Keith Yandell: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. Shifting a little bit to a few product questions. Most listeners to this podcast are product builders, growth people, founders, and so I have a couple questions here. Today you're currently leading the corp dev and BD team, and I imagine you work closely with the product team. And so I'm curious what you've found to be an effective relationship between BD and product and from the experience you've had at DoorDash doing that. Yeah, I joke that our head of product, Rajat Shroff, is actually the head of BD, because he's both interested and good at it. And to do impactful BD, the two really have to go hand-in-glove. So when I think through how to make that relationship work, the first challenge I've confronted, and maybe mistake I made, is trying to figure out what the right cadence is. When do you bring in the product team? Because if you bring them in too early on a deal that really has no chance of getting done, you waste valuable cycles. And our tech talent is our most precious resource, probably, at DoorDash. And so you have to be really mindful about when you bring them in. But if you bring them in too late, it may be a situation where you've given on terms that you really shouldn't have, and that can be really detrimental to the partnership as well. So I think one thing to do is just give visibility. So without actually bringing them and having a full discussion, like, "Here's the pipeline. If you see things that are super impactful, let us know. If you think things you're not so sure that are going to make a difference, please let us know." That's been really helpful. Another thing that Rajat's taught me is the importance of building platforms, and whenever you can. So what we used to do is, I'd go out and negotiate a deal. We had a lot of deals around DashPass, which is our subscription product, and I'd ask the product team to go build a bespoke thing for this particular partnership, Chase or whatever partnership we were negotiating at the time. And Rajat said, "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 you can negotiate. You can negotiate a better velocity. We might spend more time on the first version of this, but very little effort for the next. And we'll have a high return on the product hours and the engineering hours spent." And so that was a super valuable insight that I garnered from him, is to try to figure out how to create these type of platforms. Any other lessons of just building an effective BD team within a product company, especially at the scale you're at?…

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