Emelie Coleman, Leading Customer Experience at UberEats
July 12th, 2021
Emelie Coleman is a Regional Marketplace Operations Lead for UberEats and leads a team responsible for ensuring customers have the best experience possible when using the UberEats platform. Prior to UberEats, worked in operations at McMaster-Carr.
In this feature, Emelie shares her key learnings from her first role, skills needed to succeed in Ops, why she joined UberEats, and her day-to-day as Regional Operations Lead. Read along to soak up her incredible career advice for ambitious women, such as yourself.
Early Career
You started your career as an Operations Supervisor at McMaster-Carr after graduating Harvard with a BA in History & Science. What key learnings did you take from your first role?
My first role at McMaster-Carr was as a part of the Management Development program. I was excited to take on this first role so that I could get exposure to different facets of business. During my first few rotations, I spent time in Accounting and in Customer Support before finally making my way to warehouse operations.
From my time in Customer Support, I gained significant insight into how companies build robust support processes to ensure support agents and self-serve support resources can address all potential issues that a customer may come across. Ultimately, this has been applicable to all my subsequent roles - being grounded in the customer experience and using this to inform what business decisions to make.
My time in warehouse operations was critical for me to develop a deeper understanding of process building and process efficiency. Being in the warehouse and seeing the warehouse shipping operation right in front of me gave me the frontline learning to constantly look at every step in a process and constantly look for ways to improve it.
What skills and strengths did you realize were key to succeeding in Operations?
There are three things that come to mind - attention to detail and ruthless prioritization. As I mentioned, a major part of my role and my team’s role is building solutions to address business problems. Step one of this problem solving approach is rooted in identifying an issue. At McMaster-Carr, this meant conducting careful analysis and monitoring of ongoing warehouse processes and at Uber this has meant carefully deep diving into data. Before we can build a new solution or iterate on a current one, it is imperative to first find what isn’t working or what is exacerbating poor user experiences. Being patient and not shying away from getting into the nitty-gritty details is a key thing that has led me to uncover issues that can then be solved.
Being able to ruthlessly prioritize is something that has been especially useful while at Uber. At companies that are growing quickly (e.g. if you are in the startup space), you’ll have the unique experience to wear every hat on the team and learn - a lot. This also means that you’ll need to learn how to determine the best use of your time to drive the most business impact. This is something that I’ve continuously developed over the last few years while at Uber. Despite there being new problems to solve everyday, I actively prioritize what myself and my team are expected to deliver in terms of business impact and make sure that we are using our resources in the most effective way possible.
After two years at McMaster-Carr, you joined UberEATS as an Operations and Logistics Manager. How did you know you were ready for a new job and what steps did you take to switch roles?
After a little over two years at McMaster-Carr, I was looking forward to continuing my development in operations, however, I was keen to move into the tech space. This was mainly because I wanted to work in a space where there would be ample problems that had not yet been solved and I would be set up to design and build original solutions that had not yet been created. I also wanted to move to a company where I could build solutions quickly, test them out, and determine if they were successful or needed a bit more tweaking.
As most folks these days, I relied on research and outreach on LinkedIn to begin determining my next move. At this point, I hadn’t decided that I wanted to move into the food delivery tech space. Rather, I focused my search and outreach on the skills I wanted to develop in my next role. As mentioned, I wanted to find a role in a fast-paced company and especially one that promoted innovative thinking. I also wanted to ensure the organizational and process-building skills I had honed at McMaster-Carr would add value to my next role. Therefore, when reviewing roles, I looked out for opportunities where I could leverage these strengths and continue to develop strong strategic and quantitative skills that I knew would be valuable for the rest of my career.
Uber
At UberEATS, you started as Operations & Logistics Manager and continued to move up to Regional Operations Manager, then Senior Regional Operations Manager, and now Regional Operations Lead. As you rose the ranks, what did you learn was key to getting promoted?
There are two things that I think have supported my development - taking the initiative and becoming a subject matter expert in certain areas of the business. At an earlier stage and at fast growing companies, there is an undeniable culture of hustle. Everyone is motivated by a central goal and is striving to do their part to get closer to that ultimate goal. In this kind of culture, being a self-starter is absolutely imperative. Most of the time, there are going to be countless ongoing challenges and likely you are going to come across things that no one has tried to solve before. My approach has been to not hesitate, jump into it, and own it.
Fortunately, this approach has provided me with the opportunity to become a subject matter expert in certain business problems at Uber, including in UberEats’s emergency response.
When I chat with new team members who join Uber, they’re all excited for the hustle that is central to Uber’s team culture. The key thing I encourage them to do to set themselves up for success is to take initiative and dive into a problem headfirst and come out the other end a sought-after subject matter expert in something critical to the business.
You’re currently the Regional Operations Lead at UberEATS. What exactly does your role entail and what is your day-to-day?
In my current role, I lead a team of Operations managers who are responsible for managing supply and demand for the UberEats business during not-business-as-usual (NBAU) conditions. For example, when it rains people inherently like to order food more, especially something nice and warming. But delivery partners are going to be less inclined to go online unless sufficiently incentivized to go online (because who likes to drive in the rain!). My team is responsible for building the necessary systems to identify these kinds of conditions and build levers and processes that effectively boost supply or reduce demand during these conditions at scale.
What I love about my role is that there are always new NBAU conditions. So typically, part of my day-to-day is spent working with my team to understand how these conditions affect our users’ experiences, restaurant partners, and delivery people and if current levers that manage supply and demand in our cities will minimize poor end experiences under these conditions. If not, my time is spent working with my team and our cross-functional partners to develop and implement robust plans to manage the impact of these conditions on the Eats marketplace.
What excites you most about the future of food delivery?
This is a great question. A key thing that influences my thoughts here is the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, food delivery became an essential service for many people especially as a means of income for restaurants and gig-economy workers. As we open up, I’m excited to see how the reliance on food delivery (and in general, consumer good delivery) shifts consumer behaviors in the future. There are two things that stand out to me. First, more and more restaurants are keen to be on delivery platforms and explore other avenues like virtual and ghost kitchens to reach their customers and grow their business . Second, in the past year, we’ve seen so much innovation to deliver, well, anything. I’m looking forward to food delivery platforms looking beyond food as the goods they deliver and meet the expectations of consumers that have been built up over the past year to serve the convenience of getting whatever you need delivered to your door.
Career Advice
What do you wish you knew when you were first starting your career?
Ruthlessly prioritize - I know I mentioned this above, but want to reiterate it here, especially as this is something I’m continuing to work on. Early on in my career I tried to do everything and do everything perfectly. Ultimately, it led to me being burnt out and uninspired at different points in my career. Now, I encourage myself to take a step back before diving into a task and assess if this is something that is business critical relative to other ongoing priorities. This has been particularly useful during my time at Uber where everything moves very quickly :)
Who is one woman you aspire to be like?
My previous manager, Yesim, is someone I aspire to be like. She helped me strengthen my strategic problem solving skills and ensure that when looking at a business problem, you are getting to the root cause and not merely addressing the superficial issues that are easier to spot. Take the time to find the root cause and build a durable solution and then, you’ll see the rewards of lasting impact.
She also taught me the importance of taking the time to get to know your cross-functional partners and what they care about, what their goals are so that you can build stronger partnerships and promote better alignment across teams.
