Jessica Lachs: evaluation

Transcript context

…I could see as you talk about this why this is so important in a marketplace, especially a multi-sided marketplace where there's always trade-off decisions between supply investment and demand growth and dasher growth. I don't even know, my brain would explode trying to think about all these things, so I get exactly why this is so important to business. Okay. And then in terms of the simple recommendation, I think when people hear like, "Yeah, keep it simple," they're like, "Yeah, yeah, we're going to keep it simple." What are some things that point to, "This is not simple," that tell you like, "No, this is way too complicated. You should try to simplify this metric even though it's not ideal. It's not the perfect metric, but it needs to be simpler." Yeah. So we had a score for merchant health, which we tried experimenting with, which was a combination of factors that we had found would lead to a merchant being on the platform and getting an order. So we wanted to make sure that the merchant had active hours on the platform and had images and had a full menu that was accurate and robust. A number of different inputs. And we created a composite that weighted all of these different inputs. And then we were like, "What is our merchant health score?" And you were like, "It's 0.35. It's not 35%. So what is that, that 0.35? I don't know what it is." So instead of that, we said, "What are the most important factors in order... First, let's measure how many of the new merchants are getting an order within their first, say, seven days on the platform. And then let's look at how many of our merchants are doing these things we know are important. So these inputs. So let's goal our team on getting merchant photo coverage up. Let's goal the team on making sure that we have open hours, accurate hours. " So yes, someone might say it's simpler to have a composite metric, but it was so hard to understand what it was and how to move it that it became meaningless. And ultimately moving to something that was simpler to understand, even if it meant having three metrics instead of one, it ultimately was better for the team because folks knew what they were trying to move. And so yeah, maybe we missed number four, five and six on the list of things, but you got one through three and that's 95% of it anyway. So once we get success with that 95, then let's talk about figuring out the other 5%. It's so funny because this is exactly what we went through at Airbnb, we had, we call that a healthy host. I led the host quality team for a while and we came up with this healthy host metric that was six factors of a host, like the cancellation rate, the review rate, their response rate and things like that. And then we're just like, "Cool, let's move this, let make more hosts healthy." And then you end up like, "Okay, which one do we focus on?," And, "Oh, what about all these others?" And we ended up basically focusing on one at a time. And so let's just make that the goal for now and then rotate through the different biggest [inaudible 00:53:28] opportunities to move. [inaudible 00:53:30].…

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