How to stay fast and focused as you grow, according to Brian Chesky
When companies are small, things move fast. But as they grow, you start to see more meetings, more process, more politics, and more delays. Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, explained this shift perfectly in his interview with Lenny Rachitsky. He described a natural but dangerous cycle that most companies fall into as they scale.
Here’s how it usually happens:
1. Dependencies grow
As the company adds teams, everyone starts relying on shared platforms, services, and decision-makers. Very quickly, those shared teams get overwhelmed with requests. To manage the load, they introduce long queues, backlogs, and unrealistic roadmaps. Suddenly, teams are blocked and experience delays. That’s when divisions start to form.
2. Divisions form
To avoid the delays, teams break away. They create their own platforms, their own tools, their own services. It gives them speed and control, but now you’ve got five different versions of the same thing. The company starts to fragment, and politics creep in.
3. Politics creep in
Now that there are silos, people start fighting for resources. Whose work is more important? Who gets resources? Who gets attention from leadership? Teams start selling themselves internally instead of focusing on impact. That’s when you start seeing Slack channels full of self-promotion, teams celebrating output instead of outcomes, all just to stay visible and influence decisions and give their work a sense of importance, so they get prioritised over others. And as the noise grows, leadership tries to make sense of it all by adding more managers and more layers. That’s when bureaucracy takes over.
4. Bureaucracy takes over
To manage the chaos, leaders add more process, more approvals, more alignment meetings. Instead of moving fast and making decisions, people start waiting for permission. The system becomes more about control and structure than trust, autonomy and flexibility. And that’s how accountability fades because no one feels ownership, and everything needs approval.
5. Accountability fades
As teams grow and overlap, ownership becomes blurry. When something goes wrong, no one’s really to blame. It’s always someone else’s job and there’s no clear person responsible for the outcome. When there’s no ownership, and no consequences for failing to meet commitments, accountability fades, and that’s when complacency starts to set in.
6. Complacency sets in
Over time, people stop asking questions, they stop asking “Why?”, and challenging things. They hide behind others, play it safe, and avoid conflict. The company still looks busy, but the energy and urgency are gone.
So, how do you stop this?
Brian Chesky’s advice: give teams clear goals and real ownership. Remove unnecessary dependencies and reduce hierarchy, tnis means fewer layers between the people doing the work and those making decisions. Keep the organisation simple and the mission front and centre. And above all, stay close to the work.
According to Chesky, leaders need to stay involved in the product. He believes that in a product or tech company, the CEO should also act as the Chief Product Officer. As he put it: “We don’t have a CPO title, but if we had one, it would be me. I think the CEO should be the CPO of a product or tech company.”
The CEO of Airbnb advocates for what he calls “founder mode,” where leaders remain deeply connected to the details of their company. This approach emphasises a hands-on leadership style, although he warns that being involved in the details is not the same as micromanaging experts.
Chesky also discussed changes to the traditional product management role at Airbnb. While they didn’t eliminate product managers, they restructured the role to combine elements of product management and product marketing. This hybrid role focuses on both building the product and shaping how it’s positioned in the market.
The Product Manager owns the “what” and “why”. They focus on the product’s vision, customer needs, roadmap, and overall strategy. While the Program Manager owns the “how” and “when”. They focus on execution, timelines, cross-team coordination, and making sure everything gets delivered smoothly.
Additionally, Airbnb elevated the role of designers, placing them alongside product and engineering teams, and introduced a dedicated program management function to help keep projects on track.
Watch the interview
In this episode of Lenny’s Podcast, Airbnb Brian Chesky shares his views on leadership, product culture, and how to keep teams fast and focused as companies grow.
