Question 1

What are the key takeaways from Jess Lachs's episode on Lenny's Podcast?

Accepted Answer

1. A centralized analytics team with pods mapped to business units gives you consistent talent bars, growth opportunities, and methodology coherence. 2. Find short-term proxy metrics that drive long-term outputs — retention is a terrible thing to goal on directly because it's almost impossible to move in the short term. 3. Simple metrics that everyone understands will drive better outcomes than a mathematically perfect composite score that nobody can interpret. 4. Quantify all business levers in a common currency so you can make informed trade-offs across teams and know where each dollar of investment yields the most. 5. Track and eradicate edge case failures like 'Never Delivered' — they cost far more in churn and refunds than their low frequency suggests.

Question 2

What does Jess Lachs say about analytics and team-building?

Accepted Answer

"For me, analytics is a business impact driving function and not purely a service function. I think there are analytics teams at other companies where they are answering people's questions, maybe even through Jira tickets, we're building dashboards. That was never really of interest to me. That wasn't the team that I wanted to build." - Jessica Lachs "I strongly disagree. I believe a central model, a center of excellence is superior. We've experimented in the past with the alternative, so putting it into a business unit and it's just much more problematic and I think the value you get from a central model is far greater than some of the things that you might lose." - Jessica Lachs "We are business partners, we are thought partners with our product counterparts, with our engineering counterparts, with our ops counterparts, and we share the same goals. We bring to the table insights on things that we've noticed, deep dives that we do to understand the problems that we're trying to solve better. Where are there pockets of opportunity? That is what I expect my team to be able to bring to that table." - Jessica Lachs

Question 3

What are Jess Lachs's views on analytics, team-building, business-impact?

Accepted Answer

Jessica Lachs: "For me, analytics is a business impact driving function and not purely a service function. I think there are analytics teams at other companies where they are answering people's questions, maybe even through Jira tickets, we're building dashboards. That was never really of interest to me. That wasn't the team that I wanted to build." Jessica Lachs: "I strongly disagree. I believe a central model, a center of excellence is superior. We've experimented in the past with the alternative, so putting it into a business unit and it's just much more problematic and I think the value you get from a central model is far greater than some of the things that you might lose."

Jess Lachs

Building a world-class data org | Jessica Lachs (VP of Analytics and Data Science at DoorDash)

TRANSCRIPT

Jess Lachs

Building a world-class data org | Jessica Lachs (VP of Analytics and Data Science at DoorDash)

Jess Lachs

Building a world-class data org | Jessica Lachs (VP of Analytics and Data Science at DoorDash)

TRANSCRIPT

Jess Lachs

Building a world-class data org | Jessica Lachs (VP of Analytics and Data Science at DoorDash)