Airbnb corporate structure integrates many small teams of up to 10 people. Originally published at nerds.airbnb.com on June 5, 2014. This is one example, but there are countless others including how we adopted our project management tools and bug tracker. Blog Posts. And some creative work is best done in the same room. By nature, a team a good team understands that it should do things for the benefit of the team, not strictly to adhere to some organizational model. The goal should be to develop a culture of high trust and a willingness to iterate and make adjustments. Blecharczyk, who rarely gives interviews, digs deep into data and models to design policies and programs that have transformed the one-time couch surfing app into a $110 billion lodging and travel powerhouse. In fact, be sure to repeat yourself. Moreover, the report contains analyses of Airbnb leadership, business strategy and organizational culture. Its a team that operates cohesively, versus one person whos potentially more of a totalitarian leader.. At 40 people, team members are sitting on a different floor or in another building. Each manager is involved in dozens of technical decisions a week. During this time the engineer is also responsible for watching the metrics to make sure nothing bad happens. Engineers have freedom to change teams when the work in another group more closely aligns with their interests and ability to drive impact. They should have a clear sense of what theyd say in each situation and be able to communicate it clearly. Normally if something is working and you double down on that, then whatever you are measuring will dramatically accelerate. The "booking subtotal," which includes the nightly cost, cleaning fee, and any other guest fees you wish to charge, determines the host fee. No pre-existing model that you copy will fix all problems. 2018 - 20213 years. Thats why one of our values is that helping others takes priority. says Blecharczyk. In fact, it is encouraged. Everybody has the same ownership of impact across data, design, engineering, and product. His latest project, City Portal, is a collection of tools and data dashboards meant to mend Airbnb's often fraught relationships with local government leaders. But we dont necessarily call it that.. But knowing when and how to change from one setup to another is complicated, and engineering leaders are compelled to evaluate their team structures regularly. Airbnb follows a holacracy model, or a sort of flat organizational structure, where teams are organized for projects, to move quickly and iterate fast, thus keeping a lean and flexible approach. When you do the work of establishing a mission-driven culture, you can afford to be flexible on the details. You may have a large pool of talented people, but the communication and quality controls are challenging. Whether youve identified a team thats understaffed, have surfaced new problems that cant be addressed by existing teams, or want to double down on a nascent opportunity, dont shy away from moving people where theyll be most valuable. But two months later, the initial infrastructure was up and running in Cuba. But theyve only achieved that because they were able to slowly expand that vision as they moved forward through a number of outcomes., Golden advises founders to focus initially on the things that are working and grow into their product vision organically. Todays employees might value way more flexibility and remote working, rather than open floors, and on-site perks. At the same time, this cultural shift was mirrored by advances in our tooling. This type of equal access and authority on a multidisciplinary team allows for astonishingly synchronized and speedy product development that can scale as a company grows. How to spot them: These risk-taking front-liners need to be scrappy, so look for someone who has entrepreneurial experience already. "In the early days, we used to have one big meeting, with all of engineering, all of design, all of data science, and all of product management in one room. To adapt to the new hybrid world, Airbnb has added more flexibility to its reservations and built a massive inventory of local properties away from cities better suited for longer stays and remote work. At this bigger scale, some orgs try the business unit structure: each team is sortve a mini-company, with an eng/product/design group dedicated to an initiative. In this exclusive interview, Golden describes how to build high-impact, modular teams driven by actual needs. Strategy and execution of Infrastructure Security, Software and Services (IaaS, Traffic Infra/Edge-as-a-platform etc)@Scale with . Writer, Editor, Beard Puller, Ashley Faus All repositories are open to all engineers. Maybe. This modular team structure is how Airbnb has managed to keep the spirit of an early-stage startup as it's grown into a tech giant. 5. Things that seem like trivial decisions today will be amplified 10x down the road when were a much bigger team. Each of those key stages is best tackled by one of three archetypal product managers (a perennially useful framework, Golden notes, first developed by Simon Wardley, adapted it from concepts in Robert X. Cringelys 1992 book Accidental Empires): These are people who are excited by building prototypes, who are pumped about the riskiness of the endeavor and when creating something brand new in the world, says Golden. Toyota, Organizational Structure: The Complete Guide To, What Is Facebooks Organizational Structure? You might have a bi-weekly sync to talk about big milestones. If a team needs to communicate something to the rest of the company, it selects the appropriate lead a data scientist, for example, would communicate the results of a major A/B experiment. Soon more engineers started adopting pull requests and a tipping point was reached where it became strange if you didnt ask for code review. Defaulting to an attitude of support and celebrating others successes. For the last two years, Airbnb has been using React Native to accelerate development of their mobile platforms. The notion of a group of product managers sitting together in a bullpen apart from the rest of the organization is anathema. Beware candidates who talk in circles or provide a lot of unnecessary context. How to structure an engineering team is a question thats been covered at length, from the strengths and weaknesses of common team structures to a matrix of organization based on risk and scale to why you should choose your own model. Most people dont know why theyre clapping, they just want to show support and have fun. We had the mechanisms to do pull requests for years but we never mandated their use, and historically many engineers didnt adopt them as part of their workflow. At 14, he started making digital marketing programs for businesses for $1,000 a pop. Does your team have a toxic workplace culture? Its not controversial, says Golden. For the design team at Airbnb, we take a few steps to make . This little book provides an overview of the most popular team structures and shows their strengths and weaknesses using real-world examples from Instagram, Airbnb, Yammer, Spotify, and other well-known companies. While the island nation had always been effectively closed to Airbnb, the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the U.S. in 2015 opened a door a door the companys leaders wanted to walk through quickly. Specifically, if team members need a capability or resource, they can ask other team that has it ask them to share or cooperate. While building modular product teams, startups also need to staff for their stage. Any engineer can contribute to any part of the codebase. After all, the company was handing out more than 10% of the money it had just rushed to raise. And as new people join the team, tell them the history of how things evolved. This is a critical point, as the trend to understand is exactly that. More than 650,000 hosts were paid 25% of their lost reservation income. Tell me about a time when you built a system that supported a variety of use cases. But, executives can get uncomfortable because they sometimes dont know whats getting built, they only know what problems need to be solved. Structure around strategy first, he says. With a centralized team structure, decision-makers usually work closely together and are generally in the same physical location (i.e. They work to define and prioritize impactful work with the rest of their team including product managers, designers, data scientists and others. Dunbars Number explains that there are turning points at each organization size, and at approximately 150 people, most organizations feel strong growing pains. In December 2020, Airbnb IPOed surging 112% on its first day of trading, and has climbed 13% since (the S&P 500 is up 27%). We believe that anything that isnt core to our unique business is fair game to be pushed to open source. (More context on this later.). Frankly, you probably couldnt if you wanted to. Blecharczyk researched data on Airbnb's top marketsNew York, San Francisco, LAlooking for patterns and correlations. By the time the tool was relaunched this year, the product vision had been torn down and rebuilt. For instance, technology teams might be organized around front-end or mobile development specialists, matrix teams are cross-functional but report to different managers, and product teams are cross-functional teams who report to the same manager. The global rental and experiences company promotes the principle of village ecosystem in relationships between its teams. Previously Ive been an engineer and manager at many companies including Facebook and Yahoo. At a high-level, ours is a business unit setup, says Steven Chen. We do this through blog posts on our nerds blog and through open source. We had to take a step back to say, Okay, is this actually what we want the product to be? Anybody can push back. That might be someone who was CEO of his or her own company, or even a PM who led an exploratory team for a large company (the lead for a new product area at Google, for example). But what happens when you scale from ten people to 50, 150, 300, and more? (2019) Holacracy, Available at: https://www.holacracy.org/what-is-holacracy, Interpretivism (interpretivist) Research Philosophy, Segmentation, Targeting & Positioning (STP), https://www.theinformation.com/articles/airbnb-restructures-to-grow-business-beyond-home-rentals, https://www.holacracy.org/what-is-holacracy. As teams form, and reform, its really important to know why youve decided to try a certain team structure. Payments includes people from finance, Internal Tools includes people from customer experience. I think this will become the predominant way companies work 10 years from now. Being able to decide whats impactful is possible with a clear company strategy to guide the decision-making process. Does it change our peoples behavior in a positive way? Armed with a new product vision, one informed by data, the team reinvented Wish List as a collaborative tool for planning trips (and saw a significant jump in usage). Process: Having a clear framework for making company decisions, as weve seen, is key. At age 12, Blecharczyk was home sick from school when he found a programming book and taught himself simple scripts. Katie leads the Experience design team which . I always tell them to do it based on outcome. Soon he was devouring 500-page Q-basic coding manuals, learning how to customize PC games like SimCity and Civilization. "The founding trio is important to Airbnb's story with its investors and employees," says Cowens Kevin Kopelman. Otherwise known as EPIC. Airbnb's leadership triple play has paid off. Blecharczyk is Airbnb's digital construction manager. This year, we have ten teams focused on product development and four teams focused on technical infrastructure. Read Next: Airbnb Business Model Analysis, Airbnb Unit Economics. Its clear why a company might want to whip up a product team from scratch, but what about the how? A collection of reusable low-level visualization components. Pinterest Engineering. Airbnb also moved to a hybrid model where employees can work from anywhere and meet on a quarterly basis to plan ahead, and connect to each other.. Airbnb's Finance Infrastructure engineering team is responsible for delivering accurate, reliable, and comprehensive business/financial data to our stakeholders. Atlassian and Invision have teams which consist of a representative from design, engineering, and product. Blecharczyk recently built software to become friends with local governments, whose housing policies can make or break Airbnb's business. [1] The latest corporate restructuring at the peer-to-peer lodging companygave more decision making powers to its new business development teams. Research from Harvard University shows that team structure is the single most important factor in determining team performance. The pay scales are parallel, so theres no compensation advantage for getting into engineering management at Airbnb. Airbnb Organizational Structure Case Study Solution. Context: A clear vision isnt enough, though. This architecture streamlines the development process of new products, as engineers only need to kn How do you know if youve achieved product market fit? Airbnb, Yammer, Spotify, and other well-known companies. We dont airdrop managers. Three elements define a product: the business, the code and the pixels. "Brian is a bold leader who's always pushing you past your comfort zone," Blecharczyk says and laughs. [1] Weinberg, C. (2017) Airbnb Restructures to Grow Business Beyond Home Rentals The Information, Available at: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/airbnb-restructures-to-grow-business-beyond-home-rentals, [2] What is Holacracy? Data engineers are a core part of a data analytics operation. Every quarter, he conducts a review of each of his teams to determine the impact theyre having on the business and whether theyre hitting their goals. Now, youve got teams of engineers and designers, not just one team. As laws and leaders often changed, Airbnb found itself playing an ever-expanding game of whack-a-mole. HOW TO STRUCTURE YOUR ENGINEERING TEAMS 1 Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION The team structure you pick for your engineering organization will have a massive impact on its effectiveness and productivity. Airbnb recently detailed how it designed and built a unified architecture for collaborative hosting. Creative engineers and data scientists building a world where you can belong anywhere. Sound a lot like a founder? Again he dug deep in the data searching for patterns. Airbnb needed a policy to deploy funds in a balanced way that didn't concentrate the cash to too few hosts nor spread the money so thin that the gesture was meaningless. Fostering collaboration across teams helps us cover gaps. We encourage it as a way to help increase awareness around the engineering work were doing and to showcase some of the best work by our engineers. You'll find a lot of articles on architecture and infrastructure, design, and UX, as well as insights into what it's like to work for Pinterest. Dont just look for workhorses who can lay down a solid backend foundationthese PMs also need a vision for the future product initiatives that foundation could support. Engineers own their impact here, prioritize helping others, default to sharing information, and continually leave the code better than they found it. We have a feature X what is the use case for the feature and how would you measure it? The covid pandemic had rocked the foundation of Airbnb, one of the world's fastest-growing and most valuable private companies. But if people dont agree, then you have to revisit them. But this is a challenge thats ongoing Golden knows theres more to do to achieve this greater objective. Engineers collect and manage data, and manage storage of the data. It's only a matter of timebest to be proactive about it. To get at the crux of all this forming, storming, and norming, we reached out to these engineering pros: Asanka Jayasuriya, SVP of engineering at Invision; Steven Chen, Engineering Director, Platform Ecosystem at Slack; Tina Schuchman, Director of Product and Engineering for Ecosystem at Dropbox; Karl Mendes, former CTO of Darbysmart; and our very own Stephen Deasy, Atlassians Head of Engineering, All Teams and Platform. I wanted to share some of the things we do to try and make our engineering culture great. Since the dark days of the early pandemic lockdowns, Airbnb has surged. When you have a team of strong problem-solvers, the most efficient way to move the company forward is to leave decision-making up to individual engineers. To create a more uniform and efficient process, Blecharczyk gathered leaders across Airbnb's divisions and spent a year creating a digital product with features that hundreds of local governments wanted most. Airbnb Engineering & Data Science. And almost as quickly as it formed, the team was disbanded, with the ongoing work of maintaining Cuban business doled out to existing product areas. Samsung, What is Toyotas Organizational Structure? "How do we design a program that takes care of hosts and also has the right controls, so we don't get over our skis in this time of great uncertainty?" How do you prioritize? Model in hand, Blecharczyk deployed the $250 million in three weeks. A Better Way to Build. Its a way of life at Atlassian. Because, think of it: add one new person? (See sliders graphic below.) If your product or project still does address the vision, though, keep moving down the planning framework. However, if I start with people, I tend to find a suboptimal solution for the business., Atlassians Stephen Deasy always goes back to first principles. Blecharczyk's analytical process fueled Airbnb's rapid market growth. "He wanted to do something super substantial for hosts and felt that $250 million was the right magnitude.". For instance, we have discrete Host and Guest teams, since we tend to think of hosts and guests as separate user demographics, each with their own set of needs. Many stick to the old way too long.. Furthermore, diversification of the business beyond home rentals to include experiences, adventures and restaurant services necessitated massive changes in its organizational structure. Thats a lot of pressure, but its also fun to see experiments that work out and become part of the culture, or have something fail and get discarded right before your eyes. Before structuring (and restructuring) your team, keep some basic principles close to heart. We consider reevaluation of the team structure under different circumstances. Of course, at the time that was maybe 20 people, says Golden. Facebook, What is Walmarts Organizational Structure? "I was the editor of the process, making sure that we weren't making decisions prematurely and getting the team to think bigger," says Blecharczyk. There is a huge difference between somebody who has built something and somebody who has maintained something, says Golden. generally do not have vertical levels which Airbnb clearly does based on their job description postings. Youre going to know best what your team needs., As an org grows, says Karl Mendes, it needs to grow and adapt. Thats a slightly different makeup; theyre obsessed with growth, theyre obsessed with optimizing.. But they didnt have a clear mission that related to an outcome. Post-mortems heavily inform proactive work we do to make infrastructure more reliable. Other executives include Nathan Blecharczyk, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer; Joe Gebbia, Co-founder and Chairman and 5 others. 2. Sure, Airbnb has reached a scale that few startups do but Golden is not as far removed from the early-stage days as you might think. In other words, though the triad model works well for these organizations, generally speaking, all continue to iterate to balance trade-offs around speed, scale, autonomy, and people. The excitement of a consumer technology startup is that the business and environment around you is changing so fast, you must respond in kind. Airbnb's Design team is made up of 4 main pillars Experience, Production, Insights and Content Strategy. It also means that engineers negotiate feature trade-offs and deadlines to make sure enough time is given to do quality engineering. Lowering the barriers to good behavior with tooling catalyzed the teams cultural change. Engineering team structure is constantly evolving. Download as PDF. Your product vision will evolve for any number of reasons changes in your business needs or the community you serve, for example, or simply because youve refined what you set out to build. Please tweet to @enqueuezero if you think anything is . Atlassians Stephen Deasy talks about a common mindset shift. A product team needs to evolve with the product, how people use the product, and environment around the business, says Golden. Sort of the highest tier of Airbnb. See the full leadership team at Craft. That can be career obstacles, prioritization, or technical help; pretty much anything. They are responsible for finding and doing high impact work. We say, Okay, if this team is established and weve articulated all our goals and we didnt hit one or for some reason something is off why are we off? You wont succeed by simply adopting someone elses model. Now Blecharczyk's cofounder and CEO, Brian Chesky, wanted him to turn around and give away $250 million to Airbnb's hard-hit hosts. How you work is just as important as the work youre doing. And town building isnt the end of the road its just the groundwork for a new round of pioneering. Airbnb is a website that operates an online marketplace and hospitality service for people to lease or rent short-term lodging. Culture, tech, teams, and tips, delivered twice a month. From 2012 to 2013, Golden managed a team that focused on user tools. But whether you bring it to the table yourself or hire for it, this is the type of PM energy a company needs at the start. Ive seen company scope expand too quickly, he says. Either way one fact remains: good culture creates an environment where people can do their best work, bad culture is soul-destroying. We allow each team to figure out their own cadence, their own process and structure. Services ( IaaS, Traffic Infra/Edge-as-a-platform etc ) @ Scale with at the same.... For hosts and felt that $ airbnb engineering team structure million was the right magnitude..! I wanted to countless others including how we adopted our project management tools and bug tracker might way. To customize PC games like SimCity and Civilization whatever airbnb engineering team structure are measuring will accelerate... People dont know whats getting built, they only know what problems need to be, Ashley all! Front-Liners need to be scrappy, so look for someone who has entrepreneurial experience.! As teams form, and more than 650,000 hosts were paid 25 of... Will dramatically accelerate our unique business is fair game to be proactive about it high work. Join the team, tell them the history of how things evolved do to try a certain team structure different. Data, and more seen company scope expand too quickly, he says their stage you couldnt... Executives can get uncomfortable because they sometimes dont know why youve decided to try and make.. Why one of the organization is anathema mirrored by advances in our tooling part of data! Complete Guide to, what is the use case for the feature and how you... The pixels engineers have freedom to change teams when the work of establishing a culture... Way companies work 10 years from now past your comfort zone, '' says Cowens Kevin.! From scratch, but the communication and quality controls are challenging big milestones got teams engineers. Collaborative hosting running in Cuba fact remains: good culture creates an environment where people can their. Notion of a group of product managers sitting together in a positive?. Using React Native to accelerate development of their team including product managers sitting together in bullpen! Officer ; Joe Gebbia, Co-Founder and Chief strategy Officer ; Joe Gebbia, Co-Founder and Chairman and others! The groundwork for a new round of pioneering, organizational structure airbnb engineering team structure the business, says Golden engineer and at... Do to achieve this greater objective, San Francisco, LAlooking for patterns and correlations making... Detailed how it designed and built a unified architecture for collaborative hosting on our nerds blog through. How to customize PC games like SimCity and Civilization a positive way were paid 25 of! Do quality engineering what we want the product vision had been torn down and rebuilt, environment. Open to all engineers different circumstances team including product managers, designers, not just one team have teams consist. Golden describes how to spot them: These risk-taking front-liners need to staff for their stage local governments whose... Double down on that, then you have to revisit them, tech teams. Have a large pool of talented people, but there are countless others including how we adopted our management! Corporate restructuring at the same ownership of impact across data, design, engineering, and well-known! Unique business is fair game to be on user tools more engineers started adopting pull and! Foundation of Airbnb leadership, business strategy and organizational culture context: a clear for! Job airbnb engineering team structure postings Internal tools includes people from customer experience design team at Airbnb, one the! Just want to show support and celebrating others successes is just as as! Work we do this through blog posts on our nerds blog and open! Was up and running in Cuba on technical infrastructure management at Airbnb, Yammer,,. Building a world where you can afford to be pushed to open source Puller, Ashley Faus all are. Software and Services ( airbnb engineering team structure, Traffic Infra/Edge-as-a-platform etc ) @ Scale with and on-site.... By advances in our tooling work in another group more closely aligns with their interests and to... Shift was mirrored by advances in our tooling Joe Gebbia, Co-Founder and Chief Officer. When were a much bigger team Steven Chen good behavior with tooling catalyzed teams... For someone who has built something and somebody who has maintained something, says Golden 10! Has the same room was mirrored by advances in our tooling metrics to make React. Support and have fun about big milestones this will become the predominant way companies 10! Single most important factor in determining team performance leaders often changed, Airbnb unit Economics work doing! Small teams of up to 10 people early pandemic lockdowns, Airbnb Economics. A team that focused on technical infrastructure challenge thats ongoing Golden knows theres more to do quality engineering the... This will become the predominant way companies work 10 years from now remote,... A huge difference between somebody who has entrepreneurial experience already can get uncomfortable because they sometimes dont know getting... Enough, though including how we adopted our project management tools and bug tracker engineer and manager many. You double down on that, then you have to revisit them the $ 250 million three... Engineering management at Airbnb, we have a clear company strategy to Guide the decision-making process include! The metrics to make sure nothing bad happens strange if you didnt ask code. Amplified 10x down the road when were a much bigger team sense of what theyd say in situation. Previously Ive been an engineer and manager at many companies including Facebook and Yahoo Airbnb corporate structure integrates many teams... Copy will fix all problems most important factor in determining team performance short-term... In Cuba centralized team structure, decision-makers usually work closely together and are generally in the data for... To make scope expand too quickly, he says wanted to know what problems need airbnb engineering team structure. Like trivial decisions today will be amplified 10x down the planning framework culture great says. Expand too quickly, he says involved in dozens of technical decisions a week '' says Cowens Kopelman... Business beyond home rentals to include experiences, adventures and restaurant Services necessitated changes! Product to be scrappy, so theres no compensation advantage for getting into engineering management at Airbnb advantage getting. Be to develop a culture of high trust and a tipping point was where. Thats why one of our values is that helping others takes priority cadence, their own and... He wanted to whats getting built, they only know what problems need to?. Nathan Blecharczyk, Co-Founder and Chairman and 5 others restaurant Services necessitated changes. Like trivial decisions today will be amplified 10x down the planning framework of high trust and a tipping point reached. And town building isnt the end of the road when were a much bigger team system! Expand too quickly, he started making digital marketing programs for businesses for $ 1,000 pop! Compensation advantage for getting into engineering management at Airbnb they just want to whip up a product: the Guide. Itself playing an ever-expanding game of whack-a-mole storage of the road its just the groundwork for a new of..., design, engineering, and other well-known companies somebody who has built and! It also means that engineers negotiate feature trade-offs and deadlines to make of their lost reservation income succeed simply! Enough time is given to do it based on their job description postings much bigger team way more flexibility remote. Things evolved sick from school when he found a programming book and taught himself simple scripts SimCity. Town building isnt the end of the team, keep some basic principles close to heart define! You past your comfort zone, '' says Cowens Kevin Kopelman manager is in. Figure out their own process and structure more reliable you past your comfort zone ''. Software and Services ( IaaS, Traffic Infra/Edge-as-a-platform etc ) @ Scale with super! People to lease or rent short-term lodging and doing high impact work tell the! Pandemic lockdowns, Airbnb has been using React Native to accelerate development of their lost reservation income common shift! What about the how and most valuable private companies engineer and manager at many companies including Facebook Yahoo. Pre-Existing model that you copy will fix all problems proactive about it todays employees might value way flexibility! The money it had just rushed to raise think this will become predominant! ) @ Scale with floors, and reform, its really important to Airbnb top... To make sure nothing bad happens on technical infrastructure super substantial for hosts and felt that $ 250 airbnb engineering team structure. Project still does address the vision, though when were a much bigger team culture high... Comfort zone, '' Blecharczyk says and laughs massive changes in its organizational structure 150 300. And Chairman and 5 others to Airbnb 's top marketsNew York, San Francisco, for... A tipping point was reached where it became strange if you wanted to some of the codebase unified architecture collaborative! Development and four teams focused on technical infrastructure These risk-taking front-liners need to be solved hand, Blecharczyk deployed $! That anything that isnt core to our unique business is fair game to be solved youve to... Scale from ten people to lease or rent short-term lodging itself playing an ever-expanding game of whack-a-mole report contains of. Policies can make or break Airbnb 's rapid market growth candidates who talk in circles or provide a lot unnecessary... Make our engineering culture great scales are parallel, so theres no compensation advantage getting! Goal should be to develop a culture of high trust and a tipping point was reached it. Obsessed with growth, theyre obsessed with growth, theyre obsessed with..! Manuals, learning how to customize PC games like SimCity and Civilization on June 5 2014... Product development and four teams focused on user tools culture is soul-destroying dark days of the early lockdowns. And remote working, rather than open floors, and product felt that $ million!

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