Keith Yandell

Forcing stakeholders to 'steel-man' the opposing view generates instant empathy and helps resolve complex trade-off debates.

"One thing I found super effective in those contexts is I try to ask the other side. So, let's take the profitability side. I ask them to make the growth case. I say, 'Tell me the three best reasons wh..."

Maintaining a strict culture bar, even for highly qualified candidates, serves as a powerful recruiting tool for other high-performers.

"The fact we were willing to go all the way down the path and have someone super qualified but didn't meet the culture bar, for him was what pushed him over the edge to join the company."

Hiring generalists rather than specialists can lead to more innovative, 10x outcomes because they aren't beholden to industry norms.

"If you want to achieve a 10x outcome, hiring someone that's an expert in the field, it's maybe unlikely you're going to achieve that 10x outcome, because they're likely to do things the way things hav..."

Written documentation is the most effective way to scale culture and expectations during periods of rapid headcount growth.

"One thing I've learned is it's super hard to scale culture, especially when you're growing as fast as DoorDash has since I joined... one thing that scales really well is written work."

Forcing all employees to experience the core product firsthand builds deep empathy and identifies broken processes that metrics might miss.

"We have a program called WeDash, where, four times, a year all employees are required to go do deliveries."

Dedicate a fixed portion of every 1:1 to career development to ensure long-term growth isn't sidelined by tactical updates.

"I say how I run one-on-ones in my 'how to work with Keith' document, and the last 10 minutes of my one-on-ones are career development conversations."

Speed in decision-making requires clear ownership and a pre-defined tie-breaker for when consensus cannot be reached.

"There needs to be someone that says, 'All right. We got to be clear on who the decision maker is here. If we haven't reached a consensus, who's the tiebreaker?'"

Product leaders should learn the basics of legal and regulatory constraints to push back on over-conservatism using first principles.

"They will apply a first principles product mindset to their understanding of the law, and they will push the lawyers to make sure that they're not being overly conservative, which sometimes they can b..."

Small, consistent gains in shipping velocity create massive competitive advantages over time through compound interest.

"If you can continuously push up what you ship by a week, you're going to end up lapping competitors who are just one week behind because you're going to start the next thing a week sooner, and you're..."

Effective BD teams work with Product to build scalable platforms rather than negotiating bespoke, one-off integrations.

"Why don't you figure out what the scalable solution is for this? We will build you a product. You won't need to come ask us every time to build something. And then you'll know the parameters in which..."

Use manual operations to validate partnership hypotheses before committing precious engineering resources to a build.

"We should have gone out and tested this at one hotel with just some hacky operations and seen what the uptick was... before going and asking for the product resources."