I wanted to do an all hands when I first became a 2nd line manager. My goal was to highlight who I am and any changes. Unfortunately the first thing every new manager changes is nothing. The third thing is be everything. Nevertheless I had nothing to highlight. So I pushed it off and now after 3 months it was time.

The slide deck was the easy part. It follows the typical format of celebrations, HR highlights, culture highlights, and looking ahead. The hard part was food. Food becomes a catalyst for engineers coming together. During Covid we started using GrubHub and just allocated everyone spending limits. Problem was after the call ended so did the conversation.

My team is spread across eight timezones from California to Ireland. So 5 pm in Ireland is 9 am in California. I wanted each team to come into the office, eat, listen, then continue to socialize afterwards. Hallway conversations are a great source of “How can we be better” conversations. So I need to order food to be delivered to 6 lab locations.

The typical playbook for this is to have a local manager organize food. Often it ends up being the local cafeteria catering. To get teams excited to come into the office for food I wanted to give them skin in the game.

In our org channel I asked each group to vote on which place to order delivery from for their location. I just brought up yelp and selected places that had delivery at random. In some locations, no one liked any of the options. An argument started about which pizza place in New York City was better. I didn’t mind this because people were engaged and working towards a single decision. Other places it was an even split and they needed a tie breaker who formerly stayed on the side lines. In one case I was surprised the tie breaker eventually went against her husband who was on the same team.

I then started threads on what to order at each restaurant and it was crickets. If I don’t hear back by a certain time, I will put the menu into excel. The function =INDEX($A$2:$A$10,RANDBETWEEN(1,COUNTA($A$2:$A$10)),1) will choose. Every menu has items someone doesn’t want to get. Feedback with suggestions was instant.

So now what went wrong. First I discovered some restaurants will not inform you about delivery limitations. They don’t mention they don’t deliver to a location until you hit “process” on the order. This led to last minute changes in vendor and trying to find equivalent items.

Websites sometimes automatically update the order using the timezone difference between your browser and the restaurant. This is another fun discovery. So you subtract an hour to align with Austin timezone but instead the order is placed 2 hours early.

Not all places deliver breakfast. Also in places like San Francisco traffic is horrid so employees try to come into the office at off times. So for some I just had to order them lunch at a later time.