Impact, Inquiry and Letting Fires Burn: Vlad Loktev's Playbook from a Decade Inside Airbnb

Asked what skills carried him from IC product manager to running Airbnb's homes business, Loktev says it was more a mindset than a skill: impact above everything else. Every day he asked himself two questions: what are the company's highest priorities for the next three months, and what can he do to make a meaningful dent in them? If you find yourself not working on a top priority, he says, you should probably get a different job, because you are giving so much of your life to work that you might as well take on the hardest problem you can find.

Priorities, he notes, are usually easy to identify; the hard part is knowing what impact means and how to create it. His advice is to put the day job aside and learn the drivers of the business, asking why certain user behaviors exist and what would happen if you changed them. He blocked time on his calendar just to think about drivers, and says Instant Book, which he worked on with Lenny around 2014, was the product of exactly that kind of reasoning rather than a random project.

Loktev describes how people drift away from impact as a company grows: they stop saying "I can do X" and start asking whether another team can do Y so that they can do X. He calls that a dangerous place, and urges people to let go of dependencies and focus on what is in their control. At Airbnb every project also came with back-of-the-envelope math, however rough, showing what you would have to believe for it to move a big lever, and Lenny recalls Loktev drawing a flow chart of the business levers to show the lift a project could drive.

The other half of impact is saying no, which Loktev found emotionally hard because people are conditioned to be helpful and say yes. Saying yes to everything, he argues, leaves you distracted by things that will not matter. It may not win friends in the short term, but over time people see that a no usually has a good reason behind it.

To say no without being dogmatic, Loktev relies on a framework he calls inquiry versus advocacy. Many people open a conversation with a point of view and start advocating immediately; he does the opposite, asking a ton of questions because he believes there may be information he lacks. Only once the other person feels heard, and he has maybe changed his mind or maybe not, does he begin to advocate.

He applies this to preparation too: many PMs prepare for a meeting with their view and supporting bullets, which he calls the wrong approach. Instead, prepare questions that come from curiosity, then check whether you still hold the same view. When he catches himself talking too much, he tells himself to take a beat and ask why the other person feels so strongly.

Inquiry is paired with a second motto: don't be afraid to "poke the bear" and don't self-censor. As organizations mature, he says, it becomes hard to voice real opinions in rooms full of executives for fear of being the only dissenter or sounding stupid. Around 2013 or 2014 he promised himself to speak up regardless, reasoning that the worst outcome is losing a job he could replace.

He gives examples from debates with Airbnb's senior leaders about how much and what kind of supply should be on the platform, where he argued that having every listing was not the mission and would not differentiate Airbnb in the long run. He also recalls explaining to the whole company why moving from Request to Book to Instant Book was good "for humanity." He has been humbled as often as vindicated, and what gave him peace was remembering that his job was to surface information so the group could decide. In a company-wide Q&A he simply asked people what concerned them and tackled the questions one by one, which he found disarming.

Loktev says succeeding in a hyperscale company is largely psychological: it is easy to get lost in a sea of projects, priorities and opinions and to dwell on dependencies instead of what you can do right now. One tool he used was the Serenity Prayer, asking for the serenity to accept what he cannot change, the courage to change what he can, and the wisdom to know the difference. He wrote it on sticky notes and read it every other day to put the day-to-day in context.

The second tool was what he called the "shit bucket." He would write down something that was not going well, such as a dependency, a project or a decision that went against him, crumple the paper and throw it in the trash, with the rule that nothing could be taken back out. As a perfectionist who finds it hard to let go, he found it liberating, and he would ask frustrated PMs what they were throwing in the bucket that day. His own example was a candidate he tried for a long time to hire and could not land.

He is candid that the journey was not smooth. Every three to six months his job changed, from IC growth PM to leading a team of 20, then a couple of hundred, and each time the processes, hiring and use of time that had made him comfortable broke. His lesson, learned partly from Chesky, who seemed like a different person every six months, is to ask for help from experts, and his motto is to "ask for the impossible" because people often want to help.

Loktev thinks a common team-building mistake is trying to make everyone good at everything by working on development areas. He prefers to hire people who spike on something crucial and combine different spikes on one team, provided everyone inquires and listens. Even as an investor he asks of each founder what they spike on, whether that spike fits their problem, and how well they hire to bring in other spikes.

He gives examples of spikes: domain experts who understand the mechanics of, say, marketplaces and how to turn drivers into measurable results; people who excel at sales and packaging a message; process people who know how to connect teams; and founders with an instant feel for which interface will resonate. Lenny then lists skills he saw in Loktev, including influence, a very high bar and getting things done while avoiding the limelight.

On staying focused, Loktev says Index has a saying, "keep the main thing the main thing." When hiring product leaders he saw heavy outside activity such as advising, speaking and conferences as red flags, because it suggested something was missing in their day job. Lenny adds that the best PMs he knows spend almost no time on Twitter or LinkedIn, and Loktev agrees that people who find joy in hard problems don't need external validation.

Asked about setting priorities in a large org, Loktev's longtime motto is "let fires burn." You can't do it all, and if you are equally engaged in twenty things it means you don't know what is most important. Every Monday he held a leadership meeting to agree on one to three priorities for that week and the fires the team would knowingly let burn, so that partners in engineering or design would know a visible fire was a deliberate choice.

He also lets other people's fires burn. When a leader said they needed more resources to drive a goal, his first question was what their actual priorities were and what could burn, since fewer things with more energy behind them often works better. He adds that this is empowering because the people on your team are well placed to judge which fires matter.

There are three fires he learned never to let burn. The first is major timelines, because a slip sets the precedent that timelines don't matter. The second is disagreement over a strategic decision or the vision, which can spread like a wildfire until a team no longer believes in its work. The third, which he learned painfully, is a senior hire process: whenever he delayed or disengaged from one, it set the team back for a long time.

Among fires he did let burn were a launch that wasn't working in the numbers, where he gave the team time to understand what was wrong, and important projects he deprioritized when he had too many teams to attend every design review. A lesson he says he learned the hard way was communication: as he rose, he underestimated how much people want to know what a leader is spending time on, so he began holding all-hands and sending weekly thoughts. Taking about 10 percent more time to explain why a decision was made helps people make better decisions themselves, even though as a deep introvert it did not come naturally.

Loktev, who likes tidy, well-organized things, says a major lesson was that chaos can be great. He recalls Chesky telling him that things felt off because they were "too calm" even though the numbers were up and to the right. Chesky then picked host onboarding, which had a carefully planned multi-week design-then-build timeline, and said it would be designed in 24 hours.

The team did it, a bit slower than 24 hours but very quickly, and Loktev learned that the artificial constraint forced them to dial up intuition and think more creatively. It did not always work, and sometimes more time was needed, but often it was a great forcing function. He found those sprints among the most fun and connecting moments, because organizational dependencies and noise fall away and no idea is too crazy.

On Chesky's habit of asking how to 10x a goal, Loktev says it is less about hitting the goal than about the creative journey of working out what the world must look like for it to be true. That pushes you to test extremes, where the path you should actually take often becomes visible. Lenny adds that thinking backward from the best possible outcome unlocks bigger ideas than inching forward.

Because this pace isn't for everyone, Loktev set expectations in interviews with what he calls an anti-sell: he described what a candidate would think was the worst day at Airbnb, including working weekends, strategy changing every three months and projects being killed weeks later. Lenny mentions a similar "unsell email" from another guest, which can cost a recruiter some hires. Loktev says you will hire fewer people but the right ones, who can handle constant change.

On scaling, Loktev says one of the hardest parts is losing friends along the way. In hypergrowth most people don't scale with the company, and he cites a statistic from a book Index wrote, *Scaling Through Chaos*: among companies that reached a thousand people, only two or three of the first ten employees were still there. His advice for breaking out of that is to ask for help and learn what the next version of your role will look like.

He is blunt that "all org charts suck." Organizing by business unit tends to produce silos, while functional organization creates dependencies and a slower matrix way of working. So when a problem appears, reorganizing is rarely the answer; understand the cons of your structure and design a process so that people connect and work well together.

For founders, he suggests studying the options, picking one and then focusing on people, culture and how they collaborate, since incentives ultimately come down to culture. On hiring, his universal rule is mission over domain expertise and skills: people with raw horsepower who love the mission can build any skill the job needs. Strategy, orgs and teams all change, he says, and the mission is the constant that carries a company through hard times such as COVID.

He also frames where to work as a Venn diagram of the company's priorities and your own strengths, with the best place being the intersection. The worst thing you can do is sit in a job where you aren't impactful and aren't working on a top priority. Lenny's reading is that if you are not enjoying a job, you may not care enough about the company's mission.

Looking back on ten years, Loktev says what he remembers most are moments with people rather than launches or metrics. His most memorable was the "human tunnel" on his first day, when the whole company at headquarters, founders included, cheered his name as he ran through to a beanbag. He says moments like that don't happen organically, and come from being thoughtful about culture and hiring for core values.

His advice is that there is no single playbook, but you should spend as much energy on culture and core values as on product and hiring. Don't write them in a document nobody opens, and don't copy another company's values; make them prominent in everything. At Airbnb, everyone passed a core values interview even when the company had thousands of people, and no amount of impact earned a promotion without exemplifying the values.

Lenny, who left Airbnb years ago, can still recite the values, including "be a host," "champion the mission" and "embrace the adventure." Both note that Airbnb cut values it realized weren't really true of the company, because values should describe who you actually are rather than aspirations. They also praise the use of tangible examples for each value, and the fact that being chosen as a core values interviewer was seen as an honor.

Asked about Chesky's description of Airbnb's top-down, one-roadmap way of working, Loktev first says no company should copy another's ways of operating, since they depend on the founders, the leadership team, the domain and the moment. At Airbnb, people arrived from Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix and Apple with different assumptions, and because the Airbnb way wasn't stated for a long time, teams operated very differently. His lesson is to pick an explicit way of working and voice it so everyone has clarity.

He thinks "top-down" is misunderstood. In the room where hard decisions were made, Loktev says Chesky asked a lot of questions, listened, sometimes disregarded input given his conviction and often changed his mind, so leaders could influence decisions. He wanted leaders in the details because a decision room can't be made up of people who can't say what is happening in the business. Loktev suggests the real mode was somewhere in the middle, with information coming bottom-up and conviction coming top-down.

He names the downsides too. Requiring particular people in every detail can slow shipping, and Loktev felt the quality of what Airbnb was releasing had suffered during a push to ship everything, so he welcomed the intentional slowdown to raise the quality bar before speeding up again. For founders, he says to identify where you spike, as Chesky did in product, design and marketing, and stay involved in those decisions while letting go of others you trust someone else to handle.

On the move from product managers to product marketing managers, he finds the reaction a bit overblown. Many PMs were already doing marketing, and the change moved project management into a separate program management function, which left product leaders freer to be user-centric and strategic. Whether it suits other companies depends on the people, he says, since PMs who are also very good marketers are a rare skill set.

In Failure Corner, Loktev describes a dark period around 2018 at Airbnb when he felt overworked and overwhelmed and wondered whether he was going to tap out. As a perfectionist he realized so much of his identity was his job that he struggled to separate himself from his work. He had lost friends and relationships and many hobbies, and was not spending enough time with his family.

He concluded he had to become a more balanced person to be a better leader. He reconnected with people he had lost touch with, spent more time with his wife and parents and went back to gaming, and, ironically, became more effective while working less. Because he was happier, he felt each hour was more impactful.

He closes with a reminder that a lot of success is luck, so you should cut yourself some slack, as long as you are pouring your heart into something and giving it your all. Lenny's takeaway is that if you are burned out, doing less and leaning into your personal life may help you succeed in both. Loktev adds that you need to find joy in little things to show up with the open mind and curiosity a job demands.