How DoorDash Turned Food Delivery into a Local Commerce Platform | Vassili Samolis, VP of Product

To most people, DoorDash is an easy fix when you just need food. Our guest today would argue that's the least interesting thing they do. Vassili Samolis has been VP of Product at DoorDash for 5 years and counting, leveraging lessons from Instagram & Pinterest to help turn a simple food delivery app into a high-trust local commerce platform for the more than one million merchants who use it to help drive their businesses. In this episode, Vassili shares: - How DoorDash built a successful local commerce platform based on extreme alignment - they only get paid when a business gets a customer and a consumer finds the food that they want - Why he thinks there's never been a better time to be a PM - not in spite of code getting cheaper but because of it - And how a crowded field of a million restaurants, bodegas, and local shops taught him that the best products often start with a single, very specific customer story ### Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vassilisamolis/ DoorDash: https://www.doordash.com/ ### Chapters 00:00: Introducing Vassili and DoorDash's mission to empower local businesses 02:29 Why local restaurants struggle to survive and grow 04:27: TL;DR into Vassili's product background: From Instagram and Pinterest to DoorDash 05:39: Turning a delivery app into a full local commerce platform 07:23: Product lessons and first principles thinking 12:00: The most unexpected customer insight Vassili and his team discovered 14:10: AI and the future of product teams 17:52: What AI deployment looks like on Vassili's team 18:50: Conclusion ### Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! ### What does LogRocket do? LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com. Special Guest: Vassili Samolis.