New Perspectives
Shadowing mytaxi’s COO for one day
What Andrew, Business Analyst Lead, learned by shadowing Andy, mytaxi COO
They say you have to walk a mile in someone’s shoes to really understand them. Our Job Shadowing program does exactly that: Every three months we publish three new opportunities for colleagues to shadow another colleague from a different department to learn aspects related to the job, mytaxi and new competencies. Overall, it is a great way to connect colleagues at mytaxi!
I should have recognized the warning when Andy asked the question ‘Do you prefer a day-on-the-road or a UK day?’. With this simple question the world of Andy Batty began to reveal itself to me.
I learned this when I elected to go for a UK day to see Andy in his element and I got to understand his element pretty quickly when my day started early with a 6am taxi ride to the airport, a short flight to Heathrow, an unglamorous ride on a packed Heathrow Express to Paddington Station then finally a tube ride across to Southwark and ultimately a quick stroll to the mytaxi office. I arrived just in time for the daily standup. Now imagine Andy does this all the time time, traveling around Europe to visit the HQ and local offices all before breakfast.
As much fun as jet-setting around the continent sounds, this is a good reason why I would not like to switch jobs with Andy. But of course once you arrive somewhere the interesting parts begin:
Throughout the morning in Harling House the first Andy Batty was in action doing WPR (weekly performance review) meetings via Zoom with every country. It was in this forum that the challenge of the Operations role became apparent, which is that every mytaxi office has different sets of challenges and solutions related to meeting our targets. It is here that Andy and his partner in crime, Ecki, mytaxi CEO, weigh in on the local issues, working hard to understand the problems and provide constructive challenges to the country leadership. For this I would like to have the opportunity to switch roles with Andy, because there are so many interesting and diverse topics that need to be addressed.
On second thought maybe this is another good reason not to switch. After the WPRs Andy and Ecki had a sync session to trade updates, outstanding actions and competitive banter. It is clear that Andy and Ecki must coordinate to provide common leadership for the General Managers, while retaining their individual styles.
As you can see, Andy’s style is the smooth British cool of Austin Powers and Ecki’s style is the menacing bald head of Dr. Evil demanding 1 million dollars (of GMV = Gross Merchandise Volume).
I hit up the coffee machine a lot that day just to stay alert, and it was during one of these trips that I found out that their machine also makes cocktails!
At this point, things began to become a blur. There were meetings about strategy, budgeting and planning, multiple 1on1 meetings and more. This was all in one afternoon. I managed to make some notes that boiled down the essence of Andy in these meetings into the following formula:
- Set the scene
- Identify the problem
- Challenge the status quo
- Apply previous experience
- Sell the vision
- Delegate and set guidelines
- Summarise and digest
Over the course of the day Andy must have interacted with over a hundred mytaxi employees. And in the end I was most impressed and humbled by the enthusiasm, motivation, creative thinking and willingness to solve problems that everyone in the mytaxi team displayed. It is a testament to the mytaxi culture that even though the organisation has grown so much in the past years, it has been able to employ a system of decentralised decision making that empowers and excites people to come to work everyday to make everyday magic all across Europe.
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Who is mytaxi? We are today the leading e-hailing app in Europe, available in over 70 cities within 11 countries. A mytaxi hail is accepted around Europe every second from mytaxi’s network of over 120,000 drivers and more than ten million downloads. With more than 600 employees our entity spans across Germany, UK, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Poland, Spain, Austria, Portugal, Sweden, Romania, Peru and Chile.
Join us: https://de.mytaxi.com/jobs/
