The DoorDash “Job Swap” Story
Have you read the story about DoorDash requiring all of their employees (up to the CEO, OMG!) to make food deliveries? I love this story so…
Have you read the story about DoorDash requiring all of their employees (up to the CEO, OMG!) to make food deliveries? I love this story so much. Product managers should print this story out and wallpaper their office with it.
Why do I love it so? Because it is such a satisfying reminder of how easy it is to make slogans out of “customer focus” and “user empathy” but how difficult it is to actually do it, especially at scale.
This is what happens when you do radical customer focus correctly: Some people think you’re a genius, some people will threaten to quit.
Empathy exercises help us spend our time in a way that centers the user in our work. For some people, on some teams, this seems to come quite naturally. Others need more help. The empathy exercise are especially made for them!
DoorDash drivers are what I call “non-customer users” — people who we design experiences for *other* than those who are paying us. Sometimes these are co-workers, partners, suppliers, etc. Empathy exercises that center our focus these personae can be just as valuable as those that center our customer.
If your employees are concerned that working conditions for their co-workers are so bad that they don’t want to subject themselves to them, well that’s bad news. You should really try not to have jobs that are so bad that one employee isn’t willing to do another’s job for even one day.
But the good news is that your empathy exercise is working! The whole point is to put your problem-solving employees in the places where the problems are. If we know one thing, it’s that we need to become experts in the user’s problem in order to design an effective solution. Proximity is a great tool for doing that, even in large corporations.
You have to read the coverage pretty carefully to learn that DoorDash employees have other non-delivery ways to meet the empathy requirement, like shadowing customer support agents. There are a several great ways to use support to build empathy, which I’ll cover in another post.
For now, I would love to hear about your empathy exercises. What do you do to expose your teams to your customers, how, and how often? Tell me everything!