Lenny Distilled

Jessica Lachs

VP of Analytics and Data Science, DoorDash

6 quotes across 1 episode

Building a world-class data org

Retention is a terrible thing to goal on. It's almost impossible to drive in a meaningful way in a short term. Ultimately, you want to find a short-term metric you can measure that drives a long-term output.

You can't teach curiosity, or at least I haven't found a way to do it. Somebody who is just self-motivated to pull on the threads when they find them. So they don't just answer a question. They're like, 'Hmm, this thing seems a little odd. I'm going to dig in and look.'

Yes, you are a data scientist, but your goal is to figure out what's happening. And if that means that you're going to pick up the phone and call customers, then that is what you're going to do to roll up your sleeves.

I always encourage folks, just pick something simple, even if it's not perfect and your composite would be more perfect. If people understand it, if they have an intuition around it, if it's something that people can talk about across the company, it's going to be a much better metric.

I believe a central model, a center of excellence is superior... You get more consistent and higher talent, growth opportunities, consistency of methodologies and metrics, and team culture brand.

Just because something doesn't happen frequently doesn't mean that it's not important. When you have things that cause churn, you're losing all of that consumer's subsequent orders, and that is not necessarily observed.