The Journey to Empowered Teams - Twitter, Airbnb & Tumblr

There’s nothing Product people like more than geeking out about how one of the hot tech companies approaches Product development - and what that means for the future of their company and their own role. (Except maybe a 2x2 matrix. I mean, who doesn’t love another way of analyzing things?)

In the past couple weeks, we’ve had entries in this space from Airbnb, Tumblr and Twitter. They’re all fascinating examples - especially because they’re variations on the same theme, illustrating different stages of the same problem. One of these firms is in the thick of the problem stage, one illustrates a turnaround, and the last is an example of what good looks like. 

Let’s start with the problem company - and no bonus points if you guessed that it’s Twitter.

‘We’re only going to make the good stuff, and make it quicker’ is such a bad management cliché that it’s hardly worth making fun of. It’s the thing that top execs say when they’re trying to turn around a distressed asset - TV and Film execs have declared this when they take over studios any number of times, let alone all of the times I’ve heard it in the companies I’ve been at.

It never works. It can’t work, because the attitude is diametrically opposed to creating a culture where people invest in continuous discovery, where people ship to learn, and where that learning is quickly applied to re-prioritise the work on a regular basis. Instead, it usually reinforces a blame culture, where the only good idea is the one that the boss has - and anything that doesn’t work is the fault of people who didn’t execute it correctly.

Ok, that’s not entirely true. It works where the albatross pet project - the one that’s been eating tons of cash and time, the one with no prospect for success - is killed. It works where it’s paired with a transformation that frees people up to work in a new way. And it works when the boss understands that they - and the culture that they’ve created - isn’t good enough for the challenge that they’re facing.

That leads us to Airbnb. You’ve heard that Brian Chesky announced that they’d gotten rid of their Product Managers (not true), and it got a huge cheer from an audience of designers (actually true). If you watch what he actually said, you’ll realize something else: the problem wasn’t with the PMs, but that the company had no actual plan for what it was doing. Or rather, it had too many plans.

“First of all I asked every leader to show me your roadmap. They couldn't even figure out their road maps because everyone had a sub-roadmap on sub-teams and those teams had road maps.”

This is a brilliant admission - it’s a problem that lots of companies go through, but few have the courage and conviction to tackle.

It’s a culture issue, and stems from a problem with Prioritisation and Perspective: everyone is acting with the best of intentions, trying to do the Right Thing. But because there isn’t clear direction on what the Right Thing is, the teams and sub=teams each had their own idea of what it might be. Instead of a company working on shipping a few high-value, game-changing things, you get one that isn’t shipping anything well. 

If this sounds like what Twitter’s facing - well, surprise! If it sounds like your company, hang on: there’s hope, because Chesky took action:

“And so I said, ‘There's a simple 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 percent of the things on the road map.’

That was a wet reckoning. So… we took the very best people, {and} we put them all on a few projects.”

(Let’s skip over the term ‘wet reckoning,’ as I’m pretty sure he meant to say ‘dead reckoning’.)

This sounds drastic, but it’s something that was desperately needed - while Chesky complains that there was no single roadmap, that’s the result of a leadership gap. Systems tend towards disorder, and it takes significant investment from the management team to ensure that everyone knows what the real corporate priorities are - and to stop investment in things that aren’t critical.

This is not antithetical to the idea of empowering teams - in fact, it’s a critical component of doing so.  And that leads us to Tumblr - remember them? - who this week, published their Core Product Strategy.  It’s a great example of a management team making plain both what they’re trying to accomplish, but also the specific bets that they’re making to get there.

This is the kind of clarity that is needed to give teams the permission to go out and work as missionaries, not mercenaries. There’s more needed, of course - the things listed in the post are Objectives, and we can only presume that the Key Results for each are things that are communicated internally.  It would also make sense that individual teams, or groups of teams, have been given the task of leading on each of these 6 elements.

The reality of what’s going on internally at any of these companies is likely a bit different from what’s published and spoken about at conferences - but it’s nice to get three stories in a week that so clearly illustrate the spectrum of companies at each stage of creating a culture that allows everyone to contribute to success.