Leading with empathy

Keith Yandell is a longtime DoorDash leader who has run legal, HR, marketing, customer support, and sales, and now leads business development and corporate development after earlier litigation work at Uber. The conversation covers DoorDash's customer-obsessed culture, how he leads teams outside his expertise, his practice of helping managed people find their next job, and how he handled pandemic-era and fundraising hardships.

01Key learnings

• Hire people better than yourself, then get out of the way; the most valuable managers slowly step back as their team members succeed independently.
• Write a 'How to work with me' document that states your expectations, known growth areas, and commitments to your team; it helps new hires and scales culture.
• Help people find their next job, even outside the company; it surfaces retention risks early, lets you plan backfills, and builds a reputation that attracts talent.
• To resolve heated debates, have each side make the strongest case for the other, name a clear decision-maker and tiebreaker, and set a decision deadline.
• Require constructive feedback in one-on-ones and always thank people for it, then report back on what you changed so feedback loops stay alive.
• Validate a business idea with cheap operational tests, like a promo code or a single pilot location, before asking product and engineering to build bespoke solutions.
• Build reusable platforms rather than one-off integrations for each partner deal, so future deals can be negotiated faster and with less engineering time.
• Set forecasts you are highly confident of hitting; trading a little valuation for investor trust can pay off across later funding rounds.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.