AA120 - Did AirBnB Fire Their Product Managers?

You fire all the product managers. That's the message that I saw on LinkedIn recently. Brian Chesky is who is the CEO of Airbnb, went on Config 2023 as Figma conference. And, he said something along the lines of, We got rid of all of our product managers and it got a big applause from all the designers in the crowd. Since the clickbait has been making its rounds on LinkedIn, we're gonna actually watch the source and react to it. It's only 20 something minutes long, so we should be able to get through it pretty quick. Om Patel, he covers the teams side and the enterprise side of the podcast. I'm Brian Orlando. I cover the products and Curtis is back. Hey, welcome back Curtis. Ah, So I've listened to this now a couple of times since you sent it to me. Yeah. Just cuz I, I tried to make sure, because like when you first listened to something like this, you start peeling back the layers of like, what did he actually say? And there's, there's a lot of good information in there. There's probably some ways that he probably expressed it with not the best wording. I, I found myself thinking through what is their product like, is he referring to the website that connects host to guests? Is he talking about the product of the house itself? Is he talking about a mobile app? Because he starts going through and gonna say product, product, product. But that has never really established, and that's a, that's a key point there to establish when he's talking through design. So just keep that in the back of your mind. All right, I'm gonna try to put this over here. And, let's see what we get. Brian is the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb and I looked at the entire Fortune 500, all the CEOs. And I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, that you are the only designer CEO in the Fortune 500. If there's another one, I'd love to meet them. You were telling me that at some point in the company journey, You sat down and realized, that you were doing things in a very conventional way. Yeah. Despite your design training. I went to the Rhode Island school design with, one of my co-founders, Joe Gebbia. And, it was kind of crazy the idea that a founding team would have two designers and one engineer. It was so crazy that I remember when we pitched one of our first investors, he said, we love everything but you and your idea. Just to initial reaction first is like He said, he says, I'm the only designer that's a ceo. I don't know if that's accurate. Design thinker, he's the only trained designer. He went to risd. He did. But anybody can be a design thinker. Other CEOs could think like a designer as well. He's a design thinker and I think one, one of the characteristics there is he is user obsessed. I think that's a common term. So he's, he's obsessed with his user. His design is focused around the end user. Mm-hmm. That's something that's not often seen, at least not anymore. It, it used to be, it, it's more so to make the people who write the checks happy. I think so, yeah. So he is a designer. I mean, what kind of designers? Different than what I would've thought. Yeah. I would've guessed, like back then I, that was probably like when Interactive Design came on the set, and then it was later called User Experience Designer, but Industrial design. Yeah. I wasn't expecting an industrial designer. Yeah. So he, he's training in industrial design. Okay. Yeah. All right. I don't know how we're gonna cut this together, but here we go. I'm, I'm going back in I remember when we pitched one of our first investors, he said, we love everything but you and your idea. And one of the things they managed strangers will never sleep, save with other strangers and designers don't start companies. And at RISD in the year 2000, when I was there, I studied industrial design and there was this whole mantra, how do you get design in the boardroom? And Joe and I, maybe we didn't know any better. We thought, what if design just ran the boardroom? And that was the whole premise behind Airbnb. And so we had these magical ideas of what Airbnb could become. And for a moment, for a while, I felt like it was really special and magical. And then 10 years later, it's now 2019 and I wake up one day and I have this, I have this horrible dream. And the dream is, is as if I've been gone for 10 years. I come back to the company and it's unrecognizable, and I said, that dream that we had that company, that would be magical. That was like an amazing product people loved that we were starting to lose it. It was starting to wear out. I basically was a designer and I kind of noticed there's two types of people. And companies never become CEOs. Engineers become CEOs of Silicon Valley. Marketers become CFOs, finance people become CEOs, operators become CEOs. But the two people that never run companies are designers and head of hr. And I start, whoa, whoa. Let me stop you right there, right quick. I, cause I have a testing background. I've tried testers like the Yeah, you don't see them up there either. So like the, the purpose of the whole story that we just listed, is, to, to get us to the point where he's saying, I created the company and it was a beautiful thing and we cared about design. And design was, had a big stake in the boardroom. And then we grew and then, like I didn't recognize the company anymore so one thing I don't understand is why 10 years later, he couldn't recognize company. It's not looking. He went win and came back. Like, why they let that happen? Well I, I have an immediate like idea in my head, which is, Extreme Ownership, a Jocko Willink book, it was a great book. This is the military guy, right? Yeah. Who wrote the book? Yeah he was a Navy Seal. In the book, he says, there's so many people that when they're in command, they've gotta, they feel like they gotta get in and micromanage and get real close to the issue. But, if you are real close to the issue, you can't see what's happening from far away. Sometimes you need to back away from the problem, like far away from the problem to get an overview of the entire situation so you can make a better decision because nobody consumed with dealing with the problem can see the whole system and that like I, I know I, I'm, I'm cutting us ahead like way, way, way ahead in this podcast. Cuz he's, what he's about to say is, Hey, we got in, we started developing the software and we went in with this design-centric approach and there was a couple of us and we when we were all entrepreneurial that, that's a, that's a term, right? Entrepreneurial. Yeah, that's, basically you can get everybody that's involved in the company and the software into a room and talk about it. And, and over time we grew to a point where you can't do that anymore. And now nobody has a good. View of the whole thing. Yeah. I don't know how he is cuz I haven't really dug into his background, but especially if the founders are the type of people that are like, Hey, we set the roadmap. We, you, you come to me when you wanna put something new on the roadmap, only I can tell you the vision of the application. Right. And the, the, the, the feature factory PMs, like the feature factory product managers who are like, well I don't really, I don't do a strategy, I don't do a marketing and pricing like the CEO just tells me. Right. Especially if you're that kind of company, middle man, then there's that kind of interplay going on. You said something, how did he not recognize? I think at least the way that I read into it is, is almost like, you get a new puppy or you have a child and now the child's 10. There's a second. When you've been on work where you've just taken a step back and say, How, how in the heck did we get here? And I think that he's been so close to it for so long and he's so used to it. The gradual changes over time that have taken him so far off the path mm-hmm. Is probably how he got blinded by it. The good thing is, is he recognized it, but some companies never recognized it. He got blinded to it. Yeah. He, he, sorry. Yeah, you're right. He got blind to he, he got blind to it. And I think that once he removed himself and looked at and he goes, oh my gosh, how, how did we get here? And that's how you can, it can easily just Yeah. Like that get right away from you and Yeah. Maybe, maybe you need to take a step back. That's probably what opened him up. Yeah. I get that. I mean, one of the things that happened in this particular industry is in those 10 years he encountered competition. He didn't have much competition when he came out with the, the concept of Airbnb at the beginning. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But towards 2019 you had these other companies that sprung up, VRBO and all these other ones. Yeah. Especially overseas. So I guess, a savvy CEO would have to take notice. Yeah. All right, let's, let's move on. Yeah, I was gonna say, let, let's, let's kick back to started thinking why is this? And I think it's cuz design in some ways is fragile because companies are organized around the scientific method and the creative process is something that requires nerve. And over the years I started losing my nerve and I brought in a lot of people from a lot of different companies and they brought their way of working towards us. So what do we do? We had divisional, we basically divisionalized, so we had like 10 different divisions. They had like 10 different subdivisions. We were very much run by product managers. We had a plethora of AB experiments. And the thing I started noticing is the more, people we added, the more project we pursued, the less our app changed and the more the cost went up. And I didn't know what to do. It's now late 2019. And they're like, well, what are you gonna do? And I said, well, I don't know, because we're about to go public. And blowing up the company before you're like ready to go public is kind of a bad time. So I go back, home for the holidays days, and it's now early 2020. We're preparing to go public. And I actually, it's right before 2020, I meet two people that changed my life. Before he digs into this, what he just pointed out was the company was growing, we hired a bunch of people. They brought their way of work, like his words, they brought their way of work, meaning they changed the culture. Every hire that we brought in changed the culture slightly. The culture started changing. And now we've got all these divisions, all these basically silos throughout the organization. And the product managers jump from silo to silo. And, now he comes back and he realizes like he doesn't like that. He doesn't like that culture, he doesn't like that division. He doesn't he's setting himself up for a CEO level. Culture. Slam dunk of talk is, is the way I was feeling at the early part of this talk. I was like, uhoh, preach about why not to have silos and why not to have all the people over here and all the people and all the requirements over there and all the testing over there. Like, come on man, here we go. I got really excited. See, that's actually going to, transpire in this conversation. Yeah. Well, well, what I, what I, what I liked about it was, you, you started to go down that path. I thought you were gonna say it. It was, he goes, one day there was all these divisions and everything. It's like they didn't come in off the street and make that decision. You made that decision and then you put someone in that, right? So, Is it really the outside people there, or did we kind of maybe change somebody along the lines? Maybe not him, but somebody else that he had hired before you to make said decisions did make that decision right, or your other better Half made that decision and somebody did. It wasn't the people, it wasn't the product managers. It's not their fault. I know we have a podcast about like, hey, at that point when you're experiencing pain, maybe a somebody with the agile coaching experience can kind of help you say, Hey, look, if you wanna keep that small company feel, if you wanna keep that, that everyone working together, customer-centric, customer focused, feel, and figure out how to scale from there, how to scale, quote, scale without scaling, without oh, here's the pyramid and all these people are working for that, and all these resources are working for the whatever. Like, maybe you bring somebody in who knows how to do that and I mean, would they do that? I don't know. You know, I, I don't know if they would ever be open to that, but let's, let's keep going. Let's, moving on, moving on. The first person I meet is a guy named Hiroki Asai. Hiroki Asai was the creative director at Apple and he reported Steve Jobs and he worked at Apple from like 1998 to 2016. Wow. And the second person I already knew, but I got reacquainted, was Johnny ive and Johnny, ive ran design of Apple. And at that moment I kind of forgot about the magic of this design renaissance that Steve Jobs had. And they described this company to me and the way of running a company with a design at the center where like it was a totally different way of running a company than everything I was taught. Everything I was taught about how you run a company was opposite of what Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive and Hiroki did at Apple. So I hired Hiroki, Johnny had this firm. We brought him on, we became our number one client. And now I have this idea there's maybe a better right around company, but there's still a problem. We're gonna go public. So what do we do? All of a sudden, I remember our business drops 80% in China. It's January, 2020, and there was this thing that no one in the United States was talking about called Covid. And I remember thinking, wow, if this thing spread beyond China, it'd be really bad. Within eight weeks we lost 80% of our business. And at that moment, I remember thinking to myself, I don't know what's gonna happen if we can save the company, but how do I want to be remembered if this Airbnb's like a burning house, and I can only take half the things outta the house. What do I take with me? It suddenly was really clarifying. Make this part. And another thing happened. I realized that for 10 years I was apologizing about how I wanted to run the company because how I really wanted to run the company was as a designer, but I just didn't have the nerve. But the moment, like it was a crucible moment, we did that. So what do we do? We rebuilt the company from the ground up. We went from business unit organization to a functional organization. So we had a design department, a marketing department, engineering department. The way every startup is run, we took all the projects in the company. First of all, I asked every leader, show me your roadmap. They couldn't even figure out their roadmaps cuz everyone had a sub roadmap on subteams. And those teams had roadmaps and those teams had roadmaps. And so I said, there's a simple rule. If it's not on the roadmap, it can't ship and it must be on one roadmap. So with this giant exercise, we put every single thing on one roadmap. I feel like I should stop here because i's plenty there. Like, it's, it's time for radical changes. He detects a problem. It just so happens that coincides with like when the company's in real trouble. Yeah. Covid. It's a great example because most companies don't get this level of like, let's laser focus until they get into real trouble like this. Most companies, have a long tail of drawing down over time, as kind of like the, the, the incompetence and poor leadership and management kind of run awry. So kind of like just degrades the business over time and it's, it's such a slow death march that you don't notice. This happened so quick, he knew I needed to respond now and, reforge the business the way that I would like to run it. And, and, and that's everything he's talking about now is like, what, how, what are we doing? And, and how are we doing it? What are our priorities? And how come I can't see them all in one place? Like I can only imagine like department heads having their own roadmaps, oh my goodness. Like, and it's departmentalized. It's not product, it's not product roadmaps. Right. There is roadmaps. Right. So that's what's crazy. It's like we're gonna put it all in one because I'm, I'm, I'm fairly certain may you could argue mobile app versus website, but the Airbnb product is the platform itself that connects guests to host and. Is, and my question is, I don't use Airbnb enough. Is there another product there or is that the product? They have different offerings, but that is the product. So it's one roadmap. It's it can be, it can be one roadmap and at least they understood it. They, yeah. Flip side of that is, the risk of having one product, right. All your eggs one basket. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So when the economy tanks, or heaven forbid we have a pandemic Yeah. That impacts guests traveling, you're gonna suffer badly. Absolutely. Yeah. And, and that's, and that's what it took. Cuz you see every other organization, they, they had a reason to. We're slow. Right? Why not look at ourselves now? Perfect. Yeah. What does every company in, in the middle of any transformation, or if you see something that's wrong, how can we make these changes and not impact business? I I would say that you're, you're seeing that changes need to be made because you've seen an impact to your business. Mm-hmm. Right? So what are you saying? Are you saying you don't wanna make changes that could possibly impact your business more? Yeah. Cause I think, as you said, it's, it's an overtime thing. And if, if you have business issues over time, there's no better time to change than today. Now, change is hard, but why, why would you drag your feet? Because you're afraid to lose business? I don't know. The wild thing about this is he just told us he sat on this for 10 years and got less and less comfortable over the course of 10 years until the pandemic, hit his business with an 80% drop in revenue. And he absolutely had to respond. Like I, I, I think like how, how lucky, how lucky he was to survive, first of all, like as a business, right? But how lucky he had that opportunity. When, when, when we did our podcast about John Cotter's leading change. Mm-hmm. Like the first thing in leading change, is to, you have to create a sense of urgency, right? A burning need to help you drive the change that, Hey, we need to change why everything's great, economy's great, we're moving free money, 0% interest, whatever. There's no urgency there. The first step is driving a sense of urgency. He didn't, he like, he had a lot of help driving a sense of urgency cuz his whole business was tanking. And very luckily he could execute the changes he wanted to. I mean, you, you also could argue, be like you're the ceo, like who else is gonna execute the changes? But, but again, he just spent a couple minutes qualifying. We were going into this, big I p o and I had all these people and the businesses ballooned over time and I feel like I, you know what I mean? On one hand, one side of me will be like, well, you're running the business. You can change it any time. Who's stopping you? Yeah, right, exactly. Who's stopping you? But on the other, on the other side of it is, the side of me that has worked with founders and stuff where they feel the weight of like, any change I make, if I make it in the wrong direction, these people are gonna lose jobs and they have families and stuff like that. So I, on one hand, I understand what he's saying. On the other hand, like yeah, right, that I had that attitude in the back of the back of my head, but, they did make it through. Could, could I devil's advocate you then? Absolutely. So you said he waited he sat on this for 10 years. I might say he gave it a shot for 10 years, maybe. He tried. He just, he stayed quiet. Saw it was a little bit of weight. I mean, but he at least gave it time because you can look at change and say, oh, this is a bad direction. Mm-hmm. But if it's the, if it's the first month that's not long enough to actually understand data. But then he saw 10 years and he goes, 10 years is enough. And again, I'm only speculating here, but maybe he said I wait 10 years. Yeah. And we're not getting a lot of traffic on the site, so we have an ability to adjust. Yeah. Now is the time. Yeah. And so now we change. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's a multitude of factors. So that's part of it. And also the other part of it is he suddenly found himself in competition with others. Over those 10 years. That's one aspect of it. The other aspect is because of the pandemic, he felt, there's a burning need to change because it's threatening the survival of the company at that point. The Enterprise Agile coach in me anyway wants to say, well, if you're the CEO of the company, like I know you're, you're tracking financials and you're tracking, the, the product metrics and stuff like that, where's your board for transformation of your organization? Where is your organization gonna be five years from now? That goes next? What is, what's the culture of your organization that you would like to project? And can we put those goals on the Kanban board and try to implement strategies and test things; organizational things to get to where you wanna be. What kind of communication structures do I want? What kind of quote reporting structures do I want? My, I don't want to be a, a pyramid hierarchy anymore. What do I want to be now? Well, I, let's experiment, let's figure it out. Now I need some kind of, transformation, Kanban or backlog or something where I'm trying my experiments over time to try to change, actively steer the culture. If you don't have that work transparent somewhere, How, first of all, how do you know it's gonna be done? And second of all, who is steering your culture? Well, indeed, how do you know what needs to be done? Because it's not visible. Right, right, right. Yeah. They, they need a, they need a unified voice from a leader. So he's the ceo, he's in charge of this. And he's admitted. I, maybe I didn't recognize it. For whatever reason, somebody's shifting it, as you said, somebody's shifting it. Yes. And I've seen it in my experience before. I mean, you just literally have to sit down with the CEO and say, Hey, they need a leader. Right. They need to know where they're going. They need to know what you want to build. Right. And it sounds like in this case, if you were to try to ask that question or him as the ceo, he wouldn't be able to articulate to you where you're going other than we're just trying to make as much money as possible. Yeah. And we do that by maybe doing a couple of things. Right. But we don't really have a strategy here. Mm-hmm. There was no strategy. There was no measurement. There was no, are there, what's our North star that, I mean, there might have been words on a wall somewhere, probably, but that's probably about where it ended. There was no step 2, 3, 4. There was no measurement against it. That's, that's the crazy part. And you, you, that's the, where it starts is like, Hey, you all wanna do Agile, you wanna do waterfall, you wanna do you wanna do Kanban? Yeah. Pick something. Mm-hmm. Pick, pick it and lead, lead it. Make a choice. Mm-hmm. But don't pick something and then disconnect and say, you all go do, because they need a little bit more than that. They don't need handholding or micromanaging, but they need more. Leader does a little bit more than that. I also think that he needs, uh he needs help, from somebody, right. In order to, to make this happen. The Gino Wickman Traction book. The, the book where the, eos the entrepreneurial operating system. Operating system, yeah. Is from, it, it, it, it lists out that like any company, especially small companies, they have a, visionary and they have an integrator, and the visionary is a source of ideas. And the integrator they have operational skill and they make it happen. The doer. Yes. Yes. They have a Steve Jobs and a Wozniak. Woz is the doer. Yes. Steve is the visionary. That's, that's, that's the s Apple we're back to. Yeah. That's the s book. That's awesome. But, anyway, let's, let's kick back into, this session so, and so, I said, there's a simple rule. If it's not on the roadmap, it can't ship, and it must be on one roadmap. So with this giant exercise, we put every single thing on one roadmap. Then I said, we can only do 10% of the things on the roadmap. That was a wet reckoning. So I said, we're only gonna do a few really big things. We took the very best people, we put 'em all in a few projects. And then I said, we're not gonna do ab test unless AB test, AB testing is abdicating a responsibility to the users. And so we're gonna do a little bit of experimentation. but if we do AB testing, you're gonna only do it if you have a hypothesis. If B is better than A, you have to know why B was better than a, otherwise we're stuck with that for like the next 10 years. So, oh my God, I got right click. It's a wet reckoning. So, so yeah. Wet Reckoning. That was so weird. I don't know. I'm, I'm gonna start using that. Im not sure what a Wet reckoning is, but that's the title. Wet Reckoning. I think it's a, I think it's a teenage problem anyway. Why did I stop the video AB test? I realized when he was talking about this that like, there's like a Silicon Valley nature of AB tests that whenever you implement a new feature, you have to do ab test regardless of whatever. Like, some of this is in his little bubble cultural that the rest of us don't really do like the rest of us. I would say the rest of us in the real world, were like, we're just happy to do an AB test. I was gonna say, yeah, yeah, yeah. What? I've been companies that never AB test. Why? What? I get it. He's like, we're doing too much AB test and too much of a good thing is a bad thing. But there's a lot of companies that fly by this. Either their pants and Right. They couldn't tell you how to do an AB test and you could be like, well, you've been in marketing here for 10 years. Yeah. Well, what's an AB test? Yeah. It's like, well these, these guys, these guys. AB test. Every single idea like that, that's, that's, that's in their culture, you know? So this is part of, this is a cultural thing, and I just wanted to highlight it, to skip past it, to be like, Hey, that's just what they do out in silicon. Like, it's like when you're cooking, there's like a little bit of salt. Not too much salt. Like how do you know when you're adding too much salt? Well, you just gotta feel it out. And like, that's, that's how ab tests should be used. Yeah, I was gonna say he was sipping on the sauce about every five seconds, rather than saying, let's let it cook for a little bit before we do another test. Yeah, let's let it simmer. And so we are gonna focus number one on shipping things that you're proud of. If you don't wanna put your name on it, you don't ship it. The designers are equal to the product managers. Actually, we got rid of the classic product management function. Apple didn't have it either. Well, let's be careful. Classic. Sorry. Hold on. We have, we, we have product marketers. We combined product management with product marketing, and we said that you can't develop products unless you know how to talk about the products. We made the team much smaller. We elevated design. By the way, I started thinking to myself, who's the product manager when we design a building? The architect. we thought of designers very much as architects and this is how we started around the company. And I started reviewing all the work. I reviewed the work every week, every two weeks, every four weeks. Before people thought that was meddling. And I said, you know what? Screw it. Like we're gonna review everything. I'm gonna be the chief editor. And I didn't push decision making down. I decided to pull decision making in like the orchestra conductor. oh wait, hang on, hang on, hang on, what you just heard is we got rid of the traditional product management job. We decided we needed product marketers and we merged product managers with product marketing. That the, so that's the important thing is that he just pointed out, say if you can't, if, if you can't talk about a feature, you can't implement a feature. That, that's basically what he just lined out. And when I, when he says talk about what he means is if you can't inform the marketing department, the sales department, Market it throughout the company externally, out outside of the company, ba basically, if you can't put your face to the feature and talk about it and sell it, then you shouldn't be in the product manager spot. I have no problem with that. And we, we've had podcasts, I think maybe stormy's very first podcast or a couple, like her second podcast or something like that. It was about product owner and product manager. Like tearing the roles apart. Yeah. Yeah. When you tear the product owner role out of the product manager position, what he's describing is what you get in my opinion. Mm-hmm. Is you get a, a group that just interfaces internally to the developers and decides what to work on and kind of like. Sort of architects things and figures out solutions , and, and can't really externally talk about it and can't write marketing text, and can't talk to sales and can't figure out how to sell things, doesn't participate in pricing. In marketing that kind of stuff. Doesn't write texts. It's seen by customers. And, I honestly, I'm kind of with them on this one. I, I think that you should be doing that. It's a, it's a slippery slope. Yes, I, I would agree. The way you approached it was, right. It's, it's, but what it's what you see a lot is, is people, they want, they see a good product, owner, manager, whatever you wanna call 'em Sure. In this situation, and then they want to try to duplicate 'em. So then they get bogged down. Well, then what happens is those people either get promoted and then, or they get overwhelmed, and then you have to split 'em. Well, what ends up happening, that's when the product owner becomes just a proxy. They're just a proxy, right. They're there to, to fill a role. Answer some questions, but they can't even make a decision. Sure. They couldn't tell you anything. They couldn't. That's why he's saying what he's saying, and I think he's not wrong. His analogy was great. Product managers are like the architect. I, I would agree with that. I would be careful using the word architect in a technology setting, because I'm like, they're not coming up with service oriented architecture. What they're doing is, is they're designing the features of the house. Why they're designing the features of the house that is better for you, you as the user of the house. Mm-hmm. That's what he's saying in this context. Mm-hmm. Is this great? Yes. It's not to say that you, you have to have a designer that is a product manager. I think the message that he's saying is that a product manager needs to be design focused. Yeah. Design thinker. Right. Needs to be thinking through not, not get requirements. Don't do that. What does the user need to see in order to either, a, buy this product Yeah. Or B, have a good time in this product. With this product in it, whatever. Did he not also say though, towards the end there that he basically took decision making closer to him? Right. Well, I, I, I mean, I am willing to give him a pass on, I, well, first of all, we'll listen to the rest of this section, but I'm willing to give him a pass on that for now, because I don't know what employees he has at this point and what their, what their level of experience and their backgrounds. So I'm willing to give him a pass on this one because maybe what he's saying is I need constant demos of the application. I need to be walking through the application every week to, to explore like a user would l like walk me through the new user experience every week. Like if I was a director of product or, for an organization, I would wanna do that every, show me every week. I have no problem, like 45 minutes every week, just checking that your new users have a good experience. Like, is that too much time to ask? I don't think it is. You know what I mean? That that's, that's, that's the equivalent of what I'm hearing right now. That's what I think it is. Yeah. And the timing, this contextual, we haven't heard this, but I'm hoping that his new product marketers mm-hmm. As he called them, are actually customer facing. They actually speak with customers and not just inward facing. That's, that's where it goes down. I mean, he's, he's getting a lot of principles from Apple. So what I'm assuming is these, these product marketers can sit up in front of a crowd and own it like Steve Jobs did, right. He never did. Like, and you'll see this all the time, is, when he's showing off his product, he's not showing you APIs. He's saying, Hey, users, this is really cool. Let me show you when you, when you turn, I mean, he's actually walking through what it's like for the user, but you don't often get that. And it's, it's great that he's going to that effect. So I'm thinking that the fact that it's more design focused means that the user in mind, but the whole pulling in the decision thing, maybe, maybe he's going through retraining. Maybe that's why. But I would also ask is like, is make sure you have a backup plan? Like is it like you, you wanna take that week long vacation? Well, you can't. And he may say, I don't ever take vacations. Well that's great, but mm-hmm. But God forbid something were to happen. Because if you're the only one that can make a decision in the company, set the expectation of like, this is not the end goal. The end goal is not that I'm gonna make every single decision here. The end goal is that I'm making the decision for right now. Because in the future, I'm gonna trust that you all make the right decision. Yeah. So I wanna try to help you. Sure. Yeah. Like, you know what I mean? That's, that's it comes off really bad at first. It it sure does. And, but that's the way I'm gonna frame it for now until I hear the rest, until I hear him out. I, I, I kind of see this as like, hey, like as the executive that says, add me to all the sprint reviews, just like invite your stakeholders the way you normally do it, but also add me to them, like add me to them. And also the executive actually commits to actually being there at all the sprint reviews to kind of engage, the best business leaders that I've ever been coupled with come to a sprint review. They give the actual user user. Time to expand and talk about what they're doing, and then they won't give direct feedback. They will ask the user feedback about what they're seeing. Like, Hey, don't you think when you click this would, wouldn't it, wouldn't it have been easier if maybe you could have gone directly to there? Or maybe if you had a button that brought you straight to the screen instead of clicking around, oh, actually now you mentioned it. You know what I mean? Like that kind of questions rather than like, you should add this, or, I don't like that this works this way. You mean that kind of stuff? I don't know him, his personality. I, I've not like watched, I'm not really dug into his background, so I don't know. I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt now for the purposes of getting through the rest of this, but yeah. Yeah. I'm on the kind of periphery, the periphery was my calendar word for the day. I'm on the periphery of being like, mm, I don't know where you're going. With this whole being in the loop on all, all decisions he's busting through right now, created was a shared consciousness of like the top 30, 40 people in the company. And it was like one neural network, one brain. So all this is what we're doing. While people say we're gonna go outta business, something remarkable happens. Not only do we not go outta business, but in the last three years we went from a company that was break even to last year. We did nearly $4 billion in free cashflow. And here money it, it was like, it was totally crazy because like that is actually more free cash flow for every dollar earned than Apple or Google. And the crazy thing is, we did that by not trying to make money, but there's something amazing a designer can do more than move pixels on a screen. A designer can design a company to have fewer parts. So my competitors are, some of them are former CFOs. And yet as a designer we were able to imagine a way to save more money because you could design a company with fewer parts, fewer projects. Oh, oh, I'm sorry. Were you throwing shade on accountants that run companies plenty of companies are run by accountants or former financial people, lot by accountants. Yes. Plenty of companies are run by and, and. And, I feel he, he just hit on something that probably should be a completely separate podcast in and of itself is like, when the accountants take over the companies, you begin this very slow, long road to decline. And then that's where all the disruptors kind of come in and start picking apart pieces. Yeah, but the crazy part about it is like the, the accountant, the, when, when does the accountant make sense to hold it when they make it all about dollars and cents? Because accountant is gonna be focused on dollars and cents. That's what they've done their whole career. Yeah. He's saying I'm a designer so I can sign an org chart. When do you need an accountant to be focused on dollars and cents? You need them in the early stages when you're in startup where money is everything, you don't have excess capital. And then the redesign of the organization. You need that later on. And he's saying some companies are there 20, 30, 40, 50 years and now they need it. I mean, I get it. They go through lulls, but he's talking about his peers. He's trying to talk about people who make 4 billion in cashflow. Do they have to be money obsessed? No, they really don't. So a designer can redesign and look at a organizational chart and design what works. Mm. Maybe, but maybe, yeah, I, I'm, that's what he is saying. I'm a very squishy maybe on that one. I would rather the financial function be delegated to the teams and have enough finance people to train the teams how to do the finance function, which is a real, like that, that, that concept in like agile software development is like nowhere. Just Yeah. Yeah. It's give me enough accountants to support my teams and tie them back to the business and do the finances of the business on a team by team basis. But, uh again, now we're, woo, we're, we're, we're talking crazy talk now we're deep. design is much more than a department. It's a way of thinking about the world. And I think there's a whole new generation of designers that aren't just gonna work for engineers. They're gonna sit alongside engineers. They're not just gonna be told what to do by product managers. They are gonna be helping drive the product. And some of them are gonna choose to drive companies because ultimately what everyone wants is to have a product people love. And so that's kind of our story of what we did. again, some of this is cultural. Like you, the, the product managers tell the designers what to design I mean, hey, go design this, this style page, or this clip art or whatever. I think about it as, I wanna say clip art, cause I love that term clippy, rather than like, deal with them as partners. Like the designers are not equal to the product managers. And you know, just in the same way that the developers would not be equal to the product manager. Like, you probably should fix that in your organization where they're just peers collaborating together to design the best products. But it sounds like in, in his particular scenario, he is going the opposite way really. At least that's my take on it, right? No, I think he's, he's lobbying to move away. I think he's saying that they had had this kind of imbalance where the product manager kind of told people what to do. Oh, I see. Yeah. And they're, and they're, and he's lobbying for the designers to be equals and that kind of stuff. So yeah. I would add one, amend his statement on one thing is everybody wants a product that they love. I would say everybody wants a profitable product that they love, because if all you care about is love, I see people walking away from products that they love or that people love all the time because it's not sustainable. The crux of everything. I mean, it's, there's, there's still a dollar and cent component to it that the love is not the enlist end all be all. And he may say, that goes without saying, but you know, you, you kind of didn't really say that. It's like, designers can do that. You gotta have money at the root of it, but as long as you take care of it, then you're, I don't think he, I don't think he does. I don't think he does. You don't think he likes money? I, I think he does like money. You're like, no AB test. And people are like, should I applaud? Limited, limited? I, I don't know. We do a controlled treatment, it's not like we don't, well, I thought you, we don't have a hypothesis. Responsibility. Have a hypothesis. Think by first principles and metrics are not a strategy. A strategy is not growing. That's not a strategy. Yep. That's not a strategy we all wanna grow. But a strategy, we talk about putting your arms around the entire company. We try to have one small design team that sees the entire product. And this is critical because if you have an idea, it's like pulling on a string of a shirt. If you are contained to one surface, then you've gotta get the entire company on board. And so that's why I think this integrated approach is so important. also translated, to design thinking, like why design thinking is important. Because if you, if you whole company supports one product, Even if that product is, like some interactions are API and some interactions are integrations, whether the products and some interactions, your mobile app, some interactions or desktop or whatever, I don't even know if they really have a desktop application. Yes, you do need to make sure that the whole system is evolving together and, and you need to, whatever sets your roadmap, roadmaps, roadmap, needs to take into consideration the whole, well, he's talking about systems thinking right now, and he's not using the term, but that's what, that's what he said. That's right. That's what, that's what I was thinking about when he said that. He was like, this is systems thinking. Yeah, yeah. Well, the, and he, and he said, what, what'd he say? Metrics, metrics aren't a strategy. I, I like that. Right. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's awesome because metrics support your strategy. It's not your strategy. Metrics are the measurement on how close you are to either achieving your goals or hitting your strategy, and I like that. Yeah. I'm, I'm probably gonna steal that one, so I, I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're not gonna make any friends with metrics. how do you push for a design driven strategy? There's something interesting I noticed lawyers never have to justify their job. Like, well, I'm a, or a cfo doesn't have to justify like, why you need a cfo. And there's very few functions where people feel like they have to constantly justify their job. And designers seem to constantly do it. Designers seem to constantly justify their job. Oh boy. I think that designers are probably a little too self-conscious. I think the designers should have a nerve and they should ask themselves like, what are we trying to solve? And be a little less compromising. I don't mean to be completely difficult inside the company, but I think that design as a function has probably seeded too much ground. You know, again, in many companies like architects don't seem to have this problem because there's like a thousand years of history around that field, but we designers, a lot of us came late to the party. Web designers came after software designers and a lot of the great designers stayed in print in other areas. And so these entire functions, like product management got built before a lot of the design department came in. Make no mistake, product managers are critical, but they shouldn't be doing the job of designer. And so I think that it's really important to really like focus on a number of principles. Before he goes off. I, I do think that product managers do, the designer job in the smallest companies. Like the smallest companies don't have designers. They have product managers. And the product managers have the, or actually they might not even have product managers. They probably have founders who do this job because founders do every job they have. Yeah, yeah. They have a specific vision for their company. So I'm sort of on the fence about what he's saying. I'm, I'm kind of, one, I'm going back to it's like, wait, didn't, you said you were getting rid of all the managers and putting the designers there. So it's like, and in this scenario you just created where the the product manager is the designer. You, you just created that. It's, is I, if I'm understanding what he said before, he is get rid of the product managers. I'm gonna put designers there. And it's like, well, they're, they're, they're peers in his organization now. They're peers in his, but again, his organization is lucky enough to have, for every product manager you have a, you're coupled with a designer peer. Yeah. And, but he's, but he's not wrong as justifying the job. I think that's, that's an accurate assessment. Sure. I could apply that to a lot of different positions. There's a lot of positions that, that have to do that. And there's some that, like testers often have to justify the job, but they will never get rid of a tester. There are other jobs where you have to justify your job and they will get rid of it. High Capital one looking at you. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. They will absolutely get rid of your job. And it's, it's not wrong if you want to take and lead your company down a path, like you can't fault someone for saying, Hey we're gonna restructure how we are. Yeah. And these jobs just aren't part of our new structure. Love it. You're a leader. You make a change, you stick by it. You're a leader, that's fine. But in his scenarios, I, I don't like the analogy of architects have been here for a while, so they've got it. And now, He keeps saying the word nerve. By the way, we're at, we're at count six. He keeps, I think he's up to over 10 for this whole thing. So just make sure there's a nerve count on, thing. But he drops that and when he can that you need to have nerve, everybody can go to bat for their job at the table. Yeah. I just, I don't know if they make that decision and just try to say you want to have more nerve, which is kind of me be more steadfast or more stubborn, I guess stubborn in your ways. I don't really think you're gonna make that call. I don't think you're gonna win more friends that way. What you're gonna have to do is come up with, the people who make that decision. You're gonna have to use metrics, numbers to justify your job. So you're not fighting by being stubborn. You're gonna have to meet 'em where they're at and you're gonna start talking dollars and cents. If we do this feature, we will save x amount of time, which translates to X amount of money saving. Cause you're just gonna have to do it at being stubborn is not gonna satisfy that. Yeah. You gotta meet them where they stand. All right. We are, we're off of pause. Think that designer should not be just focused on services. They should be focused on user flows. I think they should only ship something that you're proud of. Don't test something until after you're happy, because ultimately the artist, and you should first and foremost make something for yourself. And when you love it and you're proud of it, now you're ready to put it out to somebody else. I think that designers should be trying to simplify every single thing they do. And then I think if you're in an organization, you have to use their language and explain why it benefits them. If people love our products, they're gonna wanna buy more of them. What is the goal we're trying to do? Well, the goal is we need to grow this thing. Well, why do we need to grow this thing? Growth is not a goal. Growth is just a direction like, like that can't be just a goal. And so these are some of the things. Shots fired right there. Growth is not a goal. Woo. That's so many companies are working in that way though. Oh boy. And, and growth. Growth doesn't equal profitability. Yeah. Some people outgrow themselves, which created a mountain of debt. I agree with it. Yeah. It's a metric to track something, but you do need a goal outside of that growth should support whatever your goal is. Yeah. That's, Jim Collins, why the Mighty Fall? We did, we did a podcast on Jim Collins. Why The Mighty Fall? And that was one of his thing is the, the, the undisciplined pursuit of growth. Like for no other purpose than we wanna grow Single-minded. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it comes down to ego of like, we want to be I don't wanna be in charge of a bigger boat or whatever. Like why, why? Well, isn't that, that's kind of what Musk did with Tesla at some point they wanted just keep growing. And then when he was asked Hey, why do you have, why are you eight? 10 quarters in the red, I think it was. Mm-hmm. He goes, we'll figure out how to become profitable later. Right Now we just gotta get out there. And I mean, like yeah, it did it eventually work for him? It does. Not everyone has that capital coming in. Yeah. Right. I mean that's a, that's a unique position, but also it's any of these Silicone Valley folks that are out here, like that's their thinking. Their thinking is, we we're here to corner a market, and be the first ones and corner the whole market and be, and be the the verb or noun, whatever, like basically you don't, you don't say, I'm gonna make a photocopy. You say, I'm gonna Xerox. That's right. Right. You like the, you use the company as the noun, right? And so the best thing for engineers and the best thing for PMs is to pair them with great design from the beginning because a lot of companies, design has become a service organization. Hmm. Design should not be a service organization unless that is explicitly the intention of ceo. And that means it's not your job to catch things, to stop them before it goes out. It means it's your job to work from the very beginning that design challenges technology and technology inspires art. It's a perfect harmony from the very beginning. I'm gonna stop him there because it again, he's back on his Organizational design diatribe. I think a data science the same way cuz data science is like a skill, even if you wanted to hire a half a dozen of them and embed them in all of your teams, I mean, where would you even find that many people on the market? You know what I mean? Like good people on the market with experience, you probably would have a real difficult time trying to do it. So I completely understand why companies get in the mode of saying like, well, I'm gonna hire one UI U x two three ui UX people and park them over here in the UIUX department, and then when you need them, we'll dedicate them to your team for like a sprint or two, and then they'll knock out all the, all the plans up front and all the wire frames up front, and then you guys can do all the design, whatever, and then we'll send it to the you know what I mean? Like that classic shared services model. Classic. It's absolutely classic. Yeah. Yeah. And it's the age old thing that I always hear is the shared services model, and then they go like, Hey, UX person, you can drop off the call. Mm-hmm. Hey, I love our UX designer, but you gotta be careful with them, they'll, they'll run your costs up through the roof, right? Yeah. It's like, are they really, or are they trying to save you money? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Because I'm like, I would say that it's probably a lot more expensive the other way, but Right. That's a different topic probably than this, but I, I do like what he's saying with the harmony part because, what, what, what's the analogy that we always see is a seat at the table. Yeah. Like technology often doesn't get a seat at the C level table. Mm-hmm. They get bullied around a lot, but they still have a level. Most companies don't have certified design or like c-level design officer Sure. Or whatever you wanna call it. Like, they just say, well, that's part of technology. That's part of marketing. Yeah. They're, that's exactly right. They're either part of technology or they're part of marketing. Or they're part of product. Yeah. One of those, they're part, they're parked somewhere. I envision in this organization, they're parked under the CEO because it's so important to the CEO that design is elevated to that level. Now. Again, I've not, I've done no research for this podcast, so I, I could be completely wrong, but it feels that way. You know, the idea that they're equals. You know. Right. So some of these companies are now coming up with titles like, chief Customer Experience Officer. Sure. Yeah. You, you kinda wonder if that person has to have a design background or at least have design thinking, let's say. Yeah. Right. One would hope, one would hope, one would hope they would've empathy and at least talk to the customers. Cause they have customer their title for Pete sake. Yeah. Well the, I mean, the intent of a position like that is someone who is concerned about the entire user experience Right. Front to back, but also reality, Yep. Can you break down more for us, the way that you see marketing, design, product, and engineering all working together in harmony? Exactly. So, but before, exactly. What a weird, what a weird segue. Exactly. Like weird. I like this topic because I have a theory that 90% of the people in the job product management, either don't do pricing marketing, participating in sales, and strategy. So the point being, you're on the product development side of the house, not on the business side of the house. So while, while you are, the, while you're supposed to be the business rep to the team, in actuality it's like they, they sliced off this product owner little piece. And that's what you do. And you're, oh, that's, that's a developer thing. We'll, we'll talk to the developer, our developer guy. And at that point, aren't you just like a project manager? Manager of a manager, yeah. But aren't you like a, some, some, some slice of a project manager to the development team. Like you're their rep that connects you to the rest of the business. The more he talks about this, the more I feel like somehow his company has, segmented the product managers into this weird project management type of role where they don't do this kind of stuff None of this at all has hit on anything that's value proposition based. Mm-hmm. Which, which you should have to justify for anything that you build. It's gotta do something for the co. Is it, is it experience, is it revenue? Is it a time saving? Like it's, it's for a reason. And nothing is about value proposition, but you have to understand that I understand that most of the, what he's saying by designers is most of the stuff is user driven and that will translate to the other stuff. So we don't need to worry about it. But I never have seen that from product, product managers. Like you said, strategy something at minimum. Give me a value proposition. Why, why are we doing this? Can you, can you at least justify that in terms of this? And just be broad, right? It's a cost savings. How much? I don't know, but it's a cost savings. All right, let's, let's move forward here with this. Okay. So the first thing is we try to have a roadmap and I am the keeper of the roadmap as ceo. And I think generally, usually the CEO should be the keeper of the roadmap. Our roadmap is typically about three years out, but it's very fuzzy. It's like those video games where it gets fuzzier the further over the horizon. But I have a pretty good idea of what we're shipping between now and next November. So we'll have a release in November. We'll have a release next April, next November, and I have a pretty clear picture. And then about two years out, it gets pretty fuzzy. Now to be clear, it changes and I update the roadmap every single week. Now, the long term roadmap, the near term, is hopefully not changing that churn, but the long term is constantly changing. Sorry.

I set the roadmap and I set the roadmap for a couple years and Well, no, you don't, you don't, you do not set the roadmap for a couple. You set your strategic goals for a couple years out. That's right. Objectives. Yeah. I certainly believe you set your objectives for a couple. That's, that's not a roadmap. And, and you could, you could, we could quibble back and forth for the rest of this podcast, but he sets his goals the way he wants to set his goals. And the employees in an organization, no matter what their job title is, product manager, whatever, they pull it down and say, yes, sir. That's right. You know what I mean? That's cool. Mm-hmm. Cool. Awesome. A again, I see no point in setting goals two years out that. Then the next six months you're gonna revise and throw away. Like, I just went through my backlog today, today, went through my, went through my roadmap, not my backlog. I went through my roadmap today. I took all my stuff in my later category, and I went over every single thing in my later category just to scrub things to be like, I don't want any aging items in here. I started setting up like, alerts for things that are a couple months old just so I I don't have stale stuff on my right. Yeah. Those things age like, vegetables left out out of the fridge big. They age like fine milk. Oh man. Yeah, exactly. Cause your, your, your market's susceptible like what, two years out you think you actually are gonna understand where the market's at. Two years, I've, I've wasted all this time setting my goals two years out, and then guess what? I'm gonna roll back in another pandemic. Your goals now are shut. I know, I know. You know, you've just wasted time. I know. Yeah. So it's, it's waste which he, he just outlined. It's probably too quick for him to go into context with any of this, but he probably really does say, Hey, my two years out stuff, actually one year out stuff, probably for him, my one year out stuff is like up in the air. Maybe. I think, I suspect we might need to be in this business area, but I'm not gonna put any thought or planning into it at all. If we were dig, to, dig into context here probably that's what he would tell us is like the two of your stuff is like things I know I want to expand into. I really would like to get there, but if it doesn't happen, no one's gonna cry and we haven't expended any effort at all on it. So if it goes away, it's like epics. Yeah. He just made his epics. Exactly. He knows what it is. Exactly. And it's great because I was, nobody could see, but I was clapping when he said a roadmap is constantly changing. Not the near term stuff, but mm-hmm. I'm the, the three months, six months. And I'm like, hey, because cuz again, sometimes people don't get product owners or managers that do that. Right. They, they slinky effect, they set it right and then they move it and then they adjust it. Right. And it's like that slinky effect doesn't work. But if you're constantly changing it, good, you're reacting to factors that you can't control that you can see. And you're providing value in real time based on what is being dictated, which is great. Yeah. you can measure the health organization by the relationship between marketers and engineers. And in most companies, marketers are like waiters and engineers like chefs, and if the waiter goes in the kitchen, the chef yells at them and that is not a great relationship. We actually like to start a lot of product development, not just with design, but with marketing. Because our marketers, we want to actually have a vision and to figure out how they can tell a story. Then product marketing, again, product marketing is product management plus outbound marketing. It's a smaller function, it's a extremely influential function. They will work with the designers and us to establish like, what is this project? What are the goals? What are we trying to solve? So like, let's say we launch this product, Airbnb rooms. We noticed the original Airbnb was really slowing in growth and we wanted to figure out how to revive it. And so it often starts with the insight. And the insight was people are nervous staying in the homes of other people. I'm turning him way down on the recording because I want to speak over him at this point because I, I like that he has a couple of pre-packaged stories that, that integrate both his organization and the application and he, he's ready to roll them out on demand when he needs those pre-packaged stories. I feel a lot of people that are Scrum masters, product managers, product owners, people learning the role and stuff like that. I guess even designers in order to break through to the leadership level, You really need these pre-packaged stories ready to go in order to stand out. As you know, management slash leadership material, in these types of organizations. I mean, he has them ready to go. You know what I mean? Practice, he's probably practice design systems is you should design, probably practice these whatever you want. And then you put it in the design language system. But then we started noticing that people had bad photos. So then we built an operation to take headshot of 40,000 people. If you were a designer in a corner of an app, it'd be hard to convince the marketing department to spend money to take photos. But when you're integrated, you can start to do this. again, he says integrated. I hear systems thinking. It, it, it's if you're one product manager or one designer, hell, even one, one developer. If you're one developer on one team in a tiny little corner of a tiny little program maybe one person riding on Ahoo train, right? It's hard to, to convince people hey if we spent a couple dollars and cents taking great pictures or holding events where professional photographers could take pictures of the people that that are our, our, hosts, I guess I don't remember what they call 'em in the, in the Applic application. Yeah, that'd be most, maybe we, we have, in certain cities on certain dates, we hire professional photographers and people can come in and get their head shots and, it costs us this much money. But we can make this much on the backend. You would have no avenue to to do something like that because that's, that's not a product thing that doesn't go into the software. And, and how are you gonna do that? You know when, when your voice is like, Hey, shut up kid. Get back to get back to, to, to pounding out screen designs or whatever that systems thinking never comes into play when you're all the developers over here and all the designers over here and all the test is over here, which is what we see all the time. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And absolutely. And the, and the better thing is, is if, if like a product manager should be able to do that, if we did this, here's how much it would cost. But we could save this by the, and like, You go to the marketing department with that and they would, they would probably look at you and go, how do you know what my costs are to make that determination? Right. I don't I need your help. No, you're not gonna get that information. Leave. And like, they won't give it to you. I'm too busy. Or worse actually, or they don't know actually, stay in your lane, bro, you know what's even, you know what's even, I like that you snuck bro in there. Or worse is, I'll take that back to the budgeting and I'll let you know, because smart people take care of the budgeting numbers and we're trying to keep that secret from that's a long form of No. Yeah, yeah that's the thing is if you expect a value proposition, if you want someone to tell you why should you do something, you're going to CFO or marketing or anything like that, they're gonna quantify it with numbers. But if you're not making your numbers visible or at least helping because you have to have somebody else do it, and you say, we're gonna take it back and figure it out. Right. Either you don't know or you're hiding something. Right? But, you, you owe it to your design thinkers, right to try. If you want to get your employees to think like business owners or founders, you need to treat them not like children. You need to treat them like business owners or founders. and lemme tell you a quick story about how we improve the product. So we recently created this thing we call the Airbnb Blueprint. And I was inspired by something Walt Disney did in the 1930s. He was making this movie called Snow White. It was the first feature length animated film, and it was so long he couldn't keep track of the film. So he created this thing called the Storyboard. And that's when we realized, well, what if we do the same thing at Airbnb? So we storyboarded the end-to-end journey for guests and hosts. The rest of us know this as a user journey map. Anybody who really wants to understand how their users move through the application and how to plug a new feature into the normal user experience should have a journey map like he's describing. But let's listen to the rest of it. Every single screen a user sees put on one wall, it turns out there's 150 screens. Then I said, every user policy, every time you call customer service, what policy are referencing. It turns out there were nearly 70 user policies. And then we went through like 20 million customer service calls. We went through hundreds of thousand social media posts, tons of workshops, and even our firsthand experience. And based on that, we created a prioritized map and systematically tried to fix our product. And, I, I used to tell a team, we can't do new things unless we have permission and we don't have permission working on new things until people love our core service. And if they're complaining on social media and they're calling customer service, they don't love our core service, so we have to get our house in order first. The storyboarding, like understand your user's journey through the application and what the most painful points of the journey are. And then fix 'em until your core offering is as good as it can be before you worry about like, scaling and adding a million features and adding a thousand buttons that no one's ever gonna see. Well, a good journey map lets you also see things like, what are the value subtracted opposite of value added steps. Right. The steps that the user has to sit there and the stress click through. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Those things you could remove. Yeah. Right. Aka waste in the lean mm-hmm. World. it's the same thing that we already know. He's just got a, he's just put a new kind label on it. Yeah. Well, I, I've also seen, I've seen, journey maps through an application that have a stress level that goes up and down. Mm-hmm. Like I've seen those tools. I've seen that too. They take a bit of work to do cause there's not really any tools that do it easily, but, I think it's really cool like you're applying for a loan and now you've gotta like add all your documents or whatever, like the stress level goes way up and be like, mm-hmm what do you mean I gotta find my whatever tax statement from X years ago or what the stress is gonna go up at that point. So you try to make that as easy as possible That's right. In your application and maybe add some features and make it. You know, helpful. Oh. When you add your W2 , it automatically picks all the, numbers off of it and populates the field. So you don't need to do things like that. You know what I mean? I think being the designer is like holding 5,000 ideas in your head. Some of them contradictory and we tend to call this intuition and we get really nervous cuz it seems somehow not systematic. But I actually think a lot of great design comes from deep understanding of a problem and so you're trying to absorb as much information as possible. When I joined Y Combinator, Paul Graham said, make something people want. Well, who knows what people want as well as designers, not many other people. I think that is a core value, that's a good value that we have to the world. That's a good finish. And I, I just think more designers should rise up and start companies. That's a good finishing, idea is designers know what people want. How do they know what people want is because they have, they have all the skill to get in front of users. they understand to put the user first and to put the user's opinions and the user's views at the center of what they're doing. I mean, they're trained to do that. They're trained to do interviews, that kinda stuff. As opposed to, assuming, right? Running ab tests is, is in a way a certain assumption that he was kind of calling out but, I, I like that, that he wrapped up with that. Yeah. Good. I think that that should have been the biggest thing is designers can run companies. And why is because they're often more in touch with the user than a cfo. A cto. Yeah. They're more user obsessed. So why should you not have that be the case? It's, it's almost like I, I think it's the, the publicly traded company. What would you rather have? You know, the, the board is going to tell you what they want. Do they want a CEO that is? Money obsessed. Mm-hmm. Or user obsessed. Yeah. And it's hard to quantify to that board that a user obsessed CEO is a good thing and can, and often make you a very profitable member of the board, right? Mm-hmm. It can increase your shareholder value, but I, I like his statement. I wish you would've hit on that a lot more as like, yeah, designers know the user, but oftentimes you have to ask that simple question is, are we building this to make a stakeholder happy? if our users love this product, is the stakeholder happy? Or if the stakeholders happy and the users hate it, are we still successful? And sometimes we're just here to make that suit thumbs up us. Yeah. Because we don't even care if the users don't like it. They don't care either. Yeah. So you have to ask that question. Yeah. Because if you, if it's all about customer satisfaction, like he's talking Yes. Some companies don't operate that way. They don't ask those questions. Mm-hmm. yeah, I agree. I wish he had said that earlier, cause I kept asking are these designers customer facing? We didn't know. The main reason I wanted to highlight this video on the podcast number number one was of course the, the clickbait. Like, I was like, it's not what the clickbait is prescribed. Right? It's not, but, but the other thing is like, it's, it's a organizational design talk disguise as a U I U X talk. That's right. It's, Hey, talk to your customers. Bring them in. Be customer centric, like actual customer centric. Be design centric. Being design centric means you're gonna be following. What the customer wants. You're gonna be following the customer really closely cuz you're gonna be checking with them and, and asking and, and getting feedback . And, your company shouldn't be like, all the X people are over there. All the Y people over there, all the Z people over there, or the Z people. He called that out real early and it's like, oh, I, I didn't like the way the company was designed cuz I realized that we should be putting the customer. Closer to the middle of the experience and all kind of swarming around it. And, and we should all be peers rather than all the ui ux people work for the product people and the product people say, go, go build me some clip art. I don't know why I keep like clip. I feel like I'm 80, 80 years old when I keep it, like build me clip art, Like, if you're gonna have one tiny little component team over here, a complicated subsystem team under the team topologies. Hey, it is another podcast you can check out here teams apologies. If we're gonna treat U I U X as a complicated subsystem, or design as a service where we just throw something over the wall and say, Hey, go figure this out for us. And they send it back and we have no idea. Right. What they're thinking was when they design was not in that picture. And then one last thing is know why you're building something. If customer satisfaction is of importance to you, then that's great. Yeah. I mean, own up to it. If you're just trying to make somebody in a suit who wants an app built for them and the people that work for them mm-hmm. You like say it's like internal. And they don't care. If the users like it, then that's fine. If they only care so much that a user like it, then that's fine. If they a hundred percent dive in and want the users to like it, then you need to open up that channel. They need to be able to talk to the users. You need to be user obsessed like he's talking about. It's just, it's different, it's, it's, it's knowing why you're running the company. So I, I want to, I think that he's probably saying that without saying, is that at some point they weren't user obsessed. They were technology obsessed, and they had 10 different departments doing everything they wanted. Yeah. They went back to user, user obsessed, which is great because what did he say? 4 billion in cashflow? Yeah. Yay. I mean, yeah, those cleaning fees have to go somewhere. That's true. Yeah, definitely. It's an org design topic for sure. I mean, he solved this issue by, by changing the org design luckily, because, I mean, I think of how many organizations that, that were not Airbnb, that did not have so much cash flow that we're not well known in the market that covid hit, it destroyed their business model and then they just disappeared. Mm-hmm. Whereas air Airbnb could take an 80% dip in revenue and again back to the John Kotter leading change, he could lead them through that change and come out on the other side still solvent as a company. Yeah. He certainly felt that fire, under his seat, so to speak. Right. Yeah. Kotter's his first step. Right. Felt something, a burning desire. Just felt burning somewhere. Yeah. See a doctor burning this too long. If you like this, hit the subscribe and like button down below, somewhere down here. Maybe let's know what else you'd like to talk about. That's right. And if you would like, there is, arguing agile.com. You can send us questions and we may do a podcast about it in the near future or the far future, or the not too distant future.