Biggest Challenges Faced By A Strategy And Finance Manager At DoorDash
Justine's biggest challenge at DoorDash, a "huge" company compared to her previous roles in smaller firms, is navigating its immense size to find the right resources and collaborators. This involves proactively building a network of contacts across different teams—"a really good analytics contact," for example—to avoid duplicated work and stay informed on relevant initiatives.
Networking, Career Development, Overcoming Challenges, Data Analysis, Problem-Solving
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Justine Lee
Manager (Strategy & Finance)
DoorDash
University of Pennsylvania, Wharton, 2016
N/A
Economics
Technology
Finance
Honors Student, Scholarship Recipient
Video Highlights
1. In large companies like DoorDash, Justine faces challenges in finding the right person to answer questions or provide mentorship due to the sheer size of the organization.
2. She highlights the difficulty of networking and collaboration across different teams (e.g., finance and analytics) and the potential for duplicated work due to a lack of communication.
3. Justine's experience emphasizes the importance of proactively building a strong network and identifying key contacts to stay informed about various company initiatives and avoid duplicated efforts in a large organization. This is a crucial skill for career success in large companies.
Transcript
What is your biggest challenge in your current role?
Again, most of my responses will be relative to my previous roles, like DoorDash. I would assume this is the same across many large tech companies. DoorDash is huge, right?
When I joined the finance group at DoorDash, it was 150 people on its own. Back when I was in banking, my groups had a maximum of 25 people. That was quite an adjustment.
Given the large number of people in the company, it's often hard to find the right person to answer a specific question or to be a mentor on a particular topic. For example, if I want to learn more about SQL and become better at this programming language, there's a whole analytics team. Why would they want to help me? They have their own work and don't necessarily care about someone in finance.
Similarly, if there's a business initiative by a group far removed from finance, I might have no idea about it and no connection to be invited into that meeting. I might even duplicate work that someone closer to the topic has already done.
This is somewhat mitigated if I'm proactive and establish a solid network of key opinion leaders. I'd know who to contact for analytics or pricing operations, and they could keep me in the loop.
This is definitely different from working on a 25 or 30-person team. There, you know what project each person is working on. If I'm interested in something, I can easily tell the other 24 people. That's a bit different at a bigger company.
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