The 'How to Work With Me' Document
Scale culture through one written doc: expectations, your real flaws, your commitments.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 94%
Culture doesn't scale through conversation when headcount doubles or triples annually. Yandell's answer is a three-part written document — what success looks like here, what I'm bad at and working on, and what I owe you — shared with reports, candidates, and anyone in the company who wants it. It short-circuits the months new joiners spend decoding how to be effective, and doubles as a senior-recruiting instrument because it demonstrates self-awareness before the first day.
Origin
Written by Keith Yandell at DoorDash, prompted by Tony Xu's principle that written work product is one of the few things that scales cleanly through hypergrowth.
Core principles
- 01Written work product is the highest-leverage scaling mechanism a leader has — a conversation reaches one person, a doc reaches everyone who will ever join.
- 02Publishing your own weaknesses buys more credibility than publishing your strengths.
- 03A manager's stated commitments create an enforceable contract that reports can hold you to.
- 04The doc must describe how things actually work, not the aspirational version.
How to run it
- 1
Section one: expectations and traits of people who succeed here
Write down what you've actually observed in the people who thrive at this company and on your team. This is the fastest way to compress the months a new hire spends reverse-engineering 'what does good look like'.
Pro tip Draw the traits from real successful people you've watched, not from the values poster.
- 2
Section two: how I'm hard to work with, and what I'm doing about it
Document the feedback you've received and the behaviours you're working on. Yandell writes that as a litigator by training he argues against positions even when he agrees, to test conviction — which confused his team when they then executed the thing he'd argued against. Naming it makes it legible instead of destabilising.
Pro tip The best entries are ones where your behaviour has a rational purpose that is invisible from the outside. Explain the purpose AND admit the cost.
Watch out Fake humility ("I care too much") destroys the doc's credibility instantly. The flaw must be a real, inconvenient one.
- 3
Section three: my commitments to you
State what the team can count on from you. Yandell's headline commitment is that he will help you find your next job, even if it's not at this company — and that how he runs one-on-ones (last 10 minutes are career development) is written down and therefore promised.
Pro tip Commitments that are costly to you are the ones that get believed.
Watch out Only write commitments you will honour under pressure. A broken written commitment is worse than an unwritten one.
- 4
Send it to senior candidates during recruiting
When a senior candidate asks what it's like to work with you, send the doc rather than answering in the abstract. The act of having written it down is itself the signal.
- 5
Circulate it beyond your own reporting line
Let anyone in the company read it. Yandell reports people he'd never met, on other teams, telling him the doc helped them acclimatise to the pace of the company.
Pro tip Treat inbound comments from strangers who read it as free signal on where the org's onboarding is broken.
In the wild
Yandell — running marketing while openly not being a marketer — was trying to hire Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, a legend in the marketing space, as head of brand. Nervous about the pitch, he sent the how-to-work-with-me doc when Kofi asked what it would be like to work with him.
→ Kofi later told Yandell the doc was a decisive factor: the transparency about Yandell's growth areas and the explicit admission that he didn't know the field told Kofi he'd have real autonomy. Kofi joined and is now DoorDash's CMO.
Yandell's team gave him feedback that his habit of arguing against proposals to stress-test conviction was confusing — he'd argue hard against something and then the team would go execute exactly that thing. He wrote the behaviour, its purpose, and his intent to moderate it into section two of the doc.
→ The team could reinterpret his arguing as conviction-testing rather than opposition, and hold him accountable for reducing arguing 'for sport'.
Common mistakes
Writing only the expectations section
A doc that lists what you demand from others without exposing your own flaws and commitments reads as a rulebook. The self-disclosure and the commitments are what make people trust the expectations.
Listing sanitised, flattering weaknesses
Yandell's flaw — arguing against things he agrees with — is genuinely awkward and genuinely disruptive. That's why it buys credibility. A curated weakness buys nothing.
Writing the doc and never living it
Because it is written, every deviation is now visible and citable. A doc you don't honour converts into a permanent record of your hypocrisy.
Is it for you?
Best for
Managers and executives at fast-scaling companies (especially those doubling or tripling headcount) who need their operating style and the company's culture to reach people they'll never onboard personally.
Not ideal for
Very small, stable teams where everyone already knows how you work, or leaders unwilling to publish real weaknesses or keep costly written commitments.
From the transcript
“one thing that Tony taught me is one thing that scales really well is written work product and so I put together this document there's…”
“I'm a litigator by training and so I tend to argue about things even if I agree with people to test levels of conviction”
“it talks about what my commitments are to team so I'm committed to finding you your next job even if that's not at doordash”
From the episode
Leading with empathy
Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber)