The DoorDash Operating System, part 4.
The weekly business review.
I get it, we all hate meetings. Just read LinkedIn one Tuesday afternoon and you’ll get the picture:
“We’ve eliminated all 1-on-1s.”
“We are a Slack culture.”
“We communicate solely by writing notes on bricks and then whipping them across the office.”
“Whoa, very nice.”
“That’s nothing. Now, instead of all-hands, we have our chief of staff nail a list of weekly updates to our reception desk like he’s Martin Luther in 1517.”
“Impressive. Impressive…. I’d like to know what Paul Allen thinks of meetings.”
[….]
“We’ve replaced all our product reviews with voice memos that our PMs dictate while taking their weekly lavender colonic.”
Jokes aside, these folks might all kind of have a point. A lot of meetings do suck. 1-on-1s can feel inorganic and unnecessary. Weekly update meetings could often be an email. Client meetings would pretty much always be better without the clients, and then without the meetings.
That is, except for one. The indispensable meeting. The heavyweight champ of meetings. The one meeting to rule them all.
The weekly business review.
What are your values?
Let’s step back a second.
If you’ve worked in even one startup, I’ll bet $10 that that startup had some kind of mini constitution where that company’s founders laid out the values that were meant to guide how you work. And just like startups themselves, some of these charters are pretty great, and some of these charters are pretty brutal. At best they’re sober articulations of your shared operating principles, at worst they’re the abstract word salad of a Tony Robbins self-help weekend.
Anyhow, let’s say you’re a founder, and you think that your company’s got some pretty good values. No-brainers like ‘move fast’, and ‘test & learn’, and ‘ownership’. And yet, for some reason, when you walk your office floor, you just don’t feel like your team is living them.
“Why are product and sales not in sync?”
“How come our new business unit keeps missing its revenue goal?”
“I told these people to ‘grind’ and yet they’re leaving the office at 4:45 every day?”
What’s the disconnect?
There’s the common misperception that if you just hire great people, prescribe them the right shared ‘values’, and then let them go ‘build’, that, through the miracle of some intermediary magic, eventually a successful company will emerge. That startups are at least 50% immaculate conception.
That, in my experience, is wrong.
No, startups are highly intentional undertakings, wherein you can’t simply tell your team how you want it to behave, you need to build structures where your team has the opportunity to demonstrate those behaviors on a regular basis.
Your WBR is the stage where your company’s values come to life.
Take six of what I think are DoorDash’s best operating principles:
Have a plan
Own the outcome
1% better every day
Truth seek
Bias for action
One team, one fight
How was it that DoorDash got its team of 1000+ people to go practice these operating principles every day? Easy: it wove them into the fabric of the company’s operating rhythm, starting with its company-level weekly business review.
Here is the blueprint for how it did that.
The DoorDash WBR.
1/ Have a plan.
I’ve written before about how so many startups have a big, bold revenue objective, and then simply start doing a whole bunch of random shit, with no coherent plan in the middle to mathematically connect those ‘initiatives’ to ultimately achieving their top-line goal.
A great WBR is that connective tissue. It is that plan.
Simply put, your WBR takes your company’s North Star goal of revenue [probably], and then breaks it down into its component sub-objectives and key results. In this way, you, as CEO, can understand - as if looking under the hood of your car - what’s working, what’s not, and ideally, where you should be focusing your attention. In the above made-up example - and in 99% of other cases - that means starting with ‘revenue’ and then pulling out ‘selling new customers’, ‘upselling existing customers’, and ‘serving and retaining most customers’.
2/ Own the outcome/ ownership.
Next, each of those input objectives are assigned to single owners - above in blue - who are solely responsible for their objective’s success, no matter what. The rationale here is simple: nothing motivates human beings quite like sitting in front of their peers, week-in, week-out, with their name against an objective, that absolutely must hit for the group to be successful.
I truly can’t recall the number of times we’d be running up against a wall on a specific problem, and the question would come from our COO, “ok, who owns this?”
There would be a brief pause, some crickets, and then, “…alright, Doug, you own this, please get back with a plan next week.”
3/ 1% better every day or ‘are we hitting or missing’.
Each objective is then broken down further into quantitative key results1, which are basically commitments to improve key business inputs by specific, measurable amounts, such that their corresponding objectives will be hit. A good template example of a KR is something like “Increase ARPU from $50 to $55 in Q1.” Then, importantly, that KR is broken down even further, into weekly targets, based on a build up of the initiatives you’re going to run to get there. So something like:
Week 0: $50
Week 4: $50 (+$0)
Week 8: $52 (+$2, from initiative A)
Week 12: $55 (+$3, from initiative B)
This is critical for two reasons. First you can easily sense-check whether you really think your input objectives are going to move your output KR, on the timeline you list. Second, you get a real-time pulse check on whether you’re on/ off track, so you can do something about it.
4/ Truth seek or ‘why did we miss’.
It was when a team’s goal was in the red/ off-track that the WBR really came to life. In that situation, that goal’s owner was expected to show up and to share what had happened, what assumptions had been wrong or what issue had occurred to miss, and then a good idea for what they were going to do to get back on-track. This would typically take the shape of, at maximum, 4-5 short bullet points, that could be easily digested and approved for next steps.
5/ Bias for action or ‘how fast can we get back on track’.
If I’m being honest, WBRs were kinda scary. At least I found them scary. You had a growing number of 30, 40, 50 of your smartest, most senior peers, gathered in stadium seating around a giant conference room table, all eager to hear why you were going on week 4 of a losing streak. Now, to be clear, DoorDash was an incredibly supportive culture, but, come on, no one wants to be the moron getting roasted every single week.
So, to the question of ‘how did DoorDash get such a large, complex organization to move so quickly in running down and achieving such ambitious goals?’ Well, the WBR was one big reason; it provided the fire under each one of us, and near unlimited motivation to hit our numbers.
6/ One team, one fight or ‘how do we win, together’.
As companies grow, they become more complex, with more complicated trade-offs to be made.
“Do we fund the core business or our new ventures?”
“Who owns the customer, business unit A or business unit B?”
“How do we ensure product, sales, and marketing are all in sync, in market X?”
You could get a 99% accurate snapshot of the entire DoorDash business from just skimming the WBR’s pre-read document. That left the actual meeting for what was of highest value, which was a discussion led by DoorDash’s CEO, COO, and CFO, on how to move dollars around to maximize the chance of hitting top-line revenue for the company. Canada was outperforming but Dasher acquisition in Florida was stalled? Let’s move funds from column A to column B. We want to run a national promo but can’t afford it? Can we push a little more on cost in CX? We need to promote our growing ‘grocery’ business prominently in-app, at the expense of our much larger ‘restaurant’ business? Let’s adjust those teams’ targets to match.
At the end of the day, the DoorDash WBR wasn’t necessarily about maximizing how many teams hit their goals, but rather how we all worked cohesively to ensure the company hit its. And so, after all the tires had been kicked, and everyone was confirmed to be working their tails off on their own, there was a very productive discussion of how to make trade-offs within the company such that we could all win together.
The WBR: The CEO’s control panel.
So many founders thrive in the early days of doing near-everything themselves. Most can manage as their team grows to fill a conference room. Many can even scale themselves to run very effective product, sales, and marketing functions. But where so many hit a wall is the point where their success relies on 1. delegating major inputs, 2. ensuring close cross-functional collaboration (when they’re not around), and 3. motivating and pushing a larger organization. A great WBR helps a founder formalize their expectations for their team, ensure that that team remains in-sync without their daily micromanagement, and then helps them make high-quality, real-time business decisions to maximize their chance of success. In short, the WBR is the tool for solving startup scaling challenges, and one meeting truly worth investing in getting right.
I know this is all a janky, not-quite-right version of OKRs; write your letters you jerks, see if I care.