The CEO Is the Chief Product Officer: Brian Chesky's Airbnb Operating System

Brian Chesky opens by addressing the comments he made at Figma Config that led some people to believe Airbnb had eliminated product management. He says he did not get rid of the people; he changed how they work together, and he notes that 5,000 designers cheered because many designers are frustrated with the product development process. He separates the traditional product management function from the people who help drive the product.

Airbnb combined the inbound product development responsibilities of the product manager with the outbound marketing responsibilities of product marketing, moved much of the program management work to actual program managers, and made the group smaller and more senior. The most senior people are called product marketers, but everyone must understand how to talk about the product. Chesky argues that you cannot build a product unless you know how to talk about it, and you cannot be an expert in making it unless you are an expert in its market.

The product group does not control or drive design and engineering; it manages by influence, which Chesky says works because Airbnb designed a company where people can collaborate without having to like each other. He also says designers are often treated as a service organization, and he has told well-known heads of design that they are really 'design administrators.' The result, he argues, is bad for designers, product managers, and engineers who all want to build the best products.

Chesky describes a common arc in large companies: teams run on different technical stacks, accumulate technical debt, and create dependencies. When dependent teams face backups, they ask for resources and build their own marketing departments or other groups, which turns them into separate divisions. Divisions then need advocacy and relationships to get resources, which creates politics, bureaucracy, a lack of accountability, complacency, and a fast-growing company that becomes slow.

The symptom is a company with many marketing efforts that customers never hear about, and thousands of engineers whose products customers cannot name. Chesky says a simple health heuristic is how close engineering and marketing are, comparing engineers to chefs and marketers to waiters: the waiters talk to customers all day and know how to sell, so they should be joined at the hip. He wants engineers thinking about how to talk about the products they build.

Airbnb had also been spending heavily on performance marketing, which Chesky calls a laser that can light up a corner of a room but not the whole room. He credits co-founder Joe with the laser, flash bulb, and chandelier metaphor: brand marketing is the chandelier, while performance marketing is useful for balancing supply and demand. Performance marketing does not create accumulating advantages, so Airbnb began treating marketing as education about new products rather than only ads or conversion.

Chesky says the founder cycle he hears about everywhere is real: founders run the show, are encouraged to delegate, get small thinking and bureaucracy, and then take the reins back. He cites Ben Horowitz's warning that founders often delegate away the thing they are best at. At Airbnb there is no chief product officer title, but Chesky says if there were one it would be him, because the CEO of a product or tech company should be the chief product officer.

In Airbnb's early days Chesky did everything but engineering, then became more hands-off as the company grew. He describes a paradox: the less involved he was, the more spin there was, the less clear the goals, the fewer resources teams had, and the slower they moved; people then assumed the slowness came from leadership over-involvement. By 2019 Airbnb was spending a billion dollars on AdWords, the app felt unchanged for four years, and people described working 80 hours to get 20 hours of productive work done.

Before the pandemic, Chesky met Hiroki Asai and reconnected with Jony Ive, who described how Apple ran under Steve Jobs from about 1998 to 2011. Hiroki had been a creative director at Apple and ran marketing communications, where the app and brand touchpoints were designed. Airbnb had about 10 divisions—flights, homes split into pro hosts, core hosts, and Lux, business travel, a magazine, experiences, .org, and China—all going in different directions, and Chesky says his job shifted from proactive to reactive.

The pandemic erased 80% of Airbnb's business in eight weeks, which Chesky describes as a near-death experience that gave the company clarity. People who previously thought he was too involved asked him to get more involved; he had everyone write down everything they were doing, concluded Airbnb could do about 20%, cut projects, removed management layers, and returned to a functional startup model with fewer than 7,000 employees. Every executive became an expert in their functional domain, and Chesky created one shared consciousness among the top 30 or 40 people. He also created a rolling two-year roadmap, made metrics subordinate to the calendar, planned releases every May and every November or October, kept a reserve for pivots such as housing 120,000 refugees, made program management a high-status role, and reviewed all product and marketing work every one, two, four, eight, or twelve weeks. The reviews let him see the equivalent of a semi-assembled car and identify bottlenecks without mandating a return to the office.

Chesky says too many founders apologize for how they want to run the company and negotiate a midpoint between their approach and what employees want. That midpoint, he argues, is a good way to make everyone miserable, because people want clarity and want to row in the same direction quickly. He adds that employees may not stay for the whole project, so a project should be something everyone signs up for rather than something one person advocated for. Chesky got involved in every detail and told leaders that leaders are in the details, distinguishing that from micromanagement, which is telling people exactly what to do.

He says the methodology can work for everyone, but companies do not have to be as ideological or go all the way to 100. Airbnb still spends on performance marketing, measures conversion, and runs some experiments; Chesky compares conversion work to running the ball down the field and big leaps to passes, suggesting companies should do about 80% passes and 20% running. His checklist includes the CEO acting as chief product officer, functional teams staying close together, every leader being an expert in what they lead, and avoiding pure people managers.

He also recommends keeping teams small, having five teams do one thing instead of one team doing five things, and using launches to package a story even if a company ships constantly. Teams should use data, research, and intuition; Chesky quotes Charles Eames that you cannot delegate understanding. He wants design and engineering to report to the founder or product-led person, product management to include distribution and storytelling, marketing and engineering to be interconnected, and every direct report's direct report to be an implicit dotted line to the CEO. He thinks of each release as a chapter in a story and says the most important thing is to get everyone rowing in the same direction.

The winter release centered on Airbnb's reliability problem: every home is one of a kind, so checking in can be a moment of truth, and guests often do not know what they will get. Hotels are less special, but they offer certainty, and Chesky says reliability has been Airbnb's Achilles' heel. The question was whether Airbnb could combine its uniqueness with the reliability guests expect from a hotel.

Guest Favorites is Airbnb's answer: a collection of the top two million homes based on 370 million reviews, millions of customer service tickets, and host cancellation data. Chesky says the goal is to make Guest Favorites appealing for most use cases and to upgrade the ratings and reviews system that underpins trust on Airbnb. Airbnb also overhauled the host tab and designed a new listing tab, because accurate listings depend on hosts having good tools.

Chesky notes that Airbnb no longer has separate guest and host teams; it has design, marketing, and engineering teams, because almost everything involves connecting guests and hosts. Separate teams tend to create separate, incompatible roadmaps, so designers and engineers move across a larger surface while product marketers stay closer to domain areas. He says the lesson is that a great guest experience starts with great hosts, and great hosts need great tools.

The new design also reflects Chesky's view that flat design is ending and interfaces will move toward color, texture, dimensionality, and haptic feedback without returning to skeuomorphism. He argues screens are replicating more of the natural environment, AI enables more sophisticated interfaces, and people are gravitating toward more dimensional imagery. Airbnb built an AI-powered photo tour trained on 100 million photos that can scan a host's photos and organize them by room. Chesky says none of this would have worked as well in the old way of operating, because the release required guests, hosts, design, engineering, and marketing to work together.

Chesky explains the 'add a zero' exercise as a way to make teams imagine something 10 times bigger, better, or faster, not necessarily to force them to hit that exact goal. The exercise helps teams get unstuck because they cannot use the current process at 10 times the scale, so they have to think differently and understand the problem deeply. That means breaking the problem into its components, which he calls first-principles thinking.

He says one of the most important jobs for a founder or leader is to set the pace of the team, and pace is often governed less by how hard people work than by how decisively they act. Faster decisions come from a bias for action: instead of saying the team will circle back next week, they stay in the meeting, assign responsibility, check in an hour, and get three months of work done in that period. Chesky says this is the opposite of slow, soul-crushing bureaucracy.

Chesky tells a story about basketball coach John Wooden, who said his secret was asking players to do their very best, but who also saw potential in people they did not see in themselves. When Chesky tells someone the work is not good enough, he wants it to mean that he believes the person has more potential than they are showing, not that they are not good enough. He connects this to a growth mindset and to Andy Grove's distinction between competency and motivation, saying a leader should motivate a team to see potential in themselves.

Chesky offers a paradox about burnout: the more he got into the details, the more time he had on his hands. He says the hands-on approach was much more work for about one to two years, but once the company turned the corner, people rowed in the same direction, he stopped reacting to meetings, conflicts and turnover fell, and he got more good surprises than bad. He defines culture as what happens when the leader is not in the room and says the early involvement was worth the upfront cost.

On personal balance, Chesky says he is not the historical poster child for work-life balance: he is 42, lives with a golden retriever, and does not yet have a family. He tries not to work at all every other weekend and to work intensely on the alternate weekends, exercises almost every day with cardio and three or four weight sessions a week, eats a bodybuilding-style diet of five or six meals a day, and prioritizes sleep. He also says health, relationships, and work are the three most important things, and that if health and meaningful work are in place, relationships are the last piece.

He cites the Harvard study on happiness, which found that healthy relationships are the closest thing to a secret, and says he had become isolated as an entrepreneur. He now keeps group chats with high school and college friends and takes one or two trips a year with each group, because shared experiences keep old friendships alive. When he is in New York, he stays in his sister's apartment because he wants to spend time with her.

Chesky warns that founders can let their time be set by incoming email and meeting requests rather than by strategy. He suggests asking who you would want to spend time with if your life were shorter, and then saying no to 'fake work' that feels like work but does not move the ball down the field. He says the same is true of companies: if leaders only respond to employees who reach out, they reward one kind of behavior and ignore introverts or people who do not ask for attention.

Chesky says he still feels like he has a lot to prove, a feeling that surprised Sam Altman when Chesky told him at dinner. He describes a beginner's mindset in which the bigger he gets, the more of a beginner he feels, and quotes Picasso's line about learning to paint like Raphael in four years but spending a lifetime learning to paint like a child. He values curiosity, fresh eyes, and not having too many judgments.

When he was figuring out how to run Airbnb, Chesky studied the history of divisional organizations, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Alfred Sloan at General Motors, and DuPont's shift from gunpowder to paint, which helped create the divisional structure. He says he tries to understand the sources of things and to be shameless about reaching out for help, because people are honored when others ask them for help and because people only a year ahead can be useful. He hopes that years from now he still believes about 70% of what he said, not 100%, because holding every view would mean he had not learned much.

Chesky says Sam Altman's public praise—that no one had come close to Chesky in delivering help—was unexpected. He explains that he tried to do for Altman what Michael Seibel did for him: Seibel advised him without being an official advisor, investor, or board member, and when Chesky asked how to repay him, Seibel told him to pass it on to other founders. Chesky describes a Valley culture of generosity in which the ecosystem is healthier when people help one another, and he says he learns by teaching.

His fun fact is that he spent most of his life as an artist and designer before Airbnb. He was obsessed with Norman Rockwell, asked Santa for poorly designed toys so he could redesign them, got into architectural and landscape design at eight or nine, and later studied industrial design at RISD, where he met co-founder Joe Gebbia. He also credits an art teacher, Ms. Williams, with giving him and his mother confidence to pursue art. Chesky says industrial design trained him to work with engineers, understand manufacturing, and be accountable to sales and marketing, and he argues that intuition, imagination, design, and curiosity are qualities companies need more of. After graduation he moved to Los Angeles, then quit his job and drove to San Francisco after Joe sent him a seat cushion and a letter; when a design conference sold out all hotels, they turned their house into Air Bed and Breakfast.