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Time for a code-yellow?: A blunt instrument that works

I promised myself never again. Never again would I call a code-yellow. Code-yellows suck, drain team morale, and they leave a lingering distaste amongst all those involved. Yet, during my 8-years at Instacart, they were our most effective and consistent weapon in ensuring we made meaningful progress on our hairiest problems.  Yet, within the first […]

on a Saturday writing an email to the team saying I wanted to meet immediately to call a code yellow regarding a major transition project we were working on with one of our first acquisitions. During a code-yellow, a leader can escalate a project/situation to a war room situation, pulling people out of their day-to-day work to focus entirely on the problem at hand. 2014: Fixing lagging growth when we experienced our first ‘slow down’ from hockey stick type (the infamous and expensive ‘Growth Initiative’ which likely warrants its own full post in the future) 2015: Going from losing ~$15/order to unit economic breakeven when we almost ran out of money 2016: Launching our initial advertising business to prove our path to profitability and catalyze an equity capital raise 2017: Signing the majority of major North American grocers onto our platform after Whole Foods Market, our biggest customer, was purchased by Amazon 2018: Scaling our infrastructure to keep the site up on Sunday’s (we were having constant outages every week) 2019: Building our fourth senior executive team in six years to lead us to the next plateau of scale 2020: Scaling from 100K shoppers to 600K shoppers in a 2-3 week period during the onslaught of COVID so that we meet the 5x surge in demand as the world went into lock-down

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