# TBM 255: The New Airbnb (Lenny's Podcast) W/Melissa Perri  ## Metadata - Author: [[John Cutler]] - Full Title: TBM 255: The New Airbnb (Lenny's Podcast) W/Melissa Perri - Category: #articles - Summary: Lenny's podcast with Melissa Perri discussed changes in product management at Airbnb, reflecting on the founders' experiences and the company's evolution. They explored topics like leadership challenges, company strategy, and the empowerment of the product management team. The discussion highlighted the importance of understanding a company's journey and adapting strategies to navigate growth and change effectively. - URL: https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-255-the-new-airbnb-lennys-podcast?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_little-text-block ## Highlights - Is every founder a product person? Is a founder the right product person for the entire lifecycle of a company? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyeffgtes0f2597w8vg8d9t6)) - Chesky mentioned that the job of a leader is "to be able to motivate a team to see potential in them[selves] that they don't see in themselves, and to push them." ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyeffa1k70w1wjzg471d3k4q)) - In our experience working with founders, we've found that they can be magicians at running the "zero to one" playbook. However, they start to get uncomfortable when the scale kicks in. It becomes very difficult for them to figure out what is happening, who to trust, where to "lean in," when to delegate, and when to "go deep." They go on kicks, persuaded that X is the problem, only to discover that it is Y (and Y isn't something you can solve in a day, and your advisors don't know everything). It can be very hard to transition to thinking of your company as a product vs. just the product as the product and addressing the known unknowns regarding competence, leadership style, etc. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyefhcj4fb7hstvzvgkk3bsq)) - Frequently, founders don't get the mentorship they need in Product Management leadership and CEO leadership to transition from startup to growth to enterprise. Or they don't hire the leadership expertise in Product Management, thinking this is an innate playbook that founders should possess. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyefka634xbjc72pnc6na3er)) - AirBnB was disrupting a travel industry that had already settled into being in the arbitrage business (Booking, etc.) At the time, other companies in the valley were doing similar things in different domains and hitting the arbitrage vs. differentiation challenge. Chesky mentions in the podcast that they did not want to be "in the arbitrage business." ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyefrt7d1a9zb9fd4cc38az9)) - Leadership in "wartime" vs. "peacetime" looks very different. During "wartime," more control is usually warranted when a company is going down the wrong path to set it right. Airbnb's business declined by 80% during COVID-19, which is about as existential as possible. It was a "wartime" shift for sure. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyefz4vd1z2c1z1wybfcqpd6)) - In our experiences, companies experience macro pendulum shifts in working over multiple years or decades. Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, a catalyst for a shift we are still witnessing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyeg0vth5hbq6w9jthcren6q)) - Companies are constantly transitioning between more centralized and more decentralized versions of themselves—explore, expand, and extract, etc. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyeg137dx2931sestqz9agj5)) - Using this simple model (below), is/was Airbnb all three things at once? Is Airbnb a classic Silicon Valley story of meteoric, unprecedented growth, which realistically was almost impossible to reign in? And how applicable is Airbnb's journey to your journey? [  ](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7cc12d18-9dbd-4fe5-bab4-5d2493efc677_1776x1716.jpeg) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyeg1nbcp3k75hps0amgpa6p)) - In the late 2010s, it was very sexy to establish the GM/business unit model and detached products into silos even when they were interconnected. Why was that a popular approach at that time for businesses? What were they optimizing for? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyeg43m0rhz83zgkh18bc4wc)) - Caveat: Don't underestimate the impact of the macro environment on this. When money was cheap, investors were more optimistic, and "landing" really qualified senior leaders often required granting them "ownership" (at least on paper)...this made more sense. This is no knock on the GM model. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyeg5m722qnz9amhx4sy28x2)) - It sounds like Chesky and AirBnB decided it had gotten too granular and isolated when defining teams and domains. The "units" were distinct but perhaps had too many dependencies, and the customer journey crisscrossed the domains. Sometimes, this happens when teams introduce a GM model prematurely or to satiate *internal needs, not customer needs*—customers don't care and don't imagine these as distinct products. Sometimes they are facing ridiculous pressure to grow, and lots of available money to make that happen—the answer is growth at the expense of fragmentation. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyeg75gawmgm64qst1whhfew)) - • How did they model their product manager hiring practices until this change? What were the main criteria for hiring new PMs? What skills did they reward? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyeg834px7f3qx3qdqywqm56)) - Chesky mentions that they made the Product Managers more commercial instead of purely technical. It sounds like many of them were order takers or local optimizers rather than strategic thinkers—data-driven but driving in data circles, growth-hacking but losing the thread. All good Product Managers should be commercially minded. So, how did they hire the product managers, and how did they reward them? There are a bunch of different product management philosophies out there; what philosophy did they ascribe to? Who set the tone? Who was providing the strategy to lead the product management team? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyeg9mbgc0mkbj067t40c62s)) - We've also seen a misinterpretation of the word "empowered." Were people asking Chesky to "let us do what we want," or were they asking for decisive decision-making, a strategy, and resolving "ties" (with dependencies)? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyegc4qahkvyt5ek06cnv659)) - One definition of empowerment is "providing the team with authority, necessary resources, skills, support, and clear goals." Does that match his definition? If not, what's behind that? Are people asking you as a leader for more empowerment? If so, what do you suspect is behind that? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hyegbb06qdy309571b92f40g))