Vlad Loktev: belief

Transcript context

…of course sometimes, he would disregard certain things that he heard because he had very strong conviction, a different direction. But he listened and oftentimes he would also change his mind, right? And so as a leader at Airbnb for so long, I never felt like I wasn't listened to or like he was just making these random decisions. I always had an ability to influence and an ability to voice where I felt like the company should go. So yes, he made a lot of decisions, but he made sure he was informed in those decisions and then many of us were Contributing to all the information he needed to make the decision, which is then also why he wanted every leader to be in the details. Why did he stress that for himself and every single leader on the team? It's because when you get into that room, right? And you start discussing many different directions you can go, if the leaders in that room can't tell you what's actually happening with the business, then why they're there in the first place, right? You can't then make a good decision with that group of people. So then suddenly your team of 10, you have to blow up to a team of 30. And if those people are not in the details, then you got to like what? Bring in 50 people? And so at some point you need to make sure that leadership is actually in the details, understand what's happening, and can help bring to light information that's going to help somebody make the right decision, right? So that's why top-down and being in the details to me, they were actually very connected and they made a whole lot of sense. Now, the one thing I'll say is at some point when you are working on many things, it is challenging to be in all the detail, right? And if you mandate that product cannot ship without certain people being in every single detail, sometimes you could slow it down, right? And that could be a con of that way of working. I would argue for us at Airbnb, the quality of what we were releasing kind of suffered because we were just push, push, push, ship, ship, ship, and people were shipping across the board. And I did feel as a leader, like I wasn't proud of some of the things we were shipping. And so I appreciated the intentional slowdown at the expense of our goals to get to a higher quality bar and then amp up velocity again. After everyone had a better understanding of what quality actually was. So we kind of had to slow down for a bit to then speed up later. And I think a lot of it is Brian always wanted to make sure that every leader would be able to make decisions and have really good judgment, and he wanted to teach what that meant. And I actually really appreciated that over the years. Now, if you were to go back to semantics and say, Hey, were we top down, bottom up? Those are just semantics, I would say we were actually... If you really think about it, we were neither. Because bottom up you could always through certain channels, voice information. Again, if you didn't self-center and you were not afraid to poke the bear, you had an ability to voice information. So from that sense, lots of information that came bottom up. els, voice information. Again, if you didn't self-center and you were not afraid to poke the bear, you had an ability to voice information. So from that sense, lots of information that came bottom up. But then at the same time, there was also a lot of conviction and intuition and context that came top down. And because for a lot of these decisions, there was so much conversation. The reality is I think the way we operate was actually somewhere more towards the middle on a day-to-day basis. Which is why for me, I thought it was great. We had a boss on the podcast, CTO of Meta. And I always thought of Meta as a very bottom up organization where anyone can run experiments, they're shipping things all the time. He's like, no, we're very top down. We tell people, here's the things we're building this year. Here's our big bets, here's what we're going to prioritize. And so I think to your point, a lot of people don't necessarily understand what that means and see things as bottom up versus top down. Any other pros and cons? Just real quick on working this way? I think a lot of people are... A lot of founders are like, maybe I should move my company this way. Maybe I should just be involved in everything. Maybe we need to move PMs to product marketing managers. Is there anything else that's maybe a pro or a con in this approach that might be worth sharing?…

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