[dead]
Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
101–110 of 353 posts
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. This won't happen among most companies, but I'd love to see that become a common practice with at least some high-level developers. There's so many pain points in many customer service organizations that are easily solvable if a developer understood the frustration and waste with many customer service tasks. Nothing motivates more than having to do some annoy…
This should absolutely be a thing for vertical integration developers. If you're developing cashier software for Target, you should have to use it under realistic circumstances sometimes. Same for Amazon driving software, helpdesk software, sales, etc.
When I worked for a large logistics company we’d have a few days a year where we’d go downstairs and shadow someone using our software. It was very informative. The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense and the experienced people (who worked mostly on commissions mind you) where very pissed and wanted their hot keys and their at a glance information.
It was very eye opening.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#103I recall Amazon used to do something similar. Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. The goal isn't PR or worker morale - most people see through stunts like that. The real goal is to help leaders better understand their product, its problems, and customer frustrations.
[dead]
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#104walking the Gemba
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a week in warehouse might do good for them. Or as delivery driving...
My first career was a chef. When I asked a friend of the family who owned a restaurant when I was teenager what steps I should take to become a chef, the advice he gave was "Get a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant because the most important thing you need to know is to respect your dishwasher because anytime everything goes wrong and you are in a jam, it is your dishwasher who will save you." Unknown to me the rest…
Can you elaborate a bit on how the dishwasher role gets the restaurant out of jams?
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#106I recall Amazon used to do something similar. Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. The goal isn't PR or worker morale - most people see through stunts like that. The real goal is to help leaders better understand their product, its problems, and customer frustrations.
> Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. This won't happen among most companies, but I'd love to see that become a common practice with at least some high-level developers. There's so many pain points in many customer service organizations that are easily solvable if a developer understood the frustration and waste with many customer service tasks. Nothing motivates more than having to do some annoy…
This rings so true. As a designer it's invaluable to have teammates with domain expertise—they have a much better idea about customer pain points. Honestly, they can usually articulate the problems better than customers can in interviews.
Where I work it's not uncommon for people to come into engineering through support > support engineering > software engineering. At one point our top AE decided he didn't want the stress of selling and went from AE > PM > UI Engineer. These have always been some of my favorite engineers to work with.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was not expecting this Reddit level of comments on HN. Really hoping you are sarcastic.
Nope. The role of executives at large companies is to most effectively move resources away from labor and towards the owners of capital. They decide where to open the next branch to crush competitors who treat their workers and customers better; they negotiate deals with suppliers so those suppliers and their workers have fewer resources; they coordinate with other large competitors to hamper workers' attempts at imp…
This is HN, not /r/antiwork. Back to Reddit, you go, troll.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#108The only way things like this really work is by not giving any heads up to the store or the store management. Otherwise store management spends a huge amount of time trying to tidy up before “corporate” comes by. At least that was my experience when things like this happened at the fruit stand.
It's really obvious when you put a c-suite 40-something or 50-something exec on a blue collar team: nobody's gonna be fooled for a minute. It's like that SNL skit of Kylo Ren from Star Wars going undercover in the employee cafeteria. As long as you spring it on them they won't have a chance to tidy up first. They'll still be on their best behavior and follow every rule to a T once the exec shows up though.
to be fair half of what made that funny/awkward is Kylo fishing for compliments. If Narasimhan is chill, it might be less super-awkward. Plus, who knows Narasimhan. This is the first I've heard his name. I wouldn't be surprised if most starbucks counter employees don't know the name of the CEO, much less what he looks like.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#109Ron Johnson used to do this when he headed Apple retail. Would just go into a store totally undercover to the customers (obviously staff would recognize him) and work for a bit.
Occasionally fairly major changes, both to the staff side and to the customer experience, were made based on his visits.
I don't recall ever seeing a press announcement about it. Saying you're doing it to win brownie points sure makes it seem inauthentic. Then again maybe it's better this way than leaking it to a reporter and pretending that it was discovered organically. Guess we'll have to wait and see if anything actually comes out of it to know if it's just a stunt, but I'd put my money on it.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#110I recall Amazon used to do something similar. Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. The goal isn't PR or worker morale - most people see through stunts like that. The real goal is to help leaders better understand their product, its problems, and customer frustrations.
IIRC McDonalds still does this for some subset of its corporate workforce.
Waffle House also required you to work in a restaurant for some time before they'll let you buy a franchise.