Jessica Lachs: recommendation

Transcript context

…There's so many threads I want to follow here, one that's a tangent, but something that I think a lot of people struggle with is you talked about how you want your data team, your analytics team to be proactive, to find opportunities, to give you ideas, to help you figure out what to build, not just answer questions. At the same time, there are many questions that teams need to get answered. Do you have any advice for just how to set up a team where they both find time to explore, dig, show opportunities and come up with big ideas and also, "Hey, we just need to figure out the funnel conversion on this thing," or "Hey, what do you think? What's happening in China right now?" Thoughts there? Yeah, such a good question. I think it's something that never gets easier. You have to be very intentional to carve out time for exploratory work for deep dives because as you mentioned, there are always more questions and more work to be done than hours in the day. And so I think being intentional about it and setting goals for your team around finding these insights through self-directed work is an important mechanism for holding ourselves accountable to that goal because it tends to be the first thing that goes when you get a lot of inbounds, you're like, "All right, well, let's deep dive on something that I don't know if it's really something. It could be high ROI, it could be low ROI, I don't know." So the expected value is lower than this known thing that I can deliver and make someone happy. So I think to prevent that time from just slipping away, you really have to be intentional. We would do hackathons for our team to carve out days to just go and look into these really interesting things and find opportunities. And I think we have the support of our business partners because so many great insights have come from these deep dives and it really has been some of the work that drives future roadmaps. So they're always really great at allowing us to have this time and actually encourage us often to have this time for some self-directed work, to go find the next big opportunity. If there's no answer that comes to mind, that's totally cool. But is there an example of one of these insights that someone on the data team came up with that led to something big for DoorDash that you're able to share?…

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