To showcase different perspectives and give an inside look into Grubhub, we’re spotlighting leaders across the organization. This month, we caught up with Brian Ryu, VP of Growth.
The Growth team plays a crucial role in Grubhub’s success— driving customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty while managing everything from performance marketing and CRM to pricing strategy, consumer insights, and brand development.
A quick round to get to know Brian:
- Favorite Grubhub order: My kids love Chick-fil-A hash browns, so if you look at my order history, that takes the cake. But if I’m ordering for the whole family, we love Kiin Imm Thai.
- A favorite read: “Ego Free Leadership” by Brandon Black and Shane Hughes. It changed my approach to career management and workplace relationships.
- Weekend ritual: It’s pretty simple! I have two kids and love being able to spend time outdoors with them riding bikes, exploring parks, and spending quality time with friends.
- If not this career, then what? Engineering. That’s actually what I studied in undergrad and would love to be able to build things with my hands.
- Go-to productivity hack: I’m loving Gemini – especially for summarizing meeting notes, catching up on long email threads, and speeding up technical tasks like writing SQL.
- An average work day: I tend to have a lot of meetings throughout the day which requires me to switch topics a lot. To help stay focused, I set aside quiet time each morning to figure out the top one to three decisions I need to make that day.
- An average weekend day: It’s all about family. We do our best to protect that time and our family strives to spend as much of it as we can distraction-free with our kids.
While you’re working in marketing now, your background is in financial services which a lot of folks might not know. Can you tell us about your career progression and how you ended up at Grubhub?
I started at Capital One straight out of college as a business analyst but did more than just the analysis. Something I took away from that job was the importance of having an ownership mentality and thinking through business problems end-to-end. For example, after developing program recommendations, I partnered with people across the organization, including operations, marketing, legal, data science, and more. I also spent time at the call centers listening to customer concerns that were related to the work I was doing. After a few years there, I went to business school and then into consulting at PwC. I jumped around a few different disciplines there that taught me a lot about client relationship management and becoming more comfortable navigating less familiar environments.
I then went back to Capital One where I shifted over to performance marketing. This move wasn’t necessarily planned, however, I will forever be grateful for the folks that were willing to take a chance with me despite my lack of experience in marketing. I loved the problem sets and have been in a marketing role ever since.
I ended up at Grubhub for the opportunity to work somewhere scrappy and dynamic and with the scope that brought all of my prior experiences together. I was also excited to be in a role that allowed me to be even closer to the end consumer. I felt like it’d be exciting to work on something that you feel every single day. I was already ordering food delivery on my side. And funny enough, I actually started my food delivery journey with Seamless years ago when I lived in New York City.
Growth covers a lot of ground — could you share more about what falls under that umbrella?
When people think of “Growth,” they might think of marketing first – but our team covers significantly more ground. Under the Growth umbrella, there are three core pillars:
- Diner Growth. My team leads this area and is responsible for areas including Upper Funnel Media, Performance Marketing, CRM, Pricing Key Cities Strategy, Acquisition and Retention Analytics.
- Loyalty and Marketing. This team drives the business across four primary pillars: (1) our Loyalty program, notably Grubhub+, to attract, convert, and retain our valued customers – including significant partnerships like with Amazon, American Express, Yelp and Lyft; (2) supporting B2B2C – Corporate, Campus, Merchant, and Driver – to nurture, acquire, and retain relationships across all facets of our business; (3) B2C Merchant Marketing; and (4) Diner Product Marketing.
- Brand & Creative. Our Brand team is responsible for Brand Insights & Strategy, Brand Execution & Campaigns, as well as Creative Development which includes functions like Design, Copy, and Creative Operations and Production
Is there one project/initiative your team is focused on that you’re particularly excited about?
If I had to pick one, it would be the Seamless relaunch. It has maintained a strong brand in New York with a loyal customer base going back to the fact that it was one of the very first delivery apps, homegrown in New York. I’m excited to bring that sense of innovation and positivity back with newer customers who may not be as familiar with the brand, especially with all of the standout, value-driving campaigns we have for the top-tier restaurants in the NY Metro area.
What does success look like for your function?
At the highest level, it’s driving a step change in order growth, which breaks down into three focus areas:
- Acquisition: Effectively using our media channels to deploy compelling messages, brand assets, and value props that showcase compelling reasons for prospects to explore our product and discover great restaurant, grocery, and convenience delivery experiences.
- Loyalty: Partnering with our Loyalty team to develop differentiated programs and nurturing strategies to help our valued customers experience the Grubhub+ membership. The goal is to drive stickiness through delivering meaningful everyday value.
- Retention: We aim to make it easy for all of our customers—Grubhub+ members or not—to discover great local merchants and find value, so we become their first choice for on-demand delivery. The Growth team drives this through various customer engagement efforts like emails, push notifications, in-app messaging, promotional partnerships, and loyalty benefits like setting up events where customers can earn credits for repeat orders.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten, and how has it stuck with you as a leader?
Lead through asking questions. When problem-solving or taking on complex challenges, it’s important to start by building a common understanding across teams, and asking questions helps you do that across an organization and builds trust. On a different dimension, it also supports developing talent within your teams. Asking questions rather than immediately prescribing solutions encourages others to think more independently and build grounded recommendations. Most importantly, it drives a sense of ownership and responsibility over their area.
How do you work to help your team stay creative and come up with new ideas—especially in a fast-moving environment?
- Even when things are changing rapidly around you, find the elements that remain consistent so you have an anchor to true back to amid change.
- Maintain a consistent problem-solving mindset in a fast-moving environment. When things are constantly changing around you, it can be hard to pivot and change your mind. You almost have to be clinical and disciplined about it to say, okay, the business is moving here. If I want to move with it, what do I need to do even if that means walking away from work I’ve already completed?
- Be comfortable with some risk-taking. Don’t be so afraid to be wrong on certain things. Sometimes the greatest ideas come from trying new things, even when it makes you uncomfortable. You might fail five times, but if you find one idea that’s great, it can completely change the course that you’re on. Most decisions are not irreversible.
What’s something you’ve changed your mind about as a leader over the years?
My approach to risk-taking. Earlier on in my career, I would often encourage many of the agile principles like, “fail fast, learn fast.” I do believe I did a reasonable job eliciting that on my team, but I didn’t hold myself to the same bar since I wanted to have a high “win rate.”
This cautious, incremental approach only led to incremental results. It was challenging to find those breakthrough results since I was too afraid to go further. I had the fortune of having a manager push me out of my comfort zone. I started running more initiatives in parallel—making some bigger bets and moving faster to invest in encouraging tactics. I felt uncomfortable, and half the initiatives I tested during this period failed. But through that, there were a couple of breakthrough successes that led the business area to by 2-3x growth.
Final question: If you could have any other job in the company for a day, what would it be and why?
I think it would be interesting to work on the Merchant Network team and be out in the field. I know I would learn so much by being able to be face-to-face with the merchants that we serve.
I’ve been an analyst and in data-driven roles throughout my career but know through repeated experiences that the numbers don’t always tell you the whole story. Directly interacting with the customers you serve, whether it’s the merchants, the diner, drivers, or whoever else it may be, provide the color to reshape your work to directly meet their needs and solve their problems by understanding the real on the ground and how they perceive you.
