What I learned from helping Blue Apron grow 25x in 3.5 years

The Blue Apron New York headquarters. Photo credit: Glassdoor.

Being at an early-stage startup is a bit like being in school. But in this version, you have to skip a grade every six months and still get all As. You learn quickly because you have to and fall short many times. Then, once you graduate, you look back and realize just how much you’ve learned and how much you wish you could help others on the same path.

That’s exactly why I joined the team at NextView Ventures a little over a month ago. I wanted to share my knowledge and experiences with companies. And I did learn a lot helping Blue Apron grow 25x in 3.5 years.

Here are a few things I wish I knew when I started my journey at Blue Apron.

Individual teams need a well-articulated mission and vision

Most companies know that it’s important to clearly define a mission and vision. However, I learned that a functional team could also benefit tremendously from articulating these.

When I first took over Blue Apron’s small product management team in early 2015, I realized that it didn’t have a well-defined identity and purpose. That’s not a unique experience for PMs, as the definition of product management is bound to be different for each company. But product management was even more confusing at a company like Blue Apron because it offers both a physical product and a digital experience. The lack of clarity definitely had an impact on our team morale, communication, collaboration, and recruiting.

I went onto a “soul-searching” exercise. I looked inward to identify how the company as a business could really benefit from its product management team. I also sought perspectives from product leaders at other companies to understand what their teams stood for and why.

What we landed on wasn’t really anything revolutionary. But putting our values on a piece of paper and referring to it at decision-making moments helped bring a renewed clarity and focus. It also helped us communicate our value to the rest of the organization, making collaboration way easier.

As a team leader, the work doesn’t stop at setting a vision. Without being aligned, getting support from internal leaders, and educating the rest of the company of your team’s purpose, your team won’t succeed.

Leaders need to manage their organization design

As a company goes through hyper-growth, it’s easy to allow teams to grow like weeds in a backyard, without a conscious decision on the landscaping. After all, who has time to slow down and review organization design when you needed these people yesterday (or better yet, yesteryear)?

But there are real costs and hidden inefficiencies when teams make hiring decisions in silos. Not only can this result in overlapping skillsets, it can sometimes drive conflicting team objectives.

I saw this first-hand at Blue Apron.

I led a centralized data science and analytics team, but we also had analysts on other functional teams such as customer experience, supply chain, and operations. This design happened organically as teams tried to move quickly.

But as time went on, we started to see inefficiencies in resource prioritization, talent development, and quality of work. It wasn’t an impossible situation to fix, but being thoughtful upfront would’ve set us up for success from the beginning.

Stay ahead of the chaos and invest in “ways of working”

Decide where you sit on the speed vs polish spectrum

Common sense judgment will stop scaling

Invest in first-time people managers