Vlad Loktev: evaluation

Transcript context

…What do people do that's not this? I imagine many people listening are like, "Oh, I work on things that are impactful. I'm doing great." What is it that you see that's not this? I think when a company matures, I think it grows, many more people join the team, the company gets bigger. At some point, a lot of people are working on similar things. Teams start to form, then the entire departments start to form. And pretty quickly, I think a lot of people begin to realize that you yourself are not in control of many things and you actually depend on what other people do. And so a lot of people, and I've done this too, have focused a lot of energy day to day on the dependencies, rather than the things that you yourself can do in your day-to-day. For example, what I've seen as the organization scales, people transition from saying, "I can do X," and they transition to saying, "Can the other team do Y so that I can do X?" And I think that's a very dangerous place to be, because at the end of the day, you just need to let go of some of these dependencies. You're not going to move mountains every single day and you got to focus on the things that are actually within your control. Again, it's more of a mindset shift. The other thing I would say is every single project that we worked on at Airbnb, we did back of the envelope math with assumptions to help us understand the impact that something would have. And you needed to at least... Now, those assumptions could be completely crazy and could be very challenging, but you at least needed to think through the mechanics of what you have to believe in order for this project to be a success, and for it to then make a big dent and whatever you're trying to achieve at the company. Every single thing we did had that behind the scenes, and we spent a lot of time on this to make sure that we were focused on the right things. I remember there was a project that we were going to work on. I'm like, "I think this is a big opportunity. Here's all my thinking on it." And what I didn't have is, "Here's the lift this could potentially drive." And so what you did is you just created this flow chart of all the levers of the business, and then you're talking about this sub-lever here, and if you move this 10%, here's the impact on the potential business. And you're right. It is actually a big opportunity, but this is how you want to show it.…

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