Get loud.
Great companies talk a lot.
Growing up in Canada - because stereotypes are true - I played hockey. More specifically I played in goal.
One evening, sometime in 1997, I found myself in Chilliwack, BC, (real place) facing a slap shot from some 6’6” barbarian, probably named like Doug Meatsauce or something. Anyhow, I see this poutine-fed neanderthal wind up to shoot, and then, owing to his teammate standing right in front of me, I completely lose sight of him. I hear the shot, then nothing, then a cheer. With only a handful of seconds left in the period, they’d scored. The buzzer sounds and I skate back to my bench.
“Steve, how come you just stood there?” A fair question from my coach.
“I couldn’t see anything. Guy was screening me.”
My coach pauses, staring at me incredulously.
“Then idiot1, why didn’t you say something?!”
My porousness as a goaltender aside, this anecdote illustrates something important about how great teams operate: they communicate, clearly, broadly, and often.
Hello, it’s good to see you. I’m Steve Kenning, Chairman and CEO here at Missing & Incorrect2.
As loyal readers will no doubt be aware, it’s been a bit of a dry spell here at M&I. Indeed, having wrapped up - unbelievably - part four of our series on DoorDash’s operating playbook, our editorial staff figured that we’d written all there was to say on the topic. And that in turn, out there on the front lines, battle-hardened operators were now reliably ensuring that all of their pods were fully-staffed, all their initiatives duly-walk’d, and all their Bs were being sufficiently W-R’d.
But alas, our work here is, it turns out, not done.
From a former colleague just last week:
“One issue I’m having at [x company] is that I’m always searching for information, statuses, updates. At DoorDash that information was regularly pushed out, and it kept us all on the same page.”
So, here we go, once more into the breach, with our 15th blog: Communication: If no one knows what’s going on, then no one’s gonna know what’s going on, so if they need to know something, they’re not gonna.
1. Democratized data dashboards.
“Thanks for the assist.”
It was 7:01am, February 1st, 2019. The message above was from a colleague on the US Marketplace team, who, being in New York, had an hour jump on me in Austin.
“What?” I replied, my most common response to pretty much anything at work.
“We beat our January unit economics per delivery goal by 2 cents, on a 2 cent outperform from customer service.”
Customer service? Why… that was my team.
You see, Chad had already opened his laptop and fired-up our central business Chartio3 dashboard to check on January performance. And in doing so had been able to see a view - the same view available to anyone in the company, from our CEO to our newest associate - of exactly how the company and its teams had performed against our volume, revenue, and unit economics targets.
In my startup journey there’s been one situation that strikes a special fear in my heart. And that situation is the one where you’re sitting in your weekly business review, and two teams show up with completely opposing data points. A common example: sales is pounding the table lamenting that, according to data they’ve pulled, there are hundreds of newly sold clients awaiting onboarding (and thus blocking sales commission payouts), while customer success, pulling its own reports, believe there are basically none.
DoorDash solved this with a highly talented and, more importantly, centralized, objective analytics team that was responsible for at least two critical things:
“Blessed” dashboards4 that were the unimpeachable truth for mission critical business metrics like volume, revenue, and profit. These dashboards were then pushed out to anyone in the company, such that there was always a broad understanding of how we were pacing.
Each team’s dashboard, which tracked their North Star metric, and input metrics.
In this way, there was never any time spent on aligning on a shared ‘truth’, and maximum time spent on solving problems.
2. Pushed progress updates via weather reports.
In a complex organization no team is an island. Account management relies on sales, operations relies on product, marketing relies on business development.
So, in such a company, where you’re nearly always reliant on someone else hitting their goal so that you can hit yours, sharing progress updates is critical. That’s why DoorDash’s ‘weather report’ system was so helpful.
Every week, each core team was responsible for publishing a cross-company email, showing 1. That week’s red/ yellow/ green progress to their quarterly goal, and 2. A pithy, written update on wins and learnings from the prior week and a thoughtful, specific plan for the next.
In this way no one had to burn cycles chasing down partners for updates, and bad surprises were kept to a minimum. If a key new product was going to be late you could try to reallocate resources accordingly. If outbound sales were coming in above goal, you could move funds to event marketing. If a team was just simply asleep at the wheel and doing sweet $%^& all, they didn’t stay asleep for very long.
This ‘push’ communications model was incredibly effective, and is even more critical in today’s world of remote work and globally distributed teams.
3. Group reporting and accountability in your WBR.
One activity that can drive a founder/ CEO into a mental institution is running down his/ her teams for detailed progress updates to their goals. It means one meeting with sales, one meeting with product, one meeting with post-sale, and so on. More maddening is that, somewhat frequently, each of those teams will point the finger at another, in explaining why they were missing their goal. Which means that you, CEO, are now caught playing telephone with two of your direct reports.
DoorDash’s model of a single, central Weekly Business Review, solved that problem in a number of ways:
Each core team had one page in a single, standardized document where they were expected to very clearly articulate whether they hit or missed their goal from the prior week, why, and what they were going to do about it.
Each team’s leader saw that each of his/ her colleagues were being held accountable to the same standard of performance in a shared forum.
If there were issues between two or more teams that needed to be hashed out, it was done then and there.
There was one message from the company’s leaders as to what was and was not important at that particular point in time, so that focus could be applied accordingly.
DoorDash’s WBR was the drumbeat of the business, and facilitated the top-down and cross-functional communication that was critical to running as fast and effectively as possible.
4. Knowledge and progress sharing at all-hands.
I love a good ‘all-hands’. It’s an opportunity to celebrate wins, share learnings, and communicate out the broadest strokes of the company’s direction and strategy. Some of my best memories were the electric vibes from a DoorDash all-hands; nothing makes you feel more like an important part of a team than having your coach pat you on the back, show a great play, or share with you the path to winning a championship.
However, for so many companies, there’s a moment where the vibe shifts, from scrappy startup to growing bureaucracy. And i’ll tell you exactly what I think that moment is: it’s when company all-hands pivots from a shared, one-team progress update to something closer to a high-school’s morning announcements. Less “here’s our progress to our revenue goal” and more “please be aware that in 2 weeks we’ll begin our quarterly, 9-box, 360, downside-up performance management and compensation realignment process, so, if you haven’t already, make sure you input your preliminary FØNK scores into our new HR system, ‘The Riddler’, by end of day.”
The result? You stop serving your main characters (let’s call them your ‘builders’) and start serving your background characters (let’s call them your ‘processors’). Your builders tune out and then simply stop coming, and your processors turn the side-show into the main show. CEOs, tell me you haven’t noticed as your all-hands questions pivot from “how are we thinking about different international expansion opportunities” to “when can we get a wider selection of low-sodium, gluten-free, snacks in the 2nd floor kitchen?”
So, the advice here is, to ensure the broadest, highest-level alignment: keep your all-hands regular (monthly), of high production value (should feel like an event, not a meeting), focused on high-level business outputs and inputs, and exclusive-feeling (a peek behind the curtain at high-value information, for employees eyes only).
In summary.
If you’re wondering why your team is out of alignment and/ or not doing the things you want them to, have you thought of investing in… communication?
Cool nicknames are a tradition in hockey. Names like ‘The Great One’. And ‘Sid The Kid’. And ‘Idiot’.
A subsidiary of The Fancy Good Bicycle and Rare Earth Minerals Concern, Hokkaido, Japan.
RIP.
Or something like “blessed”. Maybe “sacred”? “The King James Bible of Business Metrics”? Somebody, help me out.