Can you share a little bit about your role and your journey so far at DoorDash?
I just celebrated my seventh Dashiversary! I started helping build out the recruiting function for DoorDash and was one of the first tech recruiters. I was brought on to help scale Product and Engineer Recruiting, so I did that for just about 18 months, and one of the roles I had to fill was to hire our VP of Product, Rajat Shroff, which was my first intro to Executive Recruiting.
As with any early-stage company, we had a lot of attrition, and I think the uncertainty in recruiting was especially hard for some, but I personally loved it because I felt like I always had new roles to work on.
Through attrition in recruiting, I pivoted over from the tech side to the business side to help build out what is now our business recruiting function, starting with Executive Recruiting. When they first asked me to take exec recruiting on, I had the Chief People Officer role, the Chief Financial Officer search, and then eventually layered on a few more to hire our Vice President of Engineering Ryan Sokol, Vice President of Marketing Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, and a few others.
I was then tapped to lead the business recruiting side which I did for just about 18 months and helped build the business side from about 500 employees to just about 2,000. It was one of the most exciting times to see all of these jobs that had never existed before and get to help shape what levels and what jobs and what we think the right structure is for the teams. It really opened my eyes to like what else was out there at DoorDash. Recruiting helped me to meet and get to know so many great people, both as hiring managers and as candidates.
Ultimately, recruiting can be kind of a short sale cycle. You're on the phone all the time, especially in business recruiting at the stage we were at in 2018. I wanted to have a little bit more of that long-term sales focus and life happened in a way that was the perfect time to transition to something new as my husband and I were moving to Chicago for him to start business school
I transitioned over to lead our account management team in Chicago. Leading the Midwest I got to know the businesses in my community right away and the whole team was based in Chicago. About a year into the role, COVID hit and it was all hands on deck to get merchants updated menus, onboard them to the platform, and what felt like 24/7 support. I've been on the Outside Account Management team for just about four years. I was leading the Midwest team and then my husband took us to Georgia for his post-business school adventure.
Right before I was set to move, a role opened up in the southeast. So I transferred from leading the Midwest to leading the Southeast out of Atlanta. I had my son right after we moved, so I took maternity leave, came back, and then later was asked to take on an expanded territory and lead our Northeast and New York teams.
It's definitely been one of those journeys where I say I've had probably seven-plus roles in seven years. Leading different regions has really impacted how many people I've gotten to work with and every team needs different things. Every region needs different things and you learn so much about each specific market and how that shapes our company. I don't think I'll ever let go of that early-stage inquiry and really wanting to know why a business isn’t on DoorDash and its operations.
But I love that because of my role, I stay really connected to our customers which will always motivate me!
Can you share more about your approach in terms of navigating all of your decisions, both personally and professionally?
One of my mentors always said “Luck favors the well-prepared” and I have a philosophy that you should do a really good job at what you're doing and that will open a lot of opportunities.
When I think about recruiting, had I not applied a hundred percent to trying to find the searches that we had open, I wouldn't have been offered the opportunity to work on such large searches and ultimately wouldn't have had so many mentors on the business side of DoorDash.
Oftentimes I see people being really focused on what's next. Especially at DoorDash, it's really hard to vouch for someone if you can't say they're really good at what they're doing now. It's much easier to say I've seen them exhibit these different characteristics that are really translatable, or I've seen them really want to push themselves and I'm confident that they could learn the new skills in that way.
I've always encouraged my team to be focused on being really good at their day-to-day. And then once you're good at that, you can take on projects or other things that will allow your scope to increase horizontally. I could not emphasize that enough.
I think my own path speaks to the title is not everything moving up. In your career, in terms of title, I don't think necessarily translates to success, and I also think it really depends on what you're motivated by. I'm someone who loves learning new things, and I get really bored when I have been doing the same thing over and over.
I participated in the GM Accelerator program last year and it was awesome to be able to meet a set of colleagues who were all working on such different business problems. I loved learning from one another, business challenges, and being able to connect them to my own role. Being open to experiences like that, you're not going to do it and then your title will change, right? You do it for the experience and the connections that you make.
That's how I like to think about career mobility. Success is putting your best foot forward and being intentional about how you spend your time. It's really important to prioritize your work and know what should take you 10 minutes and what can take you an hour on.
The advice I always give to my own teams is that one of our early, early investors was in our first office and said if I get an email and it takes me less than two minutes, I open it at that moment. I think you have to treat DoorDash efficiency in that way. You have to know what tasks you just need to do so that you can create the opportunity to have space to do some of the bigger things that will eventually enable your career as well.
How does DoorDash celebrate diversity of ideas and people?
One of the things about DoorDash I really love is how much people here genuinely want to get to know one another. I think we have a very human element and pre-covid we went to the office pretty much every day which made me nervous about how it would impact our level of connections. I actually saw us lean into this even more during COVID where we really made an effort with every person to make the space to get to know them personally.
As a manager, it's been important to get to know my team so that I can celebrate everything about them. What I think DoorDash does as a company really well is creates the space for us to bring our full and authentic selves to work. That's certainly something that I try to model myself!
What ways have you experienced this culture of inclusivity and belonging?
DoorDash is a very data-driven place, and a lot of companies say that, and then it's like, what does that really mean? But I've really found at DoorDash that a lot of it comes down to the best idea is usually the one that gets prioritized. I'm not saying wins always because there are factors, but if you can make a thoughtful argument that surrounds data and has the results or likely results, that is usually something that will then become prioritized. That creates space for people of all backgrounds to understand our framework of what gets prioritized and level the playing field.
Personally, I became a mom over my time and DoorDash and I'm pregnant with my second. I have connected so much to my fellow co-parents in the company and within my organization. I've also just had to have more rigid working hours. I've found that each step along the way, I'm able to continue to be honest about what I need and have DoorDash meet me there. And that's something that I can't say is true about all workplaces.
I have the flexibility to just do my job, and I can go into the office when that makes sense for me personally or professionally, and I can work from home when I need to. Having that type of flexibility is something that not everyone has and it has helped me thrive personally at DoorDash. Becoming a parent is such a change in your mindset and everything about the way I've functioned has changed. Being able to make my child a priority but still have a job that I'm super passionate about is something that I would scream from the rooftops about why I think it's a great place to be
What do you love the most about working here at DoorDash?
It's truly been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. As a manager of teams, I describe DoorDash as being a high accountability place to work. This is not a place where you can be a slacker in a group project. For high performers, we really appreciate that everyone you're going to work with is going to pull their own weight. It's motivating to delegate something or ask someone to do something and know that they're going to bring just as much to it if not more than what you would've brought to it.
I am someone who is in the details, that's in my DNA. To know that that's something that other people and our leaders really respect and are looking for is something that really motivates me. I'll always be someone who wants to know how to do things or what is happening at the root cause. I think all of our values really sum up who we are as a business. The great thing is you can pick what values you think resonate most with you. You don't have to align with every single DoorDash value and over time they change.
As our business evolves and as you change your own role within DoorDash, even if you take the same title, your job is not going to be the same for years on end. You have to continue to evolve, which is something that has kept me here through continual new opportunities to build my skill set.
