[1/2] The new Airbnb (Category Management)

Interesting. interview Braian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, talks about how the company moved from a standard multi-product approach to a founder mode. I liked the interview because it describes what's going on in big grocery companies -- Airbnb has about 4k engineers. With the growth of the company, the founders move away from direct management, hire managers and transfer authority to them. At some point, a bunch of individual product lines appear inside the company with their own mini-CEOs that develop these products in their favor. And that leads to problems. Different groups within the company can work on different technical platforms, which reinvent the wheel for the fourth time, leading to a global accumulation of technical debt. Dependencies between teams can create problems and bureaucracy. Lack of accountability and greater autonomy can lead to loss of focus:)

In 2022 Airbnb has experienced a crisis and Brian fundamentally changed the scheme of management of the company. The idea is that the founder and CEO should be the chief product specialist in a product or technology company. To manage the product, Brian decided to use the Jira Product Discovery tool for prioritizing and mapping, which allows you to collect all product ideas in one place and prioritize them. The company removed the function of product management, but the people who performed it left. Reduced the number of individual groups, but made them more advanced Product management functions have spread in two directions: marketing and engineering The basic idea of separation was that you couldn’t create a product unless you knew how to talk about it. As a result, marketing and product strategy combined: Efficiency marketing is good for balancing supply and demand, but does not create cumulative advantages. Marketing as Education: Teach people about the unique benefits of products. Two years ahead, updating the product strategy roadmap every six months. Product management deals with product marketing, figuring out how people learn about products, makes demos, works on history and assets.

• Brian mentions the experiment. (a/b), noting that it is useless to drive them just like that - the tests should be based on hypotheses, and so there should be a holistic system of metrics for measuring results. (Airbnb has a high culture and good tuning for a/b testing.) Brian talks about the challenges of delegation and how CEOs need to have a clear vision of what the company is doing.

Continuation of the review in the second post.

#Management #Leadership #Processes #Engineering #Project #Software #Design #ProductManagement #BusinessStory