We are the analytical wing of product and engineering at Postmates.

The growth team at Postmates straddles all of the different teams and products at the company. We built our own A/B testing framework which the rest of the company uses, which has enabled the company to be more data-driven in how we approach decisions. Something you’ll hear time and time again on our team is “highest impact over cost” which is unequivocally the driving force in everything we do. The quantitative and qualitative methodologies we use are being adopted across the company and in this way, we are inflecting the company’s culture to be more data-guided.

It’s one thing to have standout individuals, but the chemistry and dynamic created among a group of standouts is another thing entirely.

As Postmates has grown, we have really attracted some outstanding talent. We come to work proud to work alongside one another and are energized by what each person brings to the table. We have a culture where anyone on the team can surface and drive an idea, and as long as they can show that it’s a high impact item, we support, endorse, and drive it forward. This has made working on the Growth team incredibly stimulating and challenging, but more importantly, it allows individuals to showcase their strengths and exercise their creativity.

Something that’s really special about working at Postmates is that you have the ability to try different things.

We try to make our team members as robust as possible. Since we straddle all of the different products at Postmates, everyone is exposed to and gets comfortable working across the stack. The ability to try different things and get experience with different aspects of engineering allows people to make informed decisions about where they want to grow their careers and develop their interests. Take me (Rick) as a prime example. I joined as an iOS engineer, did backend, moved into management, and now I’m working on backend again.

The engineering org at Postmates also has performance reviews (once every 6 months) which we take very seriously. There is a standardized set of levels which helps identify exactly how you can get better across all of the engineering competencies. They are designed to help each person move towards their personal career goals and identify how managers can support them. If you want to become better at your job by attending a workshop or gain expertise through an online course, we not only encourage you to do so but we’ll also fund it.

We look at the company wholistically and make sure that money in and money out make sense.

Our team is organized into several pods that focus on different products. The Growth team as a whole is involved in pricing, the core feed infrastructure, user acquisition, referrals, and we are responsible for many of the features you see on the Postmates app like Most Popular and Recent Orders. We couple our product engineering work with comms and marketing, and are responsible for spending our multi-million dollar marketing budget wisely. We are involved in a number of projects with touch points across all products and it’s not uncommon for our team to start a project and spit out a team to maintain it once we’ve proven it to be impactful.

Our micro-service approach to architecting systems provides end-to-end ownership to individual teams and engineers.

Not too long ago, we had a monolithic Django stack which meant that everyone worked on a single codebase. Everything was so intermeshed and it didn’t scale very well. Since then, we’ve taken the logical pieces and built them into their own self-sufficient systems. This network of different systems talking to one another has given engineering teams (or in some cases, individual engineers) a lot of control over a single system which they can own from end to end.

You’ll never be bored here.

Our underlying mission is to identify what has the highest ROI and push it forward. We constantly experiment to uncover what the most impactful strategies are, which means we must also be flexible and agile. As an example, we had a roadmap for one of our sub teams and someone on that team suddenly shared an idea for a new feature that everyone felt really excited about. Quickly looking at the metrics and seeing the potential impact, we felt that we should make scrap the roadmap and focus on pursuing this idea instead. Things change quickly, which keeps things very exciting. We wouldn’t encourage someone who prefers project lengths spanning several months to join us.

Our team is highly experimental and we believe in putting out short quick tests to learn what is highest impact over cost.

The Growth team is growing!

We’ve tripled the size of the engineering team at Postmates in the last year from 40 to 120 engineers. Looking at our Growth team specifically, we’ve grown from 7 to 12 engineers in just the last month. We hope to be at 30 by the end of 2017.

Postmates scaled up from a small startup and previously was very design-focused. In the beginning, we invested in things that sometimes didn’t have much impact on overall business growth and a lot of the direction was top down. The Growth team was born from the company’s maturity as we identify what is the most important to the entire company, prove it out, and then push the entire company in that direction.