The Secrets of Instacart's AI: What’s Next for Personalized Shopping? with CPO Daniel Danker

you probably won't hear me use the word MVP very often because it's a very reductive word and I think it can really strip the Delight out of products you you build a marketplace where traditionally there is a transaction you

go there and you pay for what you are consuming but you now layer this membership on top of that when we know that a customer is going to keep coming back then we're able to unlock a lot more value for them you have four

different players at least right so the the customer The Shopper the retailer and even the advertisers the system only works when all four are getting a really good balance of impact what is

specifically you are doing with regards to gen when you walk into a regular store you're actually filtering out all the products that are not interesting to you in pursuit of finding the products

that are interesting to you what we're going to do with AI is create this personal planogram where the store is rebuilt around you I want to talk about your life pre and poos IPO I was worried

that becoming a public company would cause us to make really short-term decisions quarter by quarter decisions but I don't think that that's actually what investors want and it's certainly not what customers want customers want us to build something great that they

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better experiences across every single corner of your product that's pendo.io product [Music] School hey this is Carlos CEO at product

school and your host on the product podcast today's guest is Daniel dunker the chief product officer at instacart the largest online grocery Marketplace

in the US instacart was founded in 2012 and went public last year join us as we delve into Daniel's insights on operating a four-sided Marketplace product economics pricing strategies to

create a membership real a use cases Beyond chatbots and the role of product on the board of directors welcome to the show Daniel thank you it's good to be

here I recently watch a video of you in a kitchen saying that you cook crabs for your daughters in the morning announcing the partnership that you did with the New York Times uh cooking

recipe so I would love to learn more about how that story came about yeah it's uh it's pretty fun you know my my daughter is in a school where

she gets to learn French and I thought it'd be fun the first time to make her creps for breakfast and uh and with little did I realized that that would become a daily habit every single morning when she wakes up and I ask her

what she wants for breakfast she says she wants creps so it's become a daily routine in my house old uh I can get the first CP out in about 4 minutes now so it's uh Lightning Fast CPS if you want some come on

over but it also became quite funny to then turn that into an experience that we got to use to show off uh the partnership with New York Times cooking uh and so uh it's a really fun

partnership that I'm happy to tell you more about yeah so speaking of Partnerships I'm very curious about that um New York Times cooking what is the the business angle

there well you know for many for many purposes people come straight to instacart when they want to shop they know what they want to get or we can help Inspire them uh in our own app but

actually food inspiration happens all over the place it happens on instacart it happens off instacart and I think New York Times cooking is a spectacular example of a place where a lot of people

find really trustworthy highquality recipes uh I've been a New York Times cooking customer for a long time so it felt very natural to me but as we talk to more and more of our customer they

told us that they love New York Times recipes as well and so it is a real opportunity for us to say well this is a place that people already go but New York Times cooking has historically been

a place for Discovery and then what do you do you end up having to write down all the ingredients and switch over to instacart and type them all into search and then buy them and that can be quite cumbersome well we thought we can take

the cumbersome aspects of that completely away uh by making it so that those recipes become shoppable and so with one button press you end up getting the entire recipe it switches over to instacart lets you buy the ingredients

lets you indicate which ones you already have so you don't need to buy them again uh so really slick all of this is actually part of what we call the instacart developer platform so it's not just about enabling shopping through the

other places like New York Times cooking where you discover uh where you discover recipes or discover food but actually making it so that a whole ecosystem can be formed uh around turning Discovery

destinations into shopping destinations another interesting partnership that I saw is one you've done with Uber Eats right so now people are able to get

their their groceries from insta card instantly delivered to to Uber so how how are you thinking about in terms of competition but also collaboration you know it always comes down to what is the

problem that we're trying to solve for customers and this fits like a glove uh customers come to instacart because they want to save time and customers come to instacart because they love food those

two truths have existed since the beginning of instacart uh but sometimes customers are uh placing a grocery order and sometimes they're interested in getting uh food delivered from a

restaurant and that's something that when we speak with our customers they've told us for a long time uh and and so we thought well we can actually make instacart twice as valuable for them by

offering not just the biggest selection in grocery but also thousands and thousands of restaurants Nationwide that they can order from and uh and so the

partnership felt very very natural there and uh and we were able to deliver an even more high quality product as a result it also makes the instacart Plus Membership more valuable to customers because now not only are they getting uh

free delivery on on grocery orders but they're also able to get free delivery on restaurant orders so it's a it's ultimately we expect that this will create a flywheel where customers get more value from instacart and as a

result they come back to instacart more frequently we also think that it's very symbiotic this relationship between placing a restaurant order and a grocery order so a really large percentage of the customers that are placing

restaurant orders are doing so immediately after having placed a grocery order just makes a lot of sense so you get the way we kind of describe it is that you get your groceries for the week and your and your uh dinner for

the night of course the actual scenarios go well beyond that and I'm a early customer so remember when instacart got started and even the founder was

literally delivering groceries and I was one of those uh customer that receed the the the groceries from the founder and obviously looking at the story from from from the future it makes sense but I

love to hear from your own perspective from the inside like kind of what what was that evolution of the product from being like a single product with a very specific use case to the platform that

you are talking about now it's almost a story of Technology more than anything else because grocery delivery is complicated the catalog is

extremely sophistic at now not only do we need to know what are all the products that people might be interested in but we need to know what the associations are between those products that typically when you buy salmon you

probably want lemon to squeeze on top uh obviously gets more interesting than that um and also where each of those products are in the physical world right

now and what's interesting is that we've come to realize that grocery stores themselves only have a limited understanding of what's available on the Shelf at any given moment some sometimes they don't know what's physically in the store sometimes they know what's

physically in the store but they don't know what's in the back versus what's on the shelf and so we have not only this really sophisticated understanding of grocery and what customers want but also

how to translate that to the physical world and and the stores that are around you that's really powerful but that's really hard to build so having now built

that we realize that there's way more we can do by integrating that into other services all around the country and so you see us doing that with the developer platform the other thing we've realized

is that by creating this product that is a go-to product for grocery delivery we are delivering convenience in people's lives and that convenience is centered

around food and can actually expand beyond that so our customers actually started expecting us to do more than just pure grocery delivery the first way that that manifested was not only through the weekly shop but through

convenience orders that happened between the weekly shop fill in orders and so we started focusing a lot more on convenience and that became a really big use case uh on instaart but I would argue that that's a near neighbor of

grocery the next thing that we did beyond that was adding more verticals so adding Best Buy Sephora uh we just launched Home Depot so you get all these

various use cases available um for delivery and you get that same kind of wow this saved my life right now I really needed this delivered immediately and I was able to get it and I never

expected that I could do that um it's uh it's really cool so even if some of those use cases are less frequent we've made the instacart membership more valuable and the instacart app more valuable by adding those and so

restaurant delivery of course is a really big one but is almost a logical extension of the journey that we've been on for quite some time now to make instacart more valuable by delivering

more convenience in more ways yeah so you mentioned membership a few times and I'm very very interested in that aspect right it's a you you buil a marketplace where traditionally there is a

transaction you go there and you pay for what you are consuming but you now layer this membership on top of that so how do you think about combining those type of

business models in a way that encourage retention and also unlocks additional value for the user when we know that a customer is going to keep coming back then we're able to unlock a lot more

value for them and that's the whole purpose of the membership and it's been very successful most of our orders come from Members the The Logical way to use instacart if you come and use this for

your weekly shop is to become a member it pays for itself very very quickly but it enables us that consistency that knowledge that this customer is going to retain and come back every single week enables us to open it way out so not

only are we able to deliver value for them in their Core weekly shop but we can add more value on through more use cases and ultimately it's that back and forth and and continuous repeat use that

enables us to deliver more of that value so we really believe in the membership we really believe that the logical way to use instacart is to be a member and we believe that through that we can

deliver the most value to customers so what's included in then you mentioned the the free delivery H not just for for instacar but now in this case is for for Uber Eats delivery um and how are you

thinking about enhancing the value for for the user as you start integrating with more with more Partners or doing other things yeah the the core value prop of

in Car Plus is that you get 0 delivery on your orders we also lower fees uh and so uh so those are the core that's the reason that most people uh use instacart

plus become members of instacart uh and that's their expectation is that they're going to get that free free delivery what we're trying to do now is make the membership more and more valuable as we

add more and more selection onto the platform and more use cases in the process and so up until now that has largely been through through more frequency that comes from convenience

orders and new use cases like I mentioned uh but restaurant delivery essentially doubles the value of the membership this is for many of our customers they've essentially had two

memberships in order to get free delivery on their grocery needs and their restaurant needs and now they're able to do all of that with one membership so it's a really really big change in the value prop of instacart

plus now our focus of course is to bring restaurant delivery to more and more of our customers we just launched it it's very nent on the platform it's a new way to use instacart and so small percentage of users have placed their orders so far

the really cool thing is we're seeing that that membership is valuable for them mo most of those orders are coming from members uh which is not unexpected it's exactly what we thought would happen uh but the really good news is

they keep coming back so not only are they continuing to come back for their grocery orders but they continue to come back for restaurant orders as well so there's repeat use there which is the sign of product Market fit that we're

looking for the next thing we're doing is of course driving that adoption across way more of our users if I'm honest if we weren't seeing that repeat use we would be a little apprehensive

about driving the adoption like all the product leaders on your uh who who are listening to and watching your podcast they they know that product Market fit is so crucial because it's the thing

you're looking for before you drive adoption and we've H we've hit that we've proven that it's very exciting it took a lot of work to get there and now we're going to focus on adoption and what you're saying reminds me I think

it's a huge mode also against competition right as as you go to a single place for all your needs you stop thinking about maintaining multiple subscriptions it also reminds me of what

Apple news did with one single place where you can consume all your news even if it's sports or Media or technology so you don't have to maintain some of that um the the challenge that I see with that Daniel especially at a company of

your size is that you have something that is working right so you guess I guess you have a core team of product people maintaining that and then how do you go about spinning out kind of a Z to

one team and ensure that that they are also getting the enough resources to to have a a shot at being successful one of the reasons that instacart became so successful at grocery is that we are

laser focused on grocery every single person at instacart wakes up every single morning trying to make the grocery experience as good as it possibly can be so I understand your question it's a good one you know when

we considered doing restaurant delivery we imagined a variety of different ways that we could do it one of the options was to go at it alone and build up the selection and build up that assortment

of restaurants and and build up the use case from scratch at instacart and we ended up choosing to do this in a partnership because we don't just want to have the best grocery we also want to

leverage really highquality restaurant delivery from a team of people who also wake up every single day obsessing about making restaurant delivery as good as it can be and we wanted to kind of have the

best of both worlds we didn't want to get distracted by taking all of the best people at instacart who work on grocery delivery and suddenly take them away from grocery delivery and then over time

you risk having the grocery experience uh becoming less and less competitive so we want it to be the best grocery delivery experience and that's why the team gets to continue to focus on that

and and we to took this approach of a partnership and an integration that enables us to overnight have nearly all of the restaurant selection and a really

sophisticated really high quality experience from day one yeah and and I I guess in this is more of a strategic decision right like you can choose what you just did which is partnering with

someone and overnight getting direct access uh higher speed higher way faster way to test if this actually works and then you have the addition the different approach which is building from scratch

and leveraging your existing database to to try to to push to a new use case I mean it will give you more control but ultimately it's going to slow you down that's right and I think we need to recognize that these are very mature

businesses today the customer expectation around grocery delivery is really high we have to understand so much about what customers want when they're placing their grocery orders and

I would say the same is true of restaurant delivery so joining jumping into to restaurant delivery and starting from scratch means having a subscale and

subpar product from day one and that's just not acceptable to us we want to have a really excellent experience and we have that with grocery delivery and now our customers that are coming in

they're getting a worldclass experience in grocery delivery and a worldclass restaurant delivery experience and they're getting that in one membership it's it's really unusual to be able to achieve something like that as quickly

as we were able to do it here another challenge that I can imagine from your perspective as a Marketplace product is you have four different players at least right so the the customer The Shopper

the retailer and even the advertiser so as you think about your your road map and how do you prioritize different initiatives to ensure that there is satisfaction across the different person

it's a huge Balancing Act I we actually have to do this Balancing Act uh around making sure that the retailers on the platform are getting what they need that customers on the platform are getting what they need Shoppers on the platform

are getting what they need and advertisers and brands are getting what they need it actually only works the system only works when all four are

getting a really good balance of impact uh and that's because the customer's experience is driven by the success of all of those experiences and I'll just give you a few examples when the

Shoppers on the platform feel rewarded and feel like they're doing great work that earns them a good livelihood then they they are the face of instacart to our customers and they they end up doing

a great job and they end up uh getting repeat use in fact one of the things that we often hear is the Delight that that our customers have when they're getting a shopper that they've had before uh the Delight that they have

when a shopper is intuitive about when something's out of stock what the right thing is to get so Shoppers are extremely important to the health and of the experience um the retailer selection

is also one of the biggest draws that that pulls customers into instacart we have the best selection by far and that means that customers can get their mainstream needs met as well as Niche

needs if you have uh you're making different food from different cultures or whatnot we want to make sure that we have all that selection so selection really really matters which means that all types of retailers need to be able

to be successful and then even the advertising is crucial to the experience not only because it enables Brands to get their products discovered but because it makes the product more affordable because there's multiple

sources of revenue that ultimately deliver an experience to customers this episode is brought to you by Appo the Next Generation a testing and feature

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EPO visit geo.com product school and Conex your experiment velocity that's geo.com product school well let's talk about this from a kpi standpoint as you

try to keep keep everybody happy and the same platform like what are some of the the kpis that you use for each specific Persona the short answer is it's

complicated that that it would be lovely to to choose just one kpi something like sales and say well everybody wins if sales go up and I think that might be

true in in its simplest form but actually you could make a lot of mistakes if you simply focused on sales as just one kpi at the outset you would say more

sales is good for retailers is good for instacart it means that customers keep coming back because otherwise sales wouldn't go up and it means that advertisers will will also reach more customers and the Choppers will get more

demand so in its simplest form sales is okay as a metric but we have quite a few other metrics so we look at how retailers are getting customers and whether customers keep coming back to

the same store so are they having a good experience with that store or are they having a bad experience that's forcing them to keep switching stores that a very important metric we have order level metrics that are extremely

important to us so how often were we on time what was our actual average delivery speed um what percentage of the items that the customer chose were actually found what's really interesting

is not only is it what percentage were exact matches but what percentage were successful Replacements when a customer goes to the store they often encounter items that are out of stock but they

don't even realize it because you in real time pivot to another item in fact you might even in real time pivot to another dish altogether that you're going to make because something wasn't

available but you don't really realize you're doing it it's all it's so automatic now when someone else is doing your shopping for you it's no longer automatic but it's actually really

really important to get right and the found rate that we find goes way up as a result of the successful Replacements that we make so it's an extremely important metric and then finally on the

user metrics the obvious ones would be to say user grow and user retention but actually some of the others are really important as well we tend to isolate metrics on new users not just average

across all of our customers because we find that their needs are different from the customers that started using instacart four or five years ago and we tend to isolate different regions so

someone who's in inside of an urban environment versus a more rural or or Suburban environment they tend to have quite different needs their baskets tend to be quite different and so we isolate

the metrics that way as well all of this is in service of making sure that we don't treat our customers as one big group that is all the same but actually recognize their unique needs and make

sure that our metrics will tell us if we're doing something that's good for one set of customers but might be bad for another I love those nonobvious metrics that are leading indicators of ultimately Revenue success I remember a

conversation with the head of Instagram and he was talking about how they're keeping track on the amount of internal sense of videos right like how many people are not just liking or commenting

but actually sharing that via dm with someone because that implies that you really really care and you want to engage in a conversation with a friend about something that you saw my favorite

example of an unintuitive metric at instacart is that customers that place an order for perishable items either produce dairy or meat and seafood are

more likely to come back on a recurring basis so the easier that we can make for customers to purchase perishable items among their first few orders the more likely we are to turn them into retained

customers and the reason for this makes so much sense once you dig into it if you buy something that doesn't go bad you might not need to use the product again for a while but if you buy

something that needs to be purchased over and over again well then you're going to keep coming back and so you'll notice in the first experience when you first open instacart as a new user and I do this all the time I create a new

account almost at least once a week just so that I can always remember what a new customer is experiencing not just someone who's used it for a long time what you'll notice is the storefront is full of produce full of dairy full of

meat and seafood I love that and since you mentioned this this kind of recipes and like ways of helping a user new or or

existing to complete a transaction I remember your talk at prodon San Francisco last year uh you were talking about some of those specific AI use cases so now that some time has has gone

by I would love to learn more about what is specifically you are doing regard with regards to gen yeah I think that AI is such an exciting story for storefronts but we're

on a journey here and V1 of that Journey the first version for almost every product seems to have been to create a chatbot sound familiar and you know if

I'm honest we learned a lot we also created a chatbot uh it's uh it's called ask instacart it's a very convenient name ask instacart AI kind of cool doesn't happen every day uh but it's not

the most common way that people are using um instacart the by and large people still people's core behavior of using instacart is to come in and use buy it again the storefront and search

that's where they spend the majority of their time and so the question for me is what does V2 look like and it's a pretty exciting story if you look at what

happens when customers go to the store today most retail most stores live and die by what they call the planogram the planogram is the internal

map of all the products in the store and where they are what shelf how high how many how deep but a regular store is forced to

personalize on just one dimension which is their location they can't even personalize by time of day it's not like the planogram changes by morning afternoon evening or night so the

personalization is that you might have a very Urban store that might be more focused on younger or Fitness oriented customers versus a more Suburban store which might be more focused on families but that's it that's the level of

personalization you get in the store and so what we've started asking ourselves is what does it look like when we bring this online how do we make that better and we call this the personal planogram

because it's all of that culmination of technology and AI that powers this personalization that's going to do things that just weren't possible in the

store and so what happens today is when you walk into a regular store you're actually filtering out all the products that are not interesting to you in pursuit of finding the products that are

interesting to you it's a familiar experience it's something we do all day long actually we're still doing that online as well we often will give you back hundreds of results for something

when in fact you're only interested in one or two of those results and so even online today you're filtering out all the things you're not interested in in pursuit of the things you are interested in well what we're going to do with AI

is create this personal planogram where the store is rebuilt around you it's rebuilt around the size of your household the the ages of different people in your household their food

preferences their food restrictions and allergies and ultimately what you're going to see is a storefront that makes it a lot easier to use so while V1 of AI

might have been a chatbot and we've learned a lot from it V2 is going to be this personal planogram this storefront that reorganizes itself around you continuously not just once but it keeps

reorganizing itself around you as you shop V3 might then be to actually turn instacart into truly an agent for you and one that understands you so well that you can set it off uh in a

direction and not even be choosing products anymore but by telling it you know you know already which which uh dishes are on rotation in my household so just let's just go go after those

three dishes this time and we'll swap in this other dish that you've seen me make before and then just go take care of the rest for me uh so that's the journey I think we're in V2 right now and I think it's going to really change how people

experience the instacart storefronts we're going to need to have you back in a few months to talk about V3 absolutely um and then how did that uh

Genna impact your current orc and in terms of setting up the right structure to ensure that you know you have the right players that you have the right level of innov while also taking care of

your core product the same way we were talking about before like launching Z to1 initiatives well it probably follows the product story as well V1 of our org

chart with AI had a carrot AI team was a team that was focused on nothing but AI V2 now has a team the whole team that uses Ai and is thinking in AI all day

long so it's become a native part of our team now if I'm being completely honest it's actually a hybrid of the two because in order to really unlock the personal planogram in order to really

unlock the scenarios that I just talked about we need to build data foundations and Elevate the quality of our data foundations in a way that unlocks the

power of AI meaning we need really really accurate and continuous understanding of what customers are doing on the platform but also we need to start understanding their profiles in

a more intuitive way you won't see us asking customers how many people are in your household we're going to infer it based on the things that they buy and we're going to

use that to create a more and more robust profile of those customers and do that but return the favor to those customers by making the the the experience more and more intuitive and

more and more automatic for them uh so that requires some data foundations that re really do require a unique investment and so that's what the AI specific team is focused on but then turning that into

use cases and turning that into better experiences is something Happ across the whole organization then Switching gears I want to talk about your life pre and post IPO as a as a CPO now that you are

also you know in the light of a lot of other shareholders like how has that influenced the way you go about leading your team and and deciding what's

next I'll tell you what I was worried about I was worried that becoming a public company would cause us to make really short-term decisions quarter by quarter decisions but I don't think that that's actually what investors want and

it's certainly not what customers want customers want us to build something great that they fall in love with and uh that stands the test of time that gets better with time and so I actually don't

think we've made a change in how we prioritize uh as as a result of being a public company and I my life hasn't really changed all that much either we have a quarterly Rhythm now in which we

tell the world what's new and how it's all going and uh and that quarterly rhythm in some ways parallels our own internal metronome for knowing whether

we're making progress against the things that we want to do like always we've had a portfolio approach where some of the projects that we're doing are things that are meant to deliver really immediate impact and some of the things

that we're doing are meant to lay the ground workor for longer term uh outcomes so in that sense that hasn't really changed I would also say that long before we became a public company we started operating like a public

company which when you're working in a in a low margin industry that's hper competitive you actually need that kind of rigor regardless and so we've had

that kind of rigor regardless and uh and so it's not a totally unfamiliar experience now to be operating as a public company uh because it requires really careful understanding of our unit economics really careful understanding

of the success of each side of the four-sided Marketplace uh so we've always operated in that way and in that sense I think it set us up well to be a good public company as well and you see on the board right plus you are an

adviser and a board member in in all startups I I am on on a board of another company and I advise another a number of other startups I love it because it just shows me different perspectives and

different products it's a way to kind of see how completely other companies are are solving problems uh so yeah it's been it's been a fun experience well so let's talk about the role of product on

the board because this wasn't that common back in the day now we have cpos sitting next to CFOs and cro discussing business which is awesome because we

have not just Tech post sales uh so specifically when you sit on the board um what is it that you are um discussing with the with the other shareholders and

how do you ensure that that product has actual impact on the Strategic decisions for the entire company yeah you know being on boards has shown me uh the value of asking some of the questions

that we tend to ask internally when we work as product leaders uh but it's just as useful working at a board level uh and the first of those is what does winning look like and it's remarkable the number of companies that have a hard

time answering that question it's not an easy question to answer uh it takes a lot of real thought about who is your customer what does success look like for them what is it that you bring that other companies might not what are our

unique differentiators and so sitting on a board asking those questions is actually just as important as asking them within within the team so isolating what winning looks like and then really

interrogating whether the strategy is going to achieve that and and whether you're making progress against that and a lot of those questions really really work at a at a product and

Technology level and work very well sitting alongside investors that are just as curious about those things but may not have had the vocabulary or the

the methodologies uh at their fingertips in a way that a product person probably does well I want to uh wrap up with some of your hot takes uh around leadership well one of the the ones I'm reading

here is that the effic is about the streamlining processes not just cutting cost what do you mean by that I think that it's more fun to ship

products and see impact on customers I think that's what we're all here to do and a lot of the efficiency that AI unlocks should enable us to do that much more quickly a lot of the efficiencies

that better processes unlock should enable us to to ship products more quickly and more efficiently spend less time managing dependencies across teams and more time working with customers and

delivering for customers so I think that I think that shipping is a drug I think we're all addicted to it and I I think that when we talk about efficiency what you enable what you unlock with that is

just being able to do it faster and and with less with less overhead I think that's exciting for everyone involved another one is about a fast moving team is built on clear communication and

removing blockers not working harder that is shocking to me because especially the two of us live in San Francisco and there's such a strong culture around working hard and working smart so how can you actually prove that

it's not just about working hard yeah we all work hard at this point that's a given that just comes with the territory so uh when you really distinguish what are the teams that move

really fast from the ones that don't what I often find is teams are getting stuck in ambiguity or when the goal isn't actually clear uh teams are

getting stuck in the glue between organizations teams are getting stuck because they need help but there isn't anyone around to help and so it's not

actually being able to do the job faster it's removing the roadblocks and so even if you just look at this latest project when we rolled out restaurants on instacart we had a very small group of

very capable people all the people that needed to be involved whether they were on the business development side the marketing side or the R&D side they were all right there I was in involved very directly other leaders were involved

very directly and we all understood our roles we all understood our place and for the leaders it wasn't to scrutinize it was to unblock that's it every single day the morning started with how's everyone

doing and how can I unblock you and are you stuck on anything is anything ambiguous and that speed of decision making and that speed of working across

teams against a very very clear goal was was infectious and even though we all worked really really really hard I think it's a project that a lot of people are going to look back on as a career

highlight because it was so easy to make progress together one thing and I find hard even in in a startup is is to really remind people of the power of Simplicity right so I can only imagine

when you are operating at your scale and you have so many other people right so many different priorities like what are some of the specific ways where you can

bring people back to the basics and and ensure that they have Clarity on what they have to do next and kind of help them remove all of that noise around them it's so easy to over complicate the

things that we're doing and I I think we have a an advantage as instacart because the whole purpose of our product is to bring Simplicity and convenience to people's lives so that has to be part of

our ethos internally as well and uh and so I think it is important to just keep the products as simple as possible it's very easy in the process of building a

product to add to it it's also very easy in the process of iterating in a product to add to it so actually if you know that you will have time later to add

more to it if if necessary then it's quite strategic and quite effective to start by asking the question in each product review what is it that's going

to make this product successful and what are we looking at here that is a nice to have and that isn't core to making the product successful the only thing I would say is there is one word of caution here you probably won't hear me

use the word MVP very often because it's a very reductive word minimum viable product is that what we're here to deliver and I think it can really strip the Delight out of products so I don't

like to use that word very much I try to use the word Simplicity simple much more than I use the word MVP because I think you can make something that is simple but still delightful and I think that

when you use the word MVP it can kind of strip the Delight out of it so we'll go with simple but also delightful and I think it's okay to keep some of those things in there that aren't the absolute core but actually are the thing that make people fall in love with the

product Dan this interview was definitely delightful uh thank you for your time uh to share with us how you're thinking about your product AI pricing strategy and kind of everything in

between um look forward to having you back to discuss more things when you are when you are ready thank you again thank you very much