Stuff I learned at Delivery Hero

This post is inspired by Will Larson’s Stuff I learned at Carta. I don’t have as many other posts to link to but I’ll do my best to convey my learnings as is.

After three and a half years, I left my job at Delivery Hero, where I worked as a principal product manager in the growth domain, focusing on incentives.

It was my first experience at a large company after mostly working at early-stage startups. I’m grateful for the experience and here are a few lessons I’ve learned.

Product management is nuanced

Compared to being a head of product at 100+ people’s company, my new individual contributor role at a post-IPO BigCo looked vastly different. The share of time spent on alignments, calls, documentation and juggling stakeholders increased significantly. I’ve learned the best ways to handle processes, performance reviews, experiments, and working with different teams. There are trade-offs on both sides that deserve a separate post, but overall, the difference was night and day because of the size and complexity of the organization.

The devil is in the details

There is an expectation from product managers to communicate effectively with various layers. They need to specify detailed requirements for engineers while delivering a business impact pitch to the wide organization and C-levels. Looking back, this is the topic I’ve struggled with, and was constantly reminded about during the review season. Piggybacking on Will’s learnings:

Utilizing the skills of others to fill the gaps is a valuable skill. – like any single approach, it’s limiting when utilized too frequently.

Whilst failing at delivering the right level of abstraction from the position of a contributor, I wish more leaders utilized on this skill. It makes collaboration much easier.

Simplicity wins

In my first year, I spent a long time getting a product off the ground from 0 → 1 and it took a lot of mental power to get all the context, align all the people and ensure a clear path forward. It felt like pushing a boulder uphill. Whilst getting sticks thrown under my feet. Then, a year later we figured out a very basic feature that took us a month to build. It drove 80% of the impact throughout my entire tenure. What’s worse is that I should have identified and prioritized it much earlier as it was a table stakes. Neither initial plans or roadmaps should have stood in my way, but I made a wrong decision not to push for it.

There is always an opportunity cost of building something else, but its usually the most simple things that drive impact.

No task is beneath you

In other words, you are never too senior to solve problems. From answering internal Slack queries, helping others with unrelated tasks, and the overall “shadow work” that happens in companies and is usually left unseen.

I thoroughly enjoyed resolving issues with others that helped them unblock an initiative or having a one-off brainstorm with my product colleague on figuring out how can they quickly ship a minimal feature that doesn’t require 2 months of development time but has some data dependency on my team.

Engineering partnership

One of my favorite parts of my gig was the partnership and interactions I had with engineers (although it might not be mutual…). The engineering partnership made my job so much easier from the start. There were no power dynamics, no ego, just a lot of camaraderie of great people all working towards the same goal.

Every big release we did felt like an achievement, particularly when it seemed like we were about to miss the deadline and spent hours on end-to-end production tests several days in a row.

I also applaud the engineering org that seems to have established great practices and culture that many would envy!

Giving a damn

At some point, I just wasn’t in it. I wasn’t slacking. Quite the opposite, I was working the hardest I ever did in my life, but there was an internal disconnect about whether I was actually enjoying what I was doing, and most importantly, if I cared enough. Eventually, the answer became an astounding “NO”. I didn’t like the challenges I faced, and I knew I couldn’t excel if I continued, which would also be counterproductive for the company. In order to be exceptional at work, we have to care. No exceptions. Whether it’s about our end customer or the things we are actually doing on a day-to-day basis. It’s the only way in pursuit of quality.

When something is crafted with care and attention, it possesses a certain feeling — a quality that’s difficult to define but impossible to miss.

Other

• Generally speaking B2C, eCommerce, and marketplace details, especially in competitive fields with sensitive unit economics and high competition.
• I’ve learned a bit of technical skills thanks to my colleagues in relation to architecture, databases, sync/async, event streaming and so much more. It encouraged me to spend some free time coding and designing again.
• Learning to engage more with the business stakeholders and involve people early in the process has saved my life multiple times.
• Being respectful to others and treating everyone as I would want to be treated. But at the same time to stand ground and not being a pushover when things get heated.

What comes next

I’m not rushing into the next thing. I will be writing and building, considering the time we live in. However, I will take a short sabbatical and disconnect.

Thanks to everyone who made the ride meaningful (a few names below). Especially those who challenged me to think harder and care more.

Appreciation goes to former and current colleagues:

• immediate peers (Ryan, Sandy, Anuraag, Joel)

• engineering (Liyong, Gilbert, Josiah, Je Min, Wenny, JunXian, Viet, An, Dean, MaHe)

• leadership (Ronnie, Ankit, Ram, Mathieu, Sway)

• many others I’ve met through this journey

People were the best part of my time at this company.