Leading through uncertainty: A design-led company - Brian Chesky (Config 2023)

foreign [Music] welcome back to the closing keynote of day one of config 2023 I'm Sarah Culver I'm a design manager at figma and I'm shokuamoto vice president of product um first of all I just wanted to thank everybody for being here with us today I know a lot of you guys have traveled and taken time of your out of your day to come here and I also know that not everybody could get into the talks that they wanted to get into due to capacity so I just wanted to acknowledge that and thank you guys we're going to make some changes oh now I think they took the clicker because uh I they gave me the thing okay anyway they're gonna Advance it okay this is like a actually this is a comedy routine you didn't realize this but it's going to be comedy um so anyway so we're sorry about that and uh we're gonna make some tweaks tomorrow to some of the room assignments and layouts and things like that so hopefully that would be better for tomorrow and also all the talks are recorded and we're going to try to email them out to you as fast as possible so that we can you can see them when you uh get back so thank you for sticking with us but we're not done yet for today we're back to introduce our closing keynote sessions uh the theme for this afternoon is navigating uncertainty what does that mean to you show um okay so uncertainty to me well the world as we know is um you know going through a lot right now we've had pandemic closures we've have an economy that's affected a lot of people's jobs we have ai which is exciting but every month every week There's new news and you know it's hard to even know what is the world going to look like 20 years from now or even five years from now and the way that I think about it is that design is fundamentally about what do we want to build what do we want to make what do we want the future to be like and it's hard to think about that when things are so uncertain so you know times aren't certain and I think uncertain times call for more vision and that's hard but it's important so design is kind of a solution to uncertainty ultimately I like that a lot um our first Speaker of branchesky has really taken the approach of putting design at the center of everything and his leadership of Airbnb to me Airbnb is the epitome of a design-led company you know you can see it in both the product and in the culture and it's been really impressive to me to see how Airbnb has navigated the ups and downs of the past few years yep so please join us in welcoming Brian in conversation with Dylan [Applause] [Music] [Music] welcome to config Brian well thank you for having me thank you all and for being here uh I think that Brian probably needs no introduction but just in case uh Brian is the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb and I looked at the entire Fortune 500 all the CEOs and I believe correctly 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 so you know maybe we can start off with uh we were talking last week about this you were telling me that at some point in the company Journey you sat down and realized uh that you were doing things in a very conventional way yeah despite your design training and uh maybe you can tell us more about that what that realization was like yeah so let me take you back to um 2019 the end of 2019. I had this suspicious feeling that like I mean well actually you can go back further I went to the Rhode Island School design with um my one of my co-founders Joe gebbia and um 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 and one of the things they managed strangers will never sleep save those 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 everybody 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 like I have this horrible dream and the dream is it's as if I've been gone for 10 years I come back to the company and it's unrecognizable and I go on a hike in Bolinas California with my two co-founders Joe and Nate and I tell them about this dream and they said what happened 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 down wear out and let me explain what was happening see I basically was a designer and I kind of noticed there's two types of people and companies never become CEOs Engineers become CEOs at Silicon Valley marketers become CFOs Finance people come CEOs operators become CEOs but the two people that never run companies are designers and head of HR I started thinking why is this and I think it's because 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 a b experiments and the thing I started noticing is the more um 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 I tell Joe and I'm like this is like I don't know what to do and they're like well what are you going to do and I said well I don't know because we're about to go public and so blowing up the company before you're like ready to go public is kind of a bad time so I go back uh home for the holidays 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 the first person I meet is a guy named Hiroki assai Hiroki assai 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 I've ran designed 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 rate around company but there's still a problem we're going to 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 be really bad eight weeks we lost 80 percent of our business and when you're our size you lose 80 percent of your business in eight weeks it's like an 18 wheeler going 80 miles an hour and then slamming on the brakes nothing good happens we go from one of the hottest IPOs in the world to within eight weeks people running articles like is this the end of Airbnb will Airbnb exist eight weeks before we're prepared to go public at this point I've never luckily had a near-death experience but the way it's been described to me is your life flashes before your eyes and that's kind of what happened with our business our business flash for our eyes and at that moment I remember thinking to myself I don't know what's going to happen if we can save the company but how do I want to be remembered if this Airbnb is like a burning house and I can only take half the things out of the house what do I take with me it suddenly was really clarifying 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 road maps because everyone had a sub road map on sub teams and those teams had road maps and those teams had road maps and so I said there's a simpler rule if it's not in the road map it can't ship and it must be on one road map so with this giant exercise we put every single thing on one road map then I said we can only do 10 of the things on the road map that was a wet Reckoning so I said we're only going to do a few really big things we took the very best people we put them all in a few projects and then I said we're not going to do a B test unless a B test a b testing is abdicating your responsibility to the users and so we're going to do a little bit of experimentation but if we do a b testing you're going to 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 and so we are going to focus number one on shipping things that you're proud of if you don't 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 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 myself who's the product manager when you designed a building the architect so we thought of designers very much as Architects and we started doing these release Cycles where we'll ship 80 percent of the products twice a year during these releases and then to be clear we do do optimizations we do ship code every single hour of every single day but that's a budget that's about 20 percent and this is how we start 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 going to review everything I'm going to be the chief editor and I didn't push decision making down I decided to pull decision making into Orchestra conductor and what we 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 going to go out of business something remarkable happens not only do we not go out of business but in the last three years we went from a company that was Break Even to last year we did nearly four billion dollars in free cash flow I think that deserves a round of applause yeah and 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 we were able to State 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 we and so I think that you know 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 going to work for engineers they're going to sit alongside Engineers they're not just going to be told what to do by product managers they are going to be helping Drive the product and some of them are going to choose to drive companies because ultimately what everyone wants is to have a product people love you take a company of The Head and the Heart and a lot of companies cut themselves off at the head and they really focus on one side of the head but most people are like they don't think like that they want a product that is deeply loving and so that's kind of our story of what we did I love it thank you it was it was interesting to hear the audience reactions you talked because you're like no way be tested people like should I applaud limited I don't know we do a control treatment but like it's not like we don't well I thought you don't like responsibility I 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 want to 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 got to get the entire company on board and so that's why I think this integrated approach is so important so if you're somebody in the audience yeah you're an IC designer a design manager maybe a design leader somewhere and you're not the founder of the company uh you're not in a company maybe that even has a Founder anymore that's no one's maybe it's a CFO running the company yeah you know and there's a lot of great CFOs out there running companies yeah how do you push for a design driven strategy well it's a really good question I I think that um I've been thinking a lot about this this something interesting I noticed lawyers never have to justify their job like well I'm 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 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 seated 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 number one I would try to make sure if you are going to do an A B test or experiment it should be hypothesis driven that if it works you should be able to say why not just what I 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 I used to think simplifying was removing things in which Johnny herokid Apple taught me is that's not what simplifying is about simplifying is distilling something to its Essence and to distill something to its essence you have to deeply understand it it's physics it's first principles and then I think there has to be a sense of craft obsessing over every single detail 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 going to want to buy more of them what is the goal we're trying to do well the goal goals 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 the goal and so these are some of the things I would do and I would try to like do it in maybe in as collaborative a way as possible but like I often tell our engineers the best thing for you is to pair you with design because otherwise it's like running and one of your legs is shorter than the other you're not going to go very fast 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 design should not be a service organization unless that is explicitly the intention of the 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 not more important than technology it's a perfect harmony from the very beginning and I think just figuring in a way to tell the story and helping people understand that you benefit from me one of the things that [Applause] something that I find truly impressive about Airbnb is how far ahead you think and I know that right now you're while we're probably sitting here some part of your brain is on okay what is Airbnb doing in six months 12 months 18 months two years yeah and I think it's really interesting how the marketing messages that you have informed the roadmap and inform the design can you break down more for us the way that you see marketing design products and Engineering all working together in harmony exactly so the first thing is we try to have a road map and I Am The Keeper of the roadmap is 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 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's churn but the long term is constantly changing and okay let's start with this that you can measure the Health Organization by the relation between marketers and engineers and in most companies marketers are like waiters and Engineers like chefs if the waiter goes in the kitchen the chef yells at them and that is not a great relationship so the first thing is that 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 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 then um you know we often will like try to present something against the most native form so if it's going to be a keynote we'll start with a keynote then we um you know we go through like a long like depends on the the roadmap a really long concept development so like let's say we launched 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 at insight and the Insight was people are nervous staying in the homes of other people they don't want to stay in the same home as we started realizing wait a second our listing the person is like non-existent because we've been optimizing entire home so we're having this conversation and we're brainstorming and that's when we had an Insight we said what if we elevated the profile on Airbnb and so then what we tried to do is we have historical references we always try to combine data and research they're equally important in research not just means the user but historical references and what is a historical reference of a profile with travel it's a passport so we said what if we make the equivalent of a host passport for every single host so then we started doing research on the kind of attributes you would want to know to stay with somebody then we started looking at design language for how you can create an animation I love design language systems but the problem with design language systems is you should design whatever you want and you put it in the design language system if you can only pull from the system you're never going to be able to take a giant leap if it is breaks the system and so there was there were this new animations we had that opened and closed the passport but then we started noticing that people had bad photos so then we built an operation to take headshots 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 and so these were the things we were able to start doing and then we started thinking about how can you tell the story so we start thinking about what a marketing campaign could be to elevate this product because a lot of products fail because they're not well marketed if you ship a feature and no one knows did it really matter and so a lot of times people give up in features too soon they ship something the data says it doesn't work they kill the feature well did you tell people about it do they know about it and so this is kind of a little bit of the life cycle of how we do it and then once we ship we unders we try to study how people are using it we do look at data we do sometimes do treatments and controls but again they're always hypothesis driven and I think we can all agree that designers should be talking with users and customers yeah of course then the line starts to blur when you're really trying to find design versus product management yes versus research and how do you much should design go into product or research in the situations let me let me I think that I think that um we so way we organize it we try to go really deep with experts so not only do we have a design function but we have a workshop group of a few dozen people that are trying to cover the entire app we have a studio that is going through a lot of the like specific implementations we have like people who focus on haptics people focus on animation I want to have people focus on typography and color you know we put user ux writing under marketing because marketers historically are more writers they have more of a writing background so we really try to align everything to the functional expertise and let me tell you a quick story about how we improve the product so we recently created this thing we call the airme 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 what if we do the same thing Airbnb what if we created a storyboard so we storyboarded the end-to-end journey for guess and hose then why ask the team every single screen a user sees put it on one wall it turns out there's 150 screens then I said every user policy every time you call customer service what policy referencing it turns out there were nearly 70 user policies some of these are all 700 pages each we map those out then I asked them to map out every single operational touch point we map those out this was really arduous we call this wrapping your arms around the company 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 first hand experience again we believe people make radic products make products for themselves and based on that we created a prioritized map and systematically tried to fix our product and I was like really focused on 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 course 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 and so so that's kind of what we did but I really try to focus on some pretty deep functional expertise and I I guess like I would also just be useful like wherever there's a hole you can fill it so it's almost like uh talking with customers isn't enough you really have to get that bird's eye view of your entire experience I think so otherwise how can you do research and I think you should be systematic about how to talk to customers like you should talk to customers you look at the data you should understand them you should be using the product yourself becoming the user in all this is like your intuition I think being a 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 because 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 before we end I'm sure that there's a bunch of people in this audience who are inspired by your story and are thinking maybe I should go start something what advice do you have for them well I'll just go back to wristy why does design need to be in boardroom when it can occasionally run the boardroom why aren't there at least a few more designers running Fortune 500 companies I don't have an answer for that but I do know a couple things I think of myself maybe as a designer but I'm not a designer the way most of you are but a designed our business model I designed our expense base I helped designer organizational chart our business how we work our story I think that design is not just how something learns it's how it's fundamentally works and I think it is one of the most important skills that we're going to need in the 21st century you ever see like there's two bad options and you're not trying to pick between two-bit options sometimes the right path is the third path and that third path requires creativity I think that a lot of business needs more heart and more imagination and that is what everyone this room can provide and so I would just encourage designers to have a Nerf I would encourage them to know that you can design the world that you want to live in and I just want to encourage as many people as possible whether it is just not asking permission for how you want to run your company for how you want to do your job speaking up about what you believe in if you're running a design Department try to make sure that the entire company is bracing your phosphate or at least have a conversation and also just know that designers can run companies they can build things they can ship things and ultimately you know when I join 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 we have to the world and I I just think more designers should rise up and start companies foreign I can't wait to see all the change that this room will bring and Brian I can't thank you enough thank you please join me in giving him a great Round of Applause [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Figma

Views: 73,953

Keywords: figma, design, product design, tips, tricks, UI design, ux design, app design, figma design, design for figma, FigJam tutorial, prototyping, collaboration, UX tutorial, Design tips, Figma tutorial, Config, design system, tutorial, product:none, audience:other, language:english, format:standard, produced_by:other, theme:culture, event:config, series:other, type:other, level:none, primary_feature:, secondary_feature:

Id: Dkfijg7s76o

Length: 28min 53sec (1733 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2023