DoorDash fuels rapid growth with Slack and Okta

While DoorDash has made its name by providing highly convenient delivery to customers, it’s also perfected the art internally with seamless onboarding. The nation’s leading last-mile logistics platform has grown rapidly, adding users all over the U.S., Australia and Canada. When you’re onboarding hundreds of new employees every month, as DoorDash does, it’s a real challenge to bring them up to speed and into the fold of company culture quickly. Once new workers get acclimated, the next challenge is connecting them to the people and resources they need, an even tougher task in the remote-work era.

For Enrique Jenkins, DoorDash’s director of IT, everything hinges on a great day-one experience for each employee. DoorDash’s solution? Using platforms like Slack and Okta to connect new employees with the tools, people and resources they need. “The faster people can get on board, the happier they’ll be,” Jenkins says. “We rely on Slack and Okta to create that seamless transition.” 

Curbing tech sprawl with Slack and Okta

When Jenkins joined DoorDash in 2018, one of his first tasks was dealing with “SaaS (software as a service) sprawl”—the multitude of cloud solutions that were disconnected from one another, complicating the tech stack and trapping important information within teams. That environment was challenging for all of DoorDash’s employees, but especially for newcomers who wanted to hit the ground running.

“That’s why we decided Slack would become one of our primary resources,” Jenkins says. “It’s one of those tools that every single employee at DoorDash uses every day.” 

Slack has become the starting point for new employees, who can use it as a directory for all things DoorDash. By integrating the company’s human capital management (HCM) system with Slack and Okta, newcomers can easily find out how to contact other employees and which Slack channels and workspaces they need to access to do their jobs. 

The lifecycle-management data from Okta is pulled into Slack to enrich user profiles, helping employees understand who does what in the large organization. It’s the modern version of the shoulder tap at the office—an option available to very few new employees in our current remote-work environment.

IT saves time by automating access and onboarding

Behind the scenes, Jenkins and his team use Slack and Okta to automate access provisioning while keeping systems secure. Okta provides access to the right set of SaaS applications to new employees on their first day, so they don’t have to cool their heels waiting hours or days for logins and passwords. Granting app access now takes just minutes.

The Slack and Okta integrations also reduce the need for Jenkins and other IT people to conduct manual onboarding tasks, like grouping employees into teams so they can work with the same apps and on the same projects. 

“Instead of manually creating all of those buckets, we can automate that process,” Jenkins says. “It cuts the time down to minutes for giving access to teams or groups. We gain back hours of time for focusing on challenging problems, like making the experience of onboarding and provisioning employees even easier.”

Elevating the role of IT with strategic innovation

Now that Jenkins and his IT colleagues use Slack and Okta to eliminate the friction in the onboarding process, they can step back and assess how they’re supporting the company. Jenkins keeps track of this progress through his own maturity quadrant, which measures progress on people, processes, tools and strategy on a scale of one to five (with one as basic maturity and five as continuously improving). He uses terminology that’s easy to understand so he can share the quadrant with any DoorDash department.

“This is what helps me keep my North Star in sight,” Jenkins says. “My day-to-day tasks might have shifted since I started at DoorDash, but my vision to hit a five in all four quadrants hasn’t changed.”

Jenkins’s goal is to make sure that DoorDash business units see the value of IT beyond just keeping networks up and running. “Covid and remote work have forced what IT does to the forefront of the business,” he says. “People see how we transitioned employees to remote work and how we’ve made onboarding and engaging with colleagues easier through tools like Slack and Okta.”

Creating communities

The benefits of better onboarding don’t stop at new employees. Anyone at DoorDash whose projects span teams and departments can save time with Slack and Okta. The tools allow for a digital headquarters where colleagues, and answers, are just a click away. “You can find employee contact information; you can find manager chains—and that comes from integrating our HCM with Okta and Slack,” Jenkins says. “That’s one of the easy wins to make a great experience for our employees.” 

“Slack has created that community for us,” he says. “People love the emojis, the custom Slack bots and the custom commands. All of it fosters that feeling that we’re using the latest and greatest technology to do our best work.”  

Jenkins on how DoorDash is reinventing the employee experience, at Oktane21:Watch the session on demand.