Making The Impossible Possible with Deliveroo’s Senior Product Manager, Will Perkins #9

After all, all art is experience.

Hello and welcome to The Company Doctor. I'm George Cloade, and in this episode, Gary and I are joined by Deliveroo's Senior Product Manager, Will Perkins. As well as exploring how his service as an army officer helped inform his style of leadership, Will chats to us about the early days of Deliveroo, how to conquer a problem which may at first appear unconquerable, and why he subscribes to the Mike Tyson school of forward planning. Gary, over to you.

So hi, Will. Thank you so much for joining this episode. Really appreciate it.

Hi, Gary. It's really great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Oh, it's fantastic having you here. And particularly as this episode is called Making Things Happen When You Can't. And looking at your past, I've got some great questions for you. That we want to share. But before we get started, it'll be really good for the people listening to just get a very quick intro to yourself and a little bit about Deliveroo, if you wouldn't mind.

Yes, of course. So, um, yeah, so my name is Will Perkins, and currently I'm a product manager at Deliveroo, and I manage the development of the app that the drivers use to deliver millions and millions of orders a week. And I've been at Deliveroo for, oh, coming up to 6 years now, so the majority of its life, should we say.

Oh, so you're an early employee by the sound of it then, wasn't it 2013 that the company got started?

2013 it kicked off and then it was around about 2015 where the exponential growth really kicked off.

Well, since you started basically.

Yeah, I think it's correlation rather than causation, I have to say. But it was about summer 2015 where it really started to get big.

Fantastic. And a little bit about yourself.

So I started my career in, in archaeological publishing, actually. Um, I did archaeology at university, and then after sort of doing a bit of that, went into the army. I did a year at Sandhurst, which is the— where the British Army trains its officers, and then spent 3 years with the 1st Regiment Royal Horse Artillery, mostly based down in Wiltshire, but also spending a bit of time in Canada. And then I did a tour of Afghanistan in 2013. Wow. And so after that, I thought I'd done everything that I wanted to do with the Army, and so got into Civvy Street, didn't really know what I wanted to do, and so luckily ended up at Deliveroo, sort of being able to put into practice again some of the leadership skills and some of the sort of interpersonal skills that I'd, um, I'd picked up, picked up in service.

Well, that's what we hope, and that's why we're really delighted to have you on this episode, because I wanted to dig into some of those things. In fact, let's get started. By the way, I did— I watched you on a YouTube video where you were— yeah, Lessons from Military Leadership, and there was some really interesting stuff I'm going to dig into. But one of the things I really liked is you, you explained Sandhurst as Hogwarts with guns, right?

Yes, yeah, yeah, it's very much like that. Um, you know, it's very, very sort of archaic in some ways. You know, you sort of sit down for dinner all together with silver laid out on the long tables. You sort of march around with your— well, it's camouflage robes on. But then, yeah, it is teaching you how to be an infantryman, really.

That's fantastic.

Yeah.

And that's what I wanted to dig into, actually, Will. I thought it'd be a good place to start because I was, I was watching your intro to, you know, Lessons from Military Leadership. And the first question is, and you were covering this on, on your video, but I think it'd be really great to start off with, which— what's the difference between managing and leading? Because you were talking about that, and I think it'll be a good place for us to start in your mind?

Yeah, it's a really sort of— it's a really interesting dynamic. And I always think of it in terms of that you can, you can manage a process which sort of is repetitive and doesn't necessarily go anywhere. That's not, that's not just disparaging at all. You know, you can manage a production line that just churns things out over and over. But to lead, you really need to be going somewhere. And I think you have to have like quite a different approach to things with this. You know, when you're, when you're managing, it's all about the organization of resources, people, time, that sort of thing. But leadership is all about having a vision for something, understanding a problem and knowing where you want to take something and be able to rally people around that, around that vision and get them there. You know, you won't necessarily do the work yourself. And in fact, often you, you can't, you know, you've got to focus on leading. I always think that if you're— it's very difficult to do the two things at once. If you're spending all your time managing the day-to-day, keeping things going, then actually you can't get yourself in the right headspace to lead, to understand where you need to go, what you need to do to inspire people to actually get the job done.

Well, I think that's great. I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? When you think about military, you can, you can understand that kind of a strategy and a vision is important. But, you know, when you get down into the business world, were you surprised that— was it much more difficult, did you find, from moving from military to the commercial world?

In some ways, no, because I think I was lucky that I went into Deliveroo into a role that was quite leadership-based. I started off in operations, which actually is quite managerial, usually. But the way it worked in the early days, it was, it was quite leadership orientated. And actually, I think over time, operations at Deliveroo has become slightly more managerial and I didn't do as well at it. And so that's partly why I sort of made the transition to product management, which I think is more fundamentally leadership based. And that's, that's where my talents lie.

To get away from those bloody people at the front end, I suppose. But I think what you said is really interesting and I'm trying to uncover it because part of this episode is about you're making things happen when things are difficult. And I think you started your career in Deliveroo as head of rider operations, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, I was an operations manager.

Operations manager, so I'm giving a different title.

Yeah.

But the interesting thing for me is, I'm not involved in that business, but I presume you've got disconnected riders that are, you know, they're going out to do what they need to do. How did you work on connecting the mission, the vision, that why thing, to people that probably didn't care that much? I'm fascinated to know that.

It was really, really difficult. So in the early days, we actually spent a lot of time face to face with riders. There weren't all that many. They tended to be centered in London, in central London, which is where we were. And so actually, we spent a lot of time hosting events for them. You know, I actually found when I was in the Army, I spent a lot of time doing social work for people, going around checking their boilers and taking their wife to hospital and sort of things like that. And actually, you know, Bringing some of that stuff over to Deliveroo, I think, helped. Now, that was good when we were small, but as, as we grew, you know, that just wasn't a scalable way to work. And I think, you know, that personal side of things has fallen away a bit. But now we've got to try and like lead and motivate through, through an app, which is a really difficult way to do things and something which is a fairly new way of doing things and quite an exciting space to be. So, yeah, in some ways, we have to pioneer things a little bit. We don't always get it right. In fact, we get it wrong quite a lot. But it's interesting to see how people react to various things you do through technology.

Yeah, and I can imagine. And when you're going through these things, again, I know you've moved on to more of a product role, but just thinking back in those times, did you ever hit a situation where you thought, you know, I just really need to kind of make these guys understand or make something happen in that environment, but I'm just really frustrated? Did you find a secret way to get to make that happen?

Yeah, I think explaining the vision to people and why you're doing things is really important. Understanding like what the goal of the company is at a higher level than just we're here to do a job and make money. Personally, I find having that explained to be really inspiring. Deliveroo's mission is to become the definitive food company, to bring people great foods quickly at a good price. And actually, if you can sell that dream to people, then you can start to like, you know, motivate them to do the things that they need to do, which are often difficult, sometimes seemingly impossible.

Yeah, no, I can imagine. In fact, it was interesting because the founder of Deliveroo was also called Will. Do you have to be called Will to work at Deliveroo?

Everyone's called Will at Deliveroo. Yeah, it's a nightmare.

But, you know, I think he set up the company for that, as you said, because, you know, he found there wasn't many restaurants delivering good food. You know, I love that. So yeah, so I get, I get what you're saying. That makes, makes a lot of sense.

That's been a really strong influence in the company. And I think having Will still as a CEO, as a founder CEO, helps, you know, keep that vision strong and keep everybody focusing on, on that initial mission, which I think sometimes can get a bit lost, you know, as founders leave and it becomes much more of a business rather than somebody's dream, that that vision like loses gets lost in translation somewhere.

So taking it to the next step, so, you know, you're now a sort of senior product manager, and we've been through a very challenging time. You know, most people listening to this, we're at the kind of business-to-business end of, uh, on the podcast, and we've all been through a pandemic, and it's been, you know, really difficult for some people and less difficult for others, I guess. But for you and for Deliveroo, what was the most difficult thing you've had to do over the last year and a bit? During the pandemic?

It's a good question. Putting you on the spot there a little bit, you know. Yeah, I think when, when things first kicked off, there was a huge amount of uncertainty out there, particularly when all of the restaurants closed for, you know, it seems like a long time ago now, but about for about 2 or 3 weeks, pretty much everywhere was closed. And, you know, we, we rely on the restaurants and the riders rely on the restaurants as well. So there was a lot of, a lot of fear that, you know, things could really go under. We didn't know how long it was going to last. And we had to start thinking, well, how do we adapt here? And how do we keep things going? So, you know, as it turned out, the restaurants reopened and takeaway was one of the few pleasures in life. You know, we had to start thinking, well, what can we do here? Not just like keep the business going, but, you know, to do our part. So we had lots of conversations with local authorities and the NHS and central government thinking, well, you know, we have this huge logistics network. Can we put it to good use delivering essential supplies, food parcels to people who had to self-isolate or couldn't get out? It's actually really interesting to think that you could turn this huge machine sort of 90 degrees and start doing something else with it. I, in some ways, it's a bit of a shame that we didn't like have to do more of it. I mean, of course it's good we didn't have to do more of that stuff because that would have been a worse situation, but it was nice to think that we did have the ability to to help out a bit there.

And through that experience, were there some things that, you know, you had to kind of turn on a sixpence, you had to do things really quickly. Was there some things that you had to kind of grab hold of and do really quick to make a difference?

Yeah. And I think, you know, some of this stuff you have to think, well, what's the minimum thing that you can do to make it work? You know, quite often in software development, you really want to just like work very, very iteratively, take tiny little steps forwards towards a solution because in a world where you don't know what's going to happen in a year, 6 months, in the pandemic times, in 2 weeks, to make plans that go too far ahead, you're setting yourself up for disaster. In the army, we used to say, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Or Mike Tyson puts it better by saying, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. We found if you just look a week into the future and do something that's going to get you one step forwards, then you can see how it works, keep testing and adjusting and moving forward in baby steps rather than backloading all the value that you can deliver, pushing out a year or so. And then by the time you actually get there, the world's changed and all the work you've done has been wasted.

Yeah, but I like the analogy of punching people in the face. What are the people skills you need to— you've had to use to punch people in the face politely? I'm interested in that. I mean, I get it, to get the impact, but what have you had to do? Can you think of examples?

You know, if you don't work iteratively, then it's quite difficult to understand this concept. When somebody says to you, I know you want X, Y, and Z, but I'm going to give you H. And they say, well, that's not, that's not what I wanted. But if you can explain to them, well, this first little bit gets us like some of the value that you've been asking for. It helps move towards that objective whilst, whilst de-risking things a bit. Trying to think of some examples where we've done this. You know, the, the driver app is entirely iterative process. We never release new versions as such. It's always like tiny little tweaks here and there to see what works and what doesn't. You know, everything we do has an experiment around it. So we can say, well, does teal work better than orange on this button? You know, we can understand what we're doing at any moment rather than doing everything all at once and thinking, well, did that work or did it not work? And which bit actually helped here? Was it the, was it the £5 million new feature we put in place, or was it changing a color of a button that really, that really made the difference?

And you hope it's not just the color, right, that made the difference, although sometimes it does.

Actually, yeah, it's usually the color of the button that makes a difference. And, you know, If that's a lot cheaper to deliver, then all the better. But I have made some expensive mistakes in the past, which I regret, and now try to work much more iteratively and in short stages.

Okay. I mean, I might dig into those because I think, you know, part— not yet, but come, just to let you know, because part of the learning from the things that you've done can help other people in some of those things you've had to learn. And actually, I was really interested, Will, to talk to you about the army a little bit, because I'm guessing there are situations where you're in a kind of a life or death in the army versus, you know, now there's a life or death, but it's kind of a slightly different life or death. Have you had to learn some secret sauce from your army days? Because I know you've done a lot of work on translating good army practice into, into business. So is there any sort of secret sauce again, with the focus on making things happen, that you've learned in the Army that you absolutely recommend people put into practice in everyday work?

So I think the thing that I've really taken away from the Army is the values-based leadership that they— I was going to say instill, but actually they hammer into you at Sandhurst. So I expected getting to Sandhurst would be all about, like, sitting in lecture theaters listening about how to lead people, and maybe a bit of like practical stuff going on as well. But actually, I don't really remember any leadership lessons other than watching Band of Brothers. Rather, they, they, they do this, as I say, values-based leadership where they say, if you can exhibit these values in your life, then you are fit to lead. And those values are— there's a rather inelegant acronym, CDRILS. So courage, discipline, respect for others, integrity, loyalty, and selfless commitment. And so, you know, we would be constantly tested on this. Is your integrity up to scratch? Are you loyal? Are you being selfless here? And they said, right, if you can do that, you may have all sorts of other failings, but you can lead soldiers. And I have taken that with me. You know, I, I do think about these things all the time. I think, okay, is my integrity up to scratch? Is my moral compass going a bit haywire? It's not just putting that into practice in business. You know, you see a lot of these like values for businesses, which are often a bit wishy-washy. And the people are expected to behave like that when they're, when they're there and then outside of work, kind of who cares. But I've actually found that living my life by these values actually helps be a leader all the time. And that then bleeds into work rather than it being something that just gets turned on and off.

Yeah, so it's part— it sounds like you make it part of your DNA. The bit I'm interested in, and people ask quite a lot, is again, how do you translate that? You know, because when you're in the army, you've got a sense of urgency by default, so those values make sense because you have to, and if you don't, there's a consequence. What have you learned in your career to be able to get the same kind of sense of urgency where it's not death-defying but it's important? How do you translate that sense of urgency to get the team to follow you over that hill, so to speak?

Yeah, I mean, I think it really comes back to that, like, vision and that belief in what you're doing. You know, there will always be people who are just there to draw the salary, and that's kind of it. But if you can sell the vision to people, like, make them feel part of the team and make them feel like, you know, they are doing something that is bigger than just their, their little piece in it. That really helps. Like a lot of what I find I do is just keep banging the drum for like why we're doing things, keep reminding people over and over again. And you know, sometimes I bore myself with it. I'm sorry, I must bore other people, but it's quite easy to forget sometimes when you're focused on the day-to-day, like what the end goal is, like keep people thinking to the finish of things and keep them focused on that, on that mission and that end goal. I tend to find helps. I don't think there's necessarily like a technique to it.

Okay, but let me just press you slightly further then on that, because, you know, because again, the topic is about making things happen when you can't. Can you think of a situation in Deliveroo where you were just almost stuck? You know, you, you needed to do something, you were slightly flummoxed by it, but you did it anyway. Can you think of an example of that? I'm putting you on the spot, I know.

Yeah, I mean, in, in the early days when we were, we were fundraising, there was always this balance between growth and profitability. You know, we want to grow most of the time, but suddenly when you're fundraising, you want to be profitable. Of course. And so you don't always know when, when the fundraising is going on. So it's quite often they'd be right, we need to, we need to be profitable in 2 weeks' time. And when you work in operations and you think, well, that's, that's impossible. How can we do this? But quite often, like, you know, if, if you panic, then you're— you can't really plan. So it always helps if you can keep a calm head and actually think about the problem rationally and go through a fairly methodical planning process, which, you know, I learned a lot of in the Army. There was a lot of like practical planning and templating of how to do this stuff. You can start to think, well, okay, this is, this is possible. And, you know, pull the plan together and you can get there. You know, you might not always fully hit the targets, but you— in, in the Army, we had a thing called the 7 questions, which was basically you ask these 7 questions and at the end of it you should have a plan. And even if you're under fire, you should be able to answer these 7 questions in a reasonably succinct and decent way. And so if anyone ever gave me a problem, I would say, right, go back to my TAM, which is the tactical aid memoir, get my 7 questions out. And start going through these things. And then slowly, a plan would fall out of it.

And would you ever do that without having a plan B? Is there always a plan B in those 7 steps? Not being an army guy myself, as you can tell.

Yeah, so there's a contingency planning at the end of it, thinking, well, what happens if this and that happens? All these plans, you should expect them to go wrong. As Mike Tyson says, you're going to get punched in the face, it's all going to go— so when I go to Kaput. But if you can stay flexible enough, don't tie yourself too rigidly into the plan, only plan on that slightly short time horizon, you can adapt to it.

And is that something, and now you're in product management, I want to come on to something else. I saw you were in a session about product management, I want to ask you, leadership board. But in product management, because the issue of having to go on a roadmap or on a schedule that might take too long, and you've got to be more agile in the world. What is your approach to being more agile to keep up with the times, I guess?

I think limiting scope is a really important thing here. Really restricting what you're going to do helps you keep those timelines. As soon as you start to say, well, okay, we'll just do this thing as well, we'll just do that, that's when, you know, scope starts to expand and things really start to slow down. The thing I've learned most is to be really, really ruthless with what you're not going to do and almost say, yeah, I'm just going to cut what we're doing in half and just do half of it and see what comes after that.

Yes, it's kind of making progress rather than having the completeness.

Exactly, exactly. And getting there quickly because as soon as you slow down and you reduce your time to market, then You know, software that isn't out in people's hands is worth nothing. And so you're much better off getting something half done out, and then improving upon it later.

I like that. That sounds good. That sounds like a good way of making things happen. Just a couple more questions for you, Will, you're doing a great job. When you were presenting to the Institute of Product Leadership, don't worry, I'm not going to catch you out. But one of the things you spoke about, apart from leading, not managing, which I really enjoyed, You talked about something called the Condor moment.

Do you remember that?

Yeah. What the hell's the Condor moment?

So the Condor moment, it comes from an old advert for cigars. I think the brand is called Condor and it's all about being, being relaxed, basically, you know, smoking cigars, a very relaxing thing to do. But also a condor is one of these enormous birds that sort of like flies high up in the air looking for rodents and things of that nature. To eat. Yeah. And so the idea of this is, well, when you've got to make decisions, the last thing you want to do is be panicked and under pressure because you make bad decisions, basically. So if you take a Condor moment, you are either sort of sitting back there smoking a cigar, relaxed, or you're just soaring gently high above the situation, looking down on it, assessing what's going on. And from that position, you can start to make like good assessments of what's happening, and then from there, good decisions.

Oh, I love that. So it's like, yeah, being calm and collected, a bit of a cool hand Luke, but so not exactly panicking and jumping into things.

That's excellent.

Exactly.

I love that.

I remember the adverts. I'm old enough to remember the adverts. I didn't think you were, but good, good reference. I've got one last question for you. I do want to ask you about your hobbies because I, I did read that your hobbies are riding a bike and pruning roses. I'll come back to that in a minute.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Which I think is fascinating. But here's my final question, Will. Looking back, you know, you've had a really interesting career, you know, both in the Army and in Deliveroo for the last few years. Looking back on your career, would you have done anything differently knowing what you know now? Because obviously now you're further forward and you've got this experience to draw on. Would you have done anything different in a significant way knowing what you know now?

I would have planned things a bit more, I think. Yeah, my career has been rather I've sort of fallen into things a bit, but had I known about things like product management, I would have definitely tried to get into it earlier and shaped my, my early education around that. But no, I've enjoyed everything that I've done, you know, from, from the, from the very first article I wrote for Current Archaeology magazine through to the last feature I shipped. I think it's been quite varied, which I quite enjoy.

I can see that variety.

Yeah, and I think I found my home in product management, which is, you know, the ultimate goal of everyone's career, I think.

There you go, a bit of a plug for product management. Making things happen when you can't, what would be one takeaway you give to someone to consider to make things happen?

You know, I think when you're approached by a problem where you think, gosh, I can't do this, it is important to take that Condor moment. Don't panic, sit back and think, okay, well, you know, there probably is a way to do this. Try and find a formal planning process, formal planning system that, you know, provides a framework that you can build off and just think through it like calmly and rationally. If you can't do it, then you can't do it, right? It could be physically impossible, but at least if you have that framework around you, then you should be able to find some way that gets you 80% of the way there. And 80% is usually, usually good enough.

That's fair. So basically, are you saying that you're never really going to get stuck completely? There's always a way. Is that where you're going?

Yeah, exactly. You know, you can always do something. You can always do something. And if you can't do the full thing, just de-scope it a bit. Now find something slightly, slightly less ambitious to do first, get that done, and then move on to the full thing later.

Love it. That's great advice. Okay. In a second, I'm going to hand you on to George because he wants to find out about your music taste. But just quickly tell me, hobbies, riding a bike, pruning roses, archaeology. Interesting combo.

Yeah. I mean, I find cycling and gardening similar in the way that it gives you the headspace that you need to either think about like problems with work or just totally, totally focus on something else. You know, I often find I have my best ideas when I'm on my bike doing a 60-mile ride. And so I think, well, I should probably, probably ride my bike more if that's where I have the— have my best ideas.

Maybe smoking cigars at the same time, by the sound of it. A bit of a Condor moment while you're cycling.

Ideally, yeah.

Brilliant. Thank you so much. Well, I really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us for this episode. I'm going to hand you on to George to discover your music taste. Thanks a lot. Thanks again.

Thanks, Gary. It's been great fun.

Yeah, thanks, Will. That was, uh, yeah, it was fascinating stuff. And as an avid far too frequent Deliveroo user. It's been fascinating to hear about the sort of the inner workings of it and how you've been selling the dream to the workforce. It's probably worth mentioning that you occasionally get on your bike to be a delivery driver occasionally, is that right?

Yeah, I think that's one of the best parts of the job actually, you know, actually experiencing it for yourself, understanding what those problems are really helps you then go and solve them for the guys who have to do it day in, day out.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So anyway, my simple job is to simply ask Has there been a soundtrack to this interesting and diverse career that you've had? Has there been a single tune or a couple of tunes that have got you through difficult times, you know, in the army or, you know, whilst facing a problem in Deliveroo, or just songs that you just whack on because they're straight-up bangers?

Good question. So one from the army then, which has a fairly military theme to it, would be Movement No. 1 from Vaughan Williams' English Folk Suite. Which is a sort of a sort of military marching tune, but it's actually very, very well— I suppose by its nature it's very rousing. I find quite motivating.

I think that's the first, the first classical piece of music that we've, we've had on the playlist so far. So congratulations.

Oh, excellent. Oh, I'm honored. And then maybe we should bring it a bit more up to date, but not very much more up to date. I think a song which has always got me going is Peg by Steely Dan. Love a bit of slap bass going on in the middle there.

You're in good company for, uh, Steely Dan fans. Brilliant, excellent choices. Thank you very much, Will, and thanks again to Gary, and we'll see you all next time.

Brilliant, thanks George, thanks Gary.

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