How Airbnb's Brian Chesky Reinvented Product Management for Success

way too many Founders apologize for how they want to run the company they find some midpoint between how they want to

run a company and how the people they lead want to run the company that's a good way to make everyone miserable

because what everyone really wants is Clarity what everyone really wants is to be able to row in the same direction

really quickly and so I basically got involved in every single detail and I basically told leaders that leaders are

in the details and there's this negative term called micromanagement I think there's a difference between

micromanagement which is like telling people exactly what to do and being in the details being in the details is what

every responsible company's board does to the CEO it doesn't mean the board is telling them what to do but if you don't

know the details how do you know people are doing a good job people think that great leader job is to like hire people

and and just Empower them to do a good job well how do you know they're doing a good job if you're not in the details

and so I made sure I was in the details and we really drove the product

today my guest is Brian chesy Brian is the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb which he started in his apartment with his

co-founders Joe Nate and has turned into an80 billion Global business with Travelers and homes in 220 countries I

was very lucky to get to work with Brian for many years and my sense is if you ask people who they consider the most

inspiring Tech or Business Leaders today Brian would be right near the top of that list in our conversation Brian

shares an depth explanation of what's happening with product management at Airbnb which caused quite a stir in the

product world when he talked about this previously we also get deep into Brian's new approach of how he runs Airbnb

including shifting away from traditional growth channels like paid growth and instead betting that if they just build

the best possible product and tell people about it growth will happen also how the product team now operates

including having just one single road map across the entire company and Brian staying very close to every design and

every feature we also get a bit into his personal life including how he finds balance and avoids burnout how he

continues to learn himself so that he can stay ahead of the business and its growth this is a very special episode

for me and I'm thrilled to bring you Brian chesy after a short word from our sponsors this episode is brought to you

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comom Lenny you fell in love with building products for a reason but sometimes the

day-to-day reality is a little different than you imagined instead of dreaming up Big Ideas talking to customers and

crafting a strategy you're drowning in spreadsheets and road map updates and you're spending your days basically

putting out fires a better way is possible introducing jira product discovery the new prioritization and

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your spreadsheets and The NeverEnding alignment efforts the old way of doing product management is over ReDiscover

what's possible with Jiro product Discovery try it for free at atlassian Brian thank you so much for being here

welcome to the podcast well thank you for having me did you ever think when I left airbeam be one that I would have a

podcast and two that you would be on my podcast I had no idea you would become a podcast host and that you would have

such sucessful podcast yeah congrats on everything it is awesome I appreciate it congrats to you too Brian things seem to

be going great I'm excited that you're here I want to start with the elephant in the room for a lot of listeners of

this podcast uh what is going on with product management at Airbnb you made some comments at figma config and a lot

of people got this impression that you eliminated product management Airbnb and I've heard from a lot of product execs

having boardroom conversations as a result of that and they were trying to decide should we remove product

management from the company should we significantly cut product management so I'm just curious to hear from you what

is the latest on your thinking on product management and what's happening with product management at Airbnb I

spoke at figma you know like four or five months ago I spoke to a room of designers I then uh

got off stage I saw people somebody tweet that said something to the nature of that I said I got rid of the product

management function all the desires room started shearing that's right so I want to I want to I want to talk about two

things what I actually meant because I didn't actually get rid of the people and also why do the people in the room

cheer because that's also like a thing we should ask ourselves I hope everyone listening to this podcast should

understand where did that place come from that 5,000 designers in the room cheered because I thought I eliminated

the existence of a function because if I said I eliminated the engineering function no one would have cheered it

was specifically that function so I want to talk about what that might mean it wasn't the people it's the way they're

working together so we don't have any longer the traditional product management function as it existed with

when you were Z but we didn't get rid of people helping Drive the product what we did

is we combined what one might call the inbound product development responsibilities of product manager with

the outbound or marketing responsibilities of product marketing that's the first thing we did the second

thing we did is we offboard much of the program management functions that product managers may do to actual

program managers a lot of people the product management title are actually program managers so we actually started

offboarding some responsibilities to program management the last thing we did is we made the group smaller and more

senior so we don't really have a lot of Junior product marketers so the most senior people are called Product

marketers but everyone has to understand how to talk about the product so the basic idea is this you can't build a

product unless you know how to talk about the product you can't be an expert in making the product unless you're also

an expert in the market of it and a lot of companies what they do is they ship a product it doesn't work and they say we

tried that it didn't work and if you say you tried it didn't work my question is was it a bad product a bad strategy or

bad execution maybe it was a really well-made product but you had no distribution plan you had no way to talk

about the product if you build a great product and no one knows about it did you even build a product so that is

essentially what we do we have a much smaller function the people are much more senior they have much more

responsibility the other thing though is that they do not control or drive designing or engineering we are a very

purely functional model they manage by influence do not have control now you might ask like how does

that work in a company where people can only manage by influence here's the amazing thing we built and designed a

company where you can manage by influence and no one has to like you you don't actually have to have to win

people over oh and last thing I want to say is why did 5,000 designers Shear when the people thought I removed the

product management function because I want to say I I don't I don't know if I can speak on behalf of all the designers

but having talked to live designers I think designers and the valley are very very frustrated with the product

development process not to say the product managers but they're extremely um frustrated and I think a lot of

designers feel like they're compromising many designers I know heads of design well-known heads of design I told them

they're not designers they're design administrators they're running a design service organization because Silicon

Valley often treats design as a service organization you know like design is catching things before it Go outs the

door it's not actually typically part of the develop process and I think this is not just bad for design I think it's bad

for product managers and Engineers because we all want to build the best products and one day you wake up and a

variety of phenomenon might have happened and if people are watching this from a large company here might be some

of the characteristics the first thing you notice is that these different groups might be running on slightly

different technical Stacks that's the first problem and they may actually be require accumulating technical debt the

next problem you'll see is that there's a lot of dependencies so five teams are going s different directions but they

all need a payment platform and so that on it happens is that the teams that everyone's dependent on get this backup

like a deli and people are going around the block and then they are basically like at some point they just kind of

give up so then the teams that are dependent on other people say give me the resources I'll build this group

myself so instead of five teams going to marketing to get a campaign or to leverage some service they start

building their own marketing departments own groups so now they're really becoming separate divisions and this is

where division comes from now once you have a division your division is as successful as you are a priority so now

you have to advocate for your division so there's a lot of advocacy if you have dependencies you've got to persuade

people by building relationships and so the people that are like that build the best relationships are the ones that get

the most resources and that creates what we call politics it's so now politics that brw in the company and

suddenly people get more subdivided more subdivided subdivided and that creates another problem which we call

bureaucracy and that bureaucracy means it's hard to know who is doing what you can't like people are going in different

directions and that creates a lack of accountability when there's lack of accountability then there's a sense that

what I do doesn't matter and that creates complacency and then suddenly a fast growing company becomes a big slow

moving bureaucracy this is a general Arc winds up happening and then you end up having this situation where company's

done like 10 marketing efforts but no customers heard anything they have thousands of Engineers they shipped all

these products but a customer can't tell you a single thing you did and you know marketing and Engineering like don't

talk to each other it's not even they hate each other they're like in different universes I've always said

that the health of an organization one simple horis is how Coast's engineering and marketing and marketing is a lot of

companies are like the waiters Engineers are like the chefs and the chefs yell at the waiters they go in the kitchen in

fact the waiters are the ones talking to the customers all day and they also know how to sell things so you really want

them being enjoined at the hip and you want Engineers to be thinking about maybe had to talk about the products

that they're building so this is the problem that we had and I also the other thing we were doing is as you know Lenny

we're spending a lot of money in Performance Marketing I don't think Performance Marketing is a bad thing I

think Performance Marketing a laser uh actually my co-founder who obviously know well Joe used to have this metaphor

of lasers flash bulbs and chandeliers if you want to light up a room performance marking is a laser it can light up a

corner of a room you don't want to use a bunch of lasers to light up an entire room you should use a chandelier and

that's what brand marketing is but if you do need to laser in in Balance supply and demand then Performance

Marketing is really good it literally lasers in Performance Marketing though doesn't create very good accumulating

advantages because it's not an investment now if you want to build it permanently like booking.com if you have

a really highi now you can have a Performance Marketing Arbitrage business but assuming you don't want a Arbitrage

business you actually need to be investing and so we think of marketing as education that we're educating people

on the unique benefits so a lot of companies don't do product marketing they do brand marketing which are ads

about the app or they do Performance Marketing but they're never really educating people about new things

they're making and shipping and because no one's marketing new things they shipping there's no purpose to ship new

things because you ship new things and people don't know about them or use them or they're not educated and so you try

these big new things people don't adopt them immediately so then you get more and more

incremental now what we do is we do we have a rolling two-year road map we don't even really do an annual plan I

mean we as you remember Lenny you're at Airbnb we would have like three-month planning Cycles now planning cycle is

just a budgeting cycle and it's like most people only spend a week or two on it some don't spell any time on it and

we have a rolling two-year product plan the strategy product strategy road map that gets updated every six months with

releases we release products um every May and every November or October obviously we did one today we can talk

about and the entire company works together they Row in the same direction and the product management also does the

product marketing so they're figuring how people are going to learn about it they're doing the demos they're

understanding the story the videos they're you know figuring out all the customer touch points making sure

everyone understands it our product marketing works with Communications we like work months ahead of time on all

the different assets and when we're working at a launch one of the first things we'll do is start figuring out

what the story is and the story will often dictate the product because ultimately you have to tell a story to

people but a story also is a really helpful way to develop a cohesive product right we wanted a company where

a thousand people could work but it'll look like 10 people did it and so sorry that was a bit of a brain dumb but that

is a little bit of a universal theory for how we develop products now I I could go into a lot more detail but I

probably will'll stop there that was amazing you touched on all of the things I want to talk about so I'm gonna oh

geez so we can go deeper and deeper because the rabbit exactly exactly so I'm going to pull on a couple threads

the first is this idea of a single road map you talked about and what this reminds me of is I was talking to

another very prominent CE of a public company and he pointed out that there's this cycle that he sees a lot of

Founders go through where they initially run the show they're in charge they tell people what to build and then over time

they're encouraged to delegate and to empower and it leads to a bunch of optimization work and small thinking

maybe and you talked about bureaucracy in politics and then eventually you realize I need to take the RS again and

drive the ship and kind of Take Back Control of what's happening and it feels like you went on that Journey that's

exactly how it went and that's how it goes almost at every company I've heard of by the way I think that like many

years ago I remember I think reading a blog post by Ben Horowitz saying that a lot of people tell product Le Founders

or engineering Le Founders to step away and delegate their product to other people but suddenly they delegated away

the thing they're best at the thing that is hardest for them to replace so we don't have a chief product officer title

but if we had one it would be me you know they they I wouldn't have a chief product officer I think the CEO should

be basically the chief product officer of a product OR tech company and the CEO is not the chief product officer then I

don't know if they're a product or tech-led company maybe maybe that's okay if they're an Ops company or if they're

a marketing company or if they're like not a tech company at all but ultimately I think the founder CEO should be that

person so when we were starting Airbnb it was probably the three of us you know as you know like I think Airbnb was a

unique situation where it was three of us I don't think any of us was that dominant I probably played the closest

thing to the role of the the people listening like the closest thing to the role of the product manager but again I

did marketing I did design I did like Ops I did like kind of a little bit of everything so I was basically everything

but engineering and then as we grew I started getting more and more hands off in the product and I always remember

Lenny when you this there was this Paradox where the less involved I was in a project I mean there was there they be

clear there were times I inserted myself and dysfunction occurred that is absolutely true and that was just a

learning experience for me but there's this other scenario where the less involved I was in the project the more

spin there was the less clear the goals the less advocacy the team had the less resources the fewer resources they had

and then therefore the slower they moved and the slower they moved the more they assumed was because I was too involved

right because people assume that that our natural equilibriums to move fast moving slow it's because of an over

involvement in leadership and therefore I would get less involved I would give teams more control I would give them

teams more empowerment and the more I kept giving people what they asked for initially they may have been happy but

the outcome of it was always it seemed weirdly like they got less of what they wanted they wanted to move faster so I'd

power them and they'd move slower and again how that happened is what I described that you you you end up in a

situation where you're delegating down so I think that things were getting worse and slower and slower and slower

2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 and by 2019 we were spending a billion dollars

on AdWords we weren't really like investing in the brand we're doing a huge amount of AB testing I think AB

testing is important in in times but like let me actually let me let me let me let me clarify you be testing we

don't test blue versus green we have a control and a treatment like I think we did with ere so we have a design we

might do a hold back occasionally to see how the thing is working but if we do an AB test there has to be a hypothesis if

we don't have a hypothesis and a is better than b then we're stuck with b and that's like a really really big

problem but never you can never change it and imagine 10 teams doing AB testing and like imagine if you designed

software the way designed a house or designed house the way design software and we AB test a sofa and we said like

well how does a sofa work and it seems like with this sofa that we've AB tested people spend more time in the living

room so therefore like people are going like this room better but actually the sofa has a relationship to the end

stands which have relationship to the lamps which have relationship to the carpet or the rug which have

relationship to the television which have relationship to the house and everything else so you have to think

about the whole cohesive system and I started realizing that I remember working with as I asked one person on

your team somebody you know well and I asked him I said why is our I feel like I open our app and the product hasn't

changed in like four years I remember saying this like 2018 2019 and he this person described that you know well as

just the way we were doing things the initial way we were doing things to move fast had made us move slow

so we end up doing is it was now late 2019 I don't know what to do I'm like the product is slow the app seems not

change cost are rising I keep adding more people there seems to be more like politics by politics I mean advocating

for like individual interests rather the whole of the company more bureaucracy meaning like meetings about meetings

about meetings and a lot of dependencies people were describing working 80 hours and getting 20 hours of productive work

done which is like just like a crazy ratio a week and I didn't really quite know what to do and then right before

the pandemic I meet two people that really affected how I thought about things the first was heroki asai heroi

now works at Airbnb he's one of my Executives and actually product design product marketing design and marketing

repor to him and he was a creative director for Apple so he worked for Steve Jobs was like basically dotted

line to Steve for many many years came from graphic design eventually ran all of marketing Communications and apple

marketing Communications they actually like they actually designed the app they made the app they designed like all the

marketing touch points for the store right so it wasn't just ads it was like every brand touch point they were

responsible so everything flowed through marketing and so marketing became the governing factor that made everything

really organized I met another person or I got reacquainted a person named Johnny IV and Johnny I was the head of

industrial design then Chief design offic or apple and they described this way of running a company that was

totally different than the way that I was running it it was basically the way that Steve Jobs ran Apple from about

1998 till he died in 2011 Apple somewhat runs it this way today but they are semi like the services is turning into

Division and they are just so big that I think it's you know not a oneto one anymore but they are still technically

run this way and I had this image of not being divisional because we were running like we 10 divisions we had a flights

Division and you know we had a homes division which was divided to proost and core host and Lux and we had business

travel and we had like you know a magazine and we had experiences and we had.org and we had china we had like

these 10 different divisions all going in 10 different directions and I created this culture where everyone want to be a

business manager and or a know business leader general manager which made them want to create many general managers

right and so the company kept getting subdivided subdivided subdivided and that made it very very difficult turn

and this was all about me delegating responsibility the problem is if you're running a divisional company you're a

product Leed founder you're kind of what are you doing like strategy Capital allocation my job went from proactive to

very reactive I was reacting to a lot of things I was in a lot of meetings try to adjudicate different issues between

groups so then the pandemic occurs and I had this image on mind it's like I have this dream that I could run a company

much more like a startup I remember going on a walk with Joe and Nate and bolus it was October

2019 and I told them I had this dream that I left the company 10 years ago and you they just

asked me to come back and I said I was horrified at what I found and they said well what did you

find I said I found a company that on the one hand had amazing culture and people with a great Mission with a brand

people really loved but the we lost our design routes you know we weren't investing in

the long term we were obsessing over hitting metrics we didn't actually have any cohesive understanding of what we

were doing it was really hard to get work done a lot of the great people were leaving and cost was rising and both

growth are slowing and that was exactly kind of what was happening and then the pandemic occurred and we lost 80% of our

business in8 weeks and then suddenly we're like oh my God like I remember having basically staring into the abyss

and luckily I've never had a near-death experience but the way it's been described to me is it's like your flly

flashes before you your eyes and you have Clarity and that's what happened to our business we had a near-death

business experience and our business flashed before our eyes and so suddenly I basically got into action and I said

I'm going to run it this other way where I'm going to get back and evolved in the details and by the way Lenny here's the

funny thing before the crisis a lot of people felt like I was too involved in different areas once the crisis happened

guess what happened people are like what do we do we need you more involved and so I got more involved and when I got

involved I made the following changes the first thing I did is I took like I said everything we're doing has to be

written down and put into Google Google like a Google sheet it turns out people couldn't even write down everything they

were doing I remember one person told me you you think we're doing too many things for me to ever be able to

document I'm like what but anyways we have eventually got everyone to write everything down and I said okay we can

do about 20% of these things and so if everyone says oh I might it be simple I'm only doing three things yes but

you're one of like a thousand people so actually we're doing 3,000 things so instead of one team doing three things

three teams should do one thing so we totally cut down the number of projects we removed layers of management I wanted

to be as few layers as possible from the leaders of the team we went to a functional model we went back to a

startups so we said we're not going to have divisional leaders we're going to have design engineering product and

which turned to product marketing and marketing and Communications and sales and operations all the functions of a

startup I said we're goingon to have fewer employees we're gonna have fewer more senior people there's a great

saying that the best way to slow a project down is to add more people to it and so we felt like very few employees

we have fewer than 7,000 employees today as a relative comparison I think Uber has 30,000 and it's not to say they're

big it's just to say that's how small we are and we've really benefited from having not a lot of employees so we had

we made sure that every executive was an expert in their functional domain so you know how there's a lot of engineering

managers that aren't that technical or maybe not a lot but they exist or there's designers but there's design

leaders who who lead the people a design leaders job should be managing the design first the people second that's

Johnny did or like they're they're interchangeable I I could never imagine Johnny AV at Apple just being a manager

of people he was looking and designing the work with the team how do you manage the people without managing their work

how do you give them development if you're not in the details with them on the work so the same thing is true so

people had to be experts everyone had to be an expert I stopped pushing decision-making down I pulled it in I

created one shared Consciousness and I said the top 30 40 people in the company are going to have one continuous

conversation metrics are going to be subordinate to the calendar so we're going to have a road map it's going to

be a two-year road map well update the road map literally every month people may Wonder well like what if the world

changes yeah it changes every day so the road map's something where the next month hasn't changed but two years out

it changes it's a rolling road map and by the way if Ukraine like gets invaded and you want to like provide housing for

refugees you can still pivot people and adapt very quickly we house 12 12,000 refugees so you still keep a reserve of

resources to be able to Pivot and do things because there's always unexpected events I created this new function

called product marketing we basically describe what that is I made the group much smaller I took a lot of product

managers I reassign as program managers I had many of them trained an actual program management because their roles

got much bigger um program management airb is a high status job a lot of companies it's like a coordination job

and me we said because we're going to do launches it's high status we said we're going to do two launches a year and you

can't ship something unless it's on the road map so every single thing in the company with the exception of some

infrastructure projects have have to be on the road map and then I'm going to review all the work and so we create the

CEO review schedule where I said I'm getting back in the involved in the project and I'm going to design I'm

going to review all the product and all the marketing so every project I would do review either every week every two

weeks every four weeks every eight weeks or every 12 weeks there'd be a Cadence and then I had a p program manager that

would score all the projects either they're green yellow or red mean they're on track or not on track to ship whether

we thought they were work we don't know until after we ship it but I use the reviews of the work every single week

and the reason there's not a lot of bureaucracy and the reason you don't need any influence at Airbnb is I'd

review the work and if something wasn't happening then I would like stop the meeting and say why isn't this happening

and like we would all get together and so you couldn't have a situation where like a team wouldn't collaborate and so

it would be like I could then feel the work of an of an individual engineer cuz imagine it's like we're a car company

and I I see the car prototype every week and I notice there's a there's a there's a something about the tires off now I I

can identify the individual person who was blocked so every week I would see I would try to see the equivalent of at

least a semi assembly of the entire new product we were working on which allowed me to identify with teams the different

bottlenecks happening in the company and the reviews were the thing that allowed us to dictate the pace and so because we

had unal we all these reviews I didn't need to mandate people going back to an office I didn't really care where they

worked because I could track how well they were working because of the review cycle I it's so these were these were

like some of the changes that we made we also started really building out much more of a marketing Communications and

creative function we built out our own in-house creative agency so we use production Partners but we don't use

widening kendi or Sher or any those anymore we actually build our own in-house agency so to speak which is a

creative group The Creative Group does a lot of the the the not just the ads but the creative on the product so we got

really really functional we got rid of a function called ux writing and we combined it with marketing writing we

said wait aren't the best writers like why don't we just have the best writers do everything why is ux writing a

separate function because actually the emails the app the ads should all be one voice now there may be people that come

from a different background like there are people that come from ux but they all roll up to one function of writing

and writing should not go to design writing should go to a function called writing unless you want your head of

writing to report to design then that doesn't make sense so we we we really make made a lot of those changes just to

round up the question that you asked I think that like way too many Founders apologize for how they want to run the

company I don't know why they do but I think they apologize for how they want run a company they basically find some

midpoint between how they want to run a company and how the people they lead want to run the company if you're a

Founder what I would tell you is the problem with finding a negotiation between how you want to run the company

the people you want is that's a good way to make everyone miserable because what everyone really wants is Clarity what

everyone really wants is to be able to row in the same direction really quickly and also if you try to appease employees

they may not even be there for the whole time so we have entire project the company where somebody advocated to do

it it was a big commitment and then they left and now we're still doing the project they advocated for so it really

has to be something that everyone wants to sign up for not just the person who's there because they might not always be

there and so you know I basically got involved in every single detail and I basically told leaders that leaders are

in the details and there's this negative term called micromanagement and I think I think there's a difference between

micromanagement which is like telling people exactly what to do and being in the details being the details is what

every responsible company's board does to the CEO it doesn't mean the board is telling them what to do but if you don't

know the details how do you know people are doing a good job people think that great leader job is to like hire people

and and just Empower them to do a good job well how do you know they're doing a good job if you're not the details and

so I made sure I was in the details and we really drove the product this episode is brought to you by EPO

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geo.com Lenny you guys found such a unique way of working I've never heard of a company

working in these ways and so many contrarian ways I think it's going to be a really interesting case study as

things progress essentially what you done is shut down traditional growth channels or at least limited them PID

growth and maybe SEO maybe referrals at least for a while and you've kind of shifted to let's just make an awesome

product and tell people about it and our bet is that what's going to grow do you feel like this can work for most other

products or is there is like a consumer specific opportunity what advice would you give to Founders that are thinking

about man we should try something like this I think that this methodology can work for everyone but I don't think you

have to be as ideal logical or have to go all the way to 100 you I still think growth channels matter to be clear we

still spend money on Performance Marketing we still do measure conversion and we will do some experiments think of

conversion and growth optimization as like running a football down a field and think of these big like leaps as passive

you should probably be doing 80% passes 20% running the ball down the field and a lot of companies they do 80% running

down the ball down the field versus in 20% passes so I think that this methodology will work for everyone I

mean here are the things I believe I'll give you a checklist number one I think that the CEO unless they're not a

product person should think of themselves that this cheap product officer and they should be involved in

the product number two if you're not functional I would at least think about everyone being really close together so

here's another way saying it Lenny every product manager should be interconnected and know what everyone else is doing

they shouldn't be independent siloed unless they really are running like separate companies or separate orgs and

they have no dependencies I think that every leader should be an expert in what they're leading there should be no

people managers in the entire company and when I say people managers meaning your only responsibility is people not

the work or not the domain because you can't manage people the void of their work you know imagine like a fire chief

they don't know anything about like putting out fires like that's crazy like you have to know the subject matter

people should aim to have as few people as possible on their team I'm not saying eliminate people I mean grow slowly and

do not be Reckless five teams should do one thing rather than one team do five things so

that's just a metaphor but people should work together I think that people should consider doing launches you can by the

way ship every hour of every day but then package it and tell a story if you want to hold the product back I think

that team should use data but they should also use research and intuition there's a designer called Charles em and

said you can't delegate understanding if you're going to do ab experiments or measure data you have to understand what

it means I think that you have to have an intuition intuition comes not from arbitrariness it comes from

understanding I would make sure that you have engineering and design ideally report to the founder product-led person

I would not have design under product unless you have an extremely good reason the product person kind of is a designer

I would TR to think about product management expanding the responsibility and including

distribution understanding the customer and teaching people how to tell a story I would try to make sure that the

product managers are a combination of Art and Science I do not think you want purely technical product managers doing

things if they're going to work with not technical functions right if they're only work technical functions that's

fine but they don't work at non-technical functions I think that's a problem I should make sure that

marketing and engineering are interconnected I would make sure that you have as few layers between a CEO and

other people if you're a CEO every direct to your direct should be a implicit DOA line to you so I treat

every direct to my direct as if they're a direct report a DOA line I don't try to conflict with the direction of my

team but I always want to know what another layer below me is doing I think you should think of each release as a

chapter of a story or like an episode of TV series and you should think of your company in a five or 10 year story you

may not know where you are in 10 years but you're telling this ongoing story and most of all I would say that

everyone should Row in the same direction if there's only one thing I said in this interview today which I'm

not sure what it would be but I I I think a good candidate is try to get everyone to row together in the same

direction otherwise why the hell are you all in the same company speaking of rowing in the same

direction you had a huge launch today I know you wanted to talk about it your winter release and it kind of is the

culmination of lot of the things you're talking about I'd love to hear just some of the stuff you're launching let me

just back up seleni so you know this problem really like well one of the best things of Airbnb is that we're this

marketplace where guest and host come together and we have all this unique inventory and people you know list on

Airbnb and every home is one of a kind and we have seven million homes and there's all this surprise and all this

delight the problem is that every home is one of a kind and you often don't know what you're going to get and so

a lot of guests have described checking into Airbnb as a Moment of Truth where when you open the door that you know the

home you find out if the home is exactly the home that you booked and this turns out to be a big problem for people

wanting to book an Airbnb and when we survey guests or people who don't use Airbnb the number one re the hotels are

not as special they're not as unique but the advantage they have is you know what you're going to get you know exactly

you're going to get and so what we found is that reliability is airb be's Achilles heel or at least it has been

that you know with hotels you know you're going to get an Airbnb you don't always know you're going to get and so

we asked ourselves what if we could combine the uniqueness of Airbnb with the reliability that you've come to

speca hotel and that's what we've done with guest favorites guest favorites are you know homes that guests in our

community love the most we took 370 million reviews on Airbnb plus millions of customer service tickets plus all the

host cancellation data and we use all the signal to create the top two million homes that this collection of two

million homes that we call guest favorites because the homes the guest rate the highest we

think combine the uniqueness of Airbnb with the reliability to come to expect hotel and I can't imagine there's a lot

of use cases where you wouldn't want to book a guest favorite we think that's also part of this broader system of

readings and reviews you see as you know Airbnb is built on a system system of trust and we invented this new way for

people to trust one another you know at least at scale you know through through through living together certainly and we

felt like the rating and review system could use a little bit of an upgrade so we obviously made some upgrades to

ratings and reviews and the final thing and this brings up another point I might bring up is we've completely overhauled

the host tab so you know one of the most important things when you get to an Airbnb is the listing is accurate but

the problem is that a lot of host listings don't have all the details up to up to date so they might not like

describe perfectly their listing they might not have filled up their amenities they might not have a photo tour and the

reason why as we're doing research is because they found it was hard to manage their listing and it was hard to manage

their listing because was designed as this hodg Podge Thing by different teams over many years oh here's the other

thing Lenny when you were at Airbnb we had a guest team and a host team we don't have a guest team and host team we

have a design team we have a marketing team we have an engine engineering team the reason we don't break the app into

guest and host anymore is because reviews affect guest and host it turns out that almost everything involves

connecting the guest and host and you have separate teams that tend to have separate road maps that go in separate

directions they become incompatible so we have product marketers that responsible guest and host things but

there's the the designers are in the engineers are fairly fungible and they can move from Project to project and

then we keep some people especially the product marketing people on a domain area but we really want to make sure

that we have designers and Engineers covering a much larger surface and so so that's what we did we have this

incredible new tab called the listing tab that we designed it's quite possibly one of the nicest things we ever

designed if you go to my Twitter account you'll see a little Sizzle reel from some of the design we've done by the way

the design is a whole new aesthetic I'd like to like make the announcement that I think flat design is over or ending

you know I think if you remember the 2000s was dominated by skew morphism the 2010s have been dominated with the

launch of iOS 7 by flat design I think we're going to move back into a world with color texture dimensionality more

haptic feedback but I don't think it's going to be schor fism where it pretends to be like a wood drain to reference

like a dashboard or leather but I think it's going to have a sense of Dimension I think the reason why is we're spending

more and more time on screens and we want the screens to replicate some of what we see in the natural environment

light texture I think it's more intuitive it's more playful I think AI allows the development of more

sophisticated interfaces people in AI are gravitating to image generating art that has got more a dimension to it and

so I think that we've we've really started to push this more three-dimensional colorful aesthetic

that I think think I think it's going to be where a lot of interface design is going and we built this AI powered photo

tour where we created our own AI computer visiting language that we trained on a 100 million photos and it

can basically scan all your photos and organize them by room so that's what we did today maybe just to round it up what

I would say is that none of this would have been possible in the old way of working you know we could have

theoretically launch a lot of these features but you know really getting them to work together has been key and

guest favorites has required the guest people you know you you have to work with guests you have to work a host you

have to essentially you know you know have you have to like figure out how to communicate to the market so it's a much

more integrated approach the designs you talked about they are incredibly cute you tweeted a little video of a lot of

them like the couch with little textures on it and uh uh it is really cool also the listing tab I think people that

aren't hosts don't understand how important the listing experience to a host that's like I think how many host

are there 7 million something like there's there's there's 7 million listings yeah over 7 million listings

yeah and so that's like the home base that's like the small business platform for millions of people and so I I worked

on the host site so I have a special place in my heart for host features and I feel like Travelers don't really

appreciate the value of that part of the product well yeah you you did some amazing work there yeah I think that

like the big lesson Lenny the other thing we learned is to create a great guest experience you need

great host and to have great hosts they need great tools and so if you want to create a great experience for guests it

often starts with building great tools for hosts to enable them to provy the great experience for guests and so that

was one of the theories behind the listing tab is we're going to build great tools for hosts they're going to

love it and we also felt like if we put te in the design of our app that hosts are going to see that and that they're

going to actually but care into hosting even more than they already do and they they do put a lot of care in now

speaking of great products a defining characteristic of briyan chesy in my mind is how big you make people think

how you push people to think bigger memories I have of you is in meetings we present our goal and you're always

saying how do we tenx this what would it take to 10x this idea and somehow we often hit these crazy goals after you

10x them or sometimes just double them what have you learned about just the power of setting really ambitious goals

but also finding the balance with not demoralizing people if they don't hit these really ambitious goals as you know

there was a there was a saying inside of Airbnb it was add a zero add a zero at the end which is to make to imagine

something order man to bigger the exercise isn't necessarily to say if people say they want to hit a goal I say

okay I added to zero you have to hit that goal it's more the exercise of what would it take to be 10x bigger or do

something 10 times better because what you find is when you push people they will sometimes think about

the problem differently and one of the best ways to get unstuck from a problem is to imagine a 10x scale or 10x better

or 10x faster where you can't do the current process to do it you have to think differently about the problem and

to think differently about the problem means you have to deeply understand the problem and to deeply understand the

problem you have to break it into its components and we might call this like first principle thinking what are the

foundational elements that comprise this problem and how can you reconstruct them so the first thing

is I think by adding a zero at least conceptually for teams to helps some understand a problem the second is I

think one of the most important things for a Founder leader to do is set the pace to a team I think the pace of the

team is one of the most important things you can do and that pace is sometimes governed not by how hard people work but

how decisive they are if you want to improve the speed of a company then make faster decisions and that fast decisions

come from a bias of action if we're in a meeting we don't just say like okay like let's Circle back on this next week no

we'll have it done by next week let's stay in this meeting till it's done what are you doing have a bias for Action

who's responsible okay what are you doing okay let's check in an hour I'll call you in the morning okay how are we

do this and so you end up getting three months of work done over that period of time but the last thing I'll say about

adding a zero Lenny is I remember there was a story about a great uh basketball coach named John Wooden he was one of

the uh winningest basketball coaches I think in college basketball history perhaps the greatest and someone asked

him once I'm going to paraphrase what he said like what is your secret to success and he said that you know I just asked

my players to do their very best and I remember thinking to myself that doesn't sound like the secret to success asking

people to do their best but there was an implicit thing that he didn't say which is that he saw potential people that

they never saw on themselves and so the role of a leader is to see potential in people that they may not even see

themselves and when I tell somebody it's not good enough either I'm saying you're not good enough or I believe that you

have more potential than you're showing me so in other words you can push a team and they could feel demoralized because

they can feel like what they're doing is not good enough if they have a fixed mindset or you create a growth mindset

organization where the more I'm involved the more I say you can do better it's because the more I believe in you and I

know that you have more in you and the way to know if a team could do better is if they're life dependent I could they

do it and Indie Grove used to say that there's competency and motivation and motivation is if they're like not

literally dependent on it but like if it was a crisis or if it was like a defining moment in their lives I think

the job of a leader is not to make it life and death that's too far but to be able to motivate a team to see potential

in them that they don't see in themselves and to really push them to set a Tempo to break something down to

first principal thinking and if you do that then I think that's going to be the opposite of these slow movings kind of

soulc crushing bureaucracies I've definitely been through that where you set a crazy goal

and then we ended up hitting it and so I've seen that myself with some of the things you've

talked about of say do it now we're not going to wait another week to Circle back and the stuff you talked about of

taking on the CPO role not having a CPO and also all these launchers it sounds like a lot of work and aot of hours what

have you learned about avoiding burnout and creating balance and also just helping people on your team avoid

burnout and creating balance so first of all um I want to give you a a a very surprising learning I weirdly

now the more I get involved this is so weird the more in the details I am the more time I have in my hands that's a

paradox and I want to explain that Paradox it doesn't make any sense but when I explain this process to people

that I would be in the details we'd have one- shared Consciousness I would review everything we would do endless edits of

even the press release it would seem like I would be working 800 hours a week and that people would be disempowered

and that no one would want to do anything and I got just the opposite here's what I found if you decide to be