Cross-Functional #166: In the details or micro-management?

In the details or micro-management?

Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, was recently on Lenny’s Podcast talking about how he runs Airbnb. And one thing that really piqued my interest was that he gets personally involved in signing off and reviewing the progress of every project. He calls it getting “in the details”.

This is a huge undertaking because Airbnb has just under 7,000 employees, but Brian says it’s actually reduced the overhead on him because he gets ahead of problems and has to fight fewer fires. It has also increased the pace of delivery which he attributes to the removal of politics: there is no hiding when the CEO is reviewing projects directly.

He called out the negative labelling of this behaviour as micro-managing however he sees it differently - he’s not telling people what to do, but he is aware of what is happening.

My view is that this approach may work for a single product company like Airbnb but at some point it will outgrow what one person can manage, creating a brittle bottleneck. Should Brian leave, replacing him with someone who has the same level of knowledge across the business would be challenging.

Kudos to Lenny for hosting one of the best interviews of the year.

I’m curious to know,  what’s your take on this?

Is it good for the CEO to be in the details of every project?

* Scroll down to see last week’s poll results.

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New speakers announced for UXDX USA

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We just announced our initial lineup of 15+ industry pioneers! You will find some amazing senior Product, UX, Design, and Dev leaders, covering a range of leading companies including Ford, Kayak, Northwestern Mutual, Shopify, Salesforce, Comcast, and many more.

Dive into the details of our first wave of speakers here and stay tuned for more announcements.

Free UXDX Community Event - 28 Nov!

There is a better way to create products. In this UXDX Community event, Stephen Carrey-Chan, Director of Product & Design from CrowdStreet, will share how to maximize business results by applying customer research at scale. Plus Jaclyn Touchstone, Senior UX Designer from Bitwarden, will share how to ensure the success of an open beta through mixed-methods research.

FREE tickets are available now, register to get yours!

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question was: Does the theory work in practice?

Users responded:

I’m glad there is consensus and we’ve certainly cleared up that confusion. 😃 

It’s interesting to see that there is no clear winner. From my perspective, while it’s technically possible to implement any practice in any company, politically, it’s not.

The biggest blocker I've seen is that typically there is no shared vision for how to work so any improvements suggested become an opinion battle. Toyota tackled this in manufacturing by implementing their single-piece flow vision (zero WIP), which has become instrumental in their way of work.

We don’t have a universally accepted best practice vision for how to work in software development, unlike in manufacturing. So, we have developed one as part of our upcoming framework for scaling autonomous teams: Zero blockers. The idea is that teams should be able to work autonomously from idea to working software. It's practically impossible, akin to Toyota's single-piece flow, but it serves as a great vision to strive for and continuously iterate towards.

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