Jessica Lachs: belief

Transcript context

…It's so funny because this is exactly what we went through at Airbnb, we had, we call that a healthy host. I led the host quality team for a while and we came up with this healthy host metric that was six factors of a host, like the cancellation rate, the review rate, their response rate and things like that. And then we're just like, "Cool, let's move this, let make more hosts healthy." And then you end up like, "Okay, which one do we focus on?," And, "Oh, what about all these others?" And we ended up basically focusing on one at a time. And so let's just make that the goal for now and then rotate through the different biggest [inaudible 00:53:28] opportunities to move. [inaudible 00:53:30]. Exactly. I think in hindsight for the example you give, which of those six things are actually the most important? And if you're able to then quantify which one matters most, you work on that one first and you materially move that one and then you work on the next one. You want to move them all. But being able to prioritize and know what you're going to get for a 20% improvement in, say, your cancellation rate, that's where analytics I think can add a lot of value. Because yes, ultimately you'll get to all of them, but the way you do that and the time can have a meaningful impact on your growth. If you can target the most problematic things first and solve those, you get more bang for your buck and that compounds over time. And so doing the things that matter first and most quickly is a competitive advantage in my opinion. The other thing we found along those same lines is rotating between different metrics is so not efficient because you get good at, "We're going to move this metric." And your team's like, "Cool, we totally understand this lever," like cancellation rate. We become really smart at cancellation rate and then three months later, you need to switch to response rate and they have to learn a whole new paradigm of how to think about it. And it's just super inefficient. So we found basically, just keep a team on the metric until there's no more opportunities and give another team one of these other metrics.…

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