you get to San Francisco, you walk through those doors and then there's a whole bunch of people that have spent the past eight years studying whatever, and you have to speak the same language. You present to people that you've only seen in emails that go out to the entire company. 

Second was understanding that in every product role you need to take your time to learn and pace yourself and understand the problem because otherwise, you're going to do what you do in ops, which is just band-aid short term solution of a problem without thinking if it's the best way to solve it.