Key points
- Delivery Hero CTO Benjamin Mann ensures the company builds the right things for customers two to three years ahead.
- Mann says food delivery requires hundreds of near-perfect steps, and a 10-minute delay feels like a million years to a hungry customer.
- Mann says engineers must focus on customer experience, and leaders must define the problem before the solution.
Delivery Hero's CTO on keeping food delivery from breaking
Benjamin Mann went from writing video game cheat codes as a child and flunking out of university to running all of engineering at Delivery Hero, which serves billions of orders a year in 72 countries. Food delivery tolerates almost no sloppiness, and at scale even a ten-minute delay is felt by millions. That leaves the leader keeping engineers pointed at the customer's problem and staying steady while the business is in chaos.
Takeaways
- Food delivery is far harder than it looks. Hundreds of steps fire in parallel and in sequence to land an order in 25 to 35 minutes. Ten minutes late is nothing in e-commerce but feels like a million years to a hungry person.
- A CTO must be at home in chaos. Random things pop up constantly. COVID spiked demand overnight while governments set concrete requirements the platforms were not built for, and food delivery went from luxury to essential service that could not go down.
- Technical debt needs a business deadline. Mann tells engineers to ask what happens if the debt is not fixed and when it would hurt the business, then have an eye-level conversation about timing. Engineers struggle to quantify debt themselves.
- Leaders define the customer problem first. Engineers forget the customer under timelines and complex requirements. Mann says leaders pull them back to the problem before the solution, since no long-lasting profitable business is built without customer focus.
- Team trust takes long and breaks fast. Walking into a team that lacks trust is the hardest problem Mann has faced. Trust takes long to build and one mistake returns you to zero, and a team does what its leader does.
- Working abroad works out for everyone. In almost twenty years of managing people, Mann has watched everyone who tried to succeed outside their own country actually succeed. He tells people not to give in to imposter syndrome.
Mann's path to Delivery Hero
- Started as a child with video games, writing cheat codes after his mother refused to buy a new game until he finished the one he had.
- He was already programming on the side when he entered university in Austria, quit rather than sit through Java 101, tried again and flunked out.
- Freelanced until his mother insisted he get a job, then joined Global Blue to build tax-free refund products that became industry standard, and followed a VP to Singapore to build that team.
- Tried management once, hated it, swore never to manage again, tried again a couple of years later, and became Delivery Hero's CTO after his boss asked if he wanted to succeed him.