Operating Rigour

Processes also serve as repositories of institutional memory. They carry lessons from countless past cases, often unknown to the person following the process. Problems once encountered, solutions once devised, all of that is encoded into a set of steps.

Just to give you a funny anecdote, during my first week at Instacart, I remember joining our weekly business review, and there was a team that had managed to save $0.01 per delivery through a set of optimization. And as soon as they announced that, the whole room erupted in applause. And I remember thinking, oh, we celebrate cents here.