Time for a Code-Yellow?: A Blunt Instrument That Works
I promised myself never again. Never again would I call a code-yellow. Code-yellows suck, drain team morale, and they leave a lingering distaste amongst all those involved. Yet, during my 8-years at Instacart, they were our most effective and consistent weapon in ensuring we made meaningful progress on our hairiest problems.

Yet, within the first year of Beacon’s life – I found myself sitting at my kids Tae Kwon Do competition (which was running 3.5 hours late!) on a Saturday writing an email to the team saying I wanted to meet immediately to call a code yellow regarding a major transition project we were working on with one of our first acquisitions.

What Is a Code-Yellow?
Code-yellow’s are thought to have originated at Google. During a code-yellow, a leader can escalate a project/situation to a war room situation, pulling people out of their day-to-day work to focus entirely on the problem at hand. It is alluring because it allows for existing plans to be deprioritized, removes any/all ambiguity around what is most important at the moment, and strongly encourages the team to sacrifice the ‘L’ and ‘B’ from Work-Life-Balance.

At Instacart, despite our best efforts to not have this be the case, we leaned on Code Yellow’s so aggressively that they became part of our standard operating cadence. We used this framework successfully to solve our seemingly existential problems: [...]

2014: Fixing lagging growth when we experienced our first ‘slow down’ from hockey stick type (the infamous and expensive ‘Growth Initiative’ which likely warrants its own full post in the future)
2015: Going from losing ~$15/order to unit economic breakeven when we almost ran out of money
2016: Launching our initial advertising business to prove our path to profitability and catalyze an equity capital raise
2017: Signing the majority of major North American grocers onto our platform after Whole Foods Market, our biggest customer, was purchased by Amazon
2018: Scaling our infrastructure to keep the site up on Sunday’s (we were having constant outages every week)
2019: Building our fourth senior executive team in six years to lead us to the next plateau of scale
2020: Scaling from 100K shoppers to 600K shoppers in a 2-3 week period during the onslaught of COVID so that we meet the 5x surge in demand as the world went into lock-down