The point of Brian Chesky, AirBnB's co-founder and CEO: get further on fewer things
This is a topic which is particularly dear to me. Being someone who has struggled with the tendency to take too much initiative, to re-wire myself to be more focused on finishing stuff has been a many years deliberate effort.
See, I genuinely thought that to achieve more I had to take up more, have more things going on. The somewhat counterintuitive, yet so clear realization to me now, that the exact opposite is often true took me a little while to fully get to grips with… I believe I'm not only better at it now, but in general a better professional (and person) for it. For the clarity and the perspective of focusing and being ruthless at it.
Now, life is a bit more complex, and it's also true that there are contexts and situations in which one may benefit from several explorations in parallel. So, as usual, obviously there's nuance, and the key is doing things deliberately. Enough about me though.
"Get further on fewer things" is the theme and one that always calls my attention when it comes about in some shape or form. Particularly when it shows up as more than just thrown out empty words. And that is precisely how I perceived recent interviews I have seen from Brian Chesky, AirBnB's co-founder and current CEO.
Speaking about deliberately, I am mindfully staying out of polemics coming from how people interpreted his talks when it comes to product management and centralization of decision-making. I have thoughts about it (e.g., that often people are misinterpreting what happened with product management at AirBnB), they don't matter that much right now, nor are the focus for this piece. And in any case, I do believe every leader of any organization should dare to lead in the way they best seem fit in their context, and with their own ways (something that Brian also speaks about, by the way).
I am here to talk about the stuff that I found inspirational about how Brian is approaching things at AirBnB, which to my surprise don't seem to receive the same level of attention:
The true breaking of silos and the focus on doing less things trying to pull bigger levers (just another way of saying getting further on fewer things).
Here's a few insights (not literal quotes, but what was meant) from Brian's recent interview to
's Newsletter:List all the things which are currently going on. What if we can only do 20% of them?!
Instead of having each team doing 5 things, what if we'd have 5 teams focusing on one?!
The traditional way (with divisions and teams with their own priorities) typically means to do 80% of incremental things and only 20% of structural end-to-end experiences improvements. What if we turn that upside down?!
If you really think about it, how often can you unlock real structural value as experience in your product if all you can change is the piece of the journey your team happens to be responsible for? This is what fundamentally they seem to be trying to tackle.
Looking at the end-to-end experience in a more holistic manner, figuring out what are the right and bigger levers to pull, and rally a bunch of people to get behind executing that mission.
It's the closest I have seen a big tech company do to a concept that emerged out of Kanban method practitioners in my home country, Brazil, but typically applied on a much smaller scale, called "Dynamic Flow". With focus on the work to be done, as opposed to a team-centric approach, and re-teaming dynamically around what needs to be done.
The way I look at it is an evolution that hopefully we will see more traction towards in upcoming years. Where we recognize the fractal nature of a product (e.g., at the same time AirBnB is a single product, but can also be perceived as a set of them, each with a more specific part of the problem being solved), where we should never lose the perspective of a coherent holistic experience. But also finally get rid of the nonsense of product vs projects as a dichotomy of sorts. It's embracing the intertwining of those things in a meaningful way, and having a bit of the best of both worlds (product thinking and the coordinated effort of well-thought-through structural projects).
All of it, in my view, is quite consistent with what Jeff Patton's (creator of Story Mapping) would define product development to be about…
by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact.