Brian Chesky’s new playbook

1. Lead with Clarity

Founders should avoid apologizing for their vision or finding a midpoint between their desires and their team’s, as this leads to misery. Instead, provide clear direction so everyone can row in the same direction quickly.

2. Leaders Are In The Details

Leaders must be deeply involved in the details of the work, distinguishing this from micromanagement, to understand if people are doing a good job and to effectively drive the product.

3. CEO as CPO

In a product or tech-led company, the CEO should assume the role of Chief Product Officer, deeply involved in product strategy and development.

4. Row in Same Direction

Focus on aligning everyone in the company to row in the same direction, as collective effort towards a unified goal is fundamental to organizational success.

5. Adopt Functional Model

Revert to a purely functional organizational model, like a startup, with unified design, engineering, product marketing, and other core functions, rather than divisional leaders.

6. Deep Involvement for Efficiency

While deep involvement in details may require intense effort for 1-2 years, it ultimately leads to greater organizational alignment, fewer conflicts, and paradoxically, more free time for the leader in the long run.

7. Prioritize Healthy Relationships

Actively cultivate and maintain healthy relationships with friends and family, as this is identified as the single most important factor governing long-term happiness.

8. Maintain Beginner’s Mindset

Cultivate a ‘beginner’s mindset’ by approaching every situation with curiosity and fresh eyes, regardless of experience, to continuously learn and avoid complacency.

9. Proactive Time Management

Avoid letting incoming emails or meeting requests dictate your agenda; instead, proactively manage your time by aligning it with your strategic priorities and long-term goals.

10. Eliminate “Fake Work”

Consciously say no to ‘fake work’—tasks that feel productive but don’t advance core goals—and instead say yes only to work and people that are truly meaningful and move the ball forward.

11. Integrate Product & Marketing

Re-architect product management to combine inbound product development with outbound product marketing responsibilities, offload program management to dedicated program managers, and make the product group smaller and more senior to ensure market expertise and product understanding.

12. Market Expertise for Builders

Those building a product must also be experts in its market and know how to talk about the product, as a great product is useless if no one knows about it or understands its benefits.

13. Manage by Influence

Adopt a purely functional organizational model where product roles manage by influence rather than direct control over design or engineering, fostering collaboration without hierarchical bottlenecks.

14. Avoid Divisional Silos

Resist subdividing the company into separate divisions, as this leads to technical debt, dependencies, internal politics, bureaucracy, lack of accountability, and ultimately complacency.

15. Integrate Engineering & Marketing

A key indicator of organizational health is the closeness between engineering and marketing, as engineers should consider how to talk about products, and marketing understands customer needs.

16. Marketing as Education

View marketing as an investment in educating people about unique product benefits and building brand, rather than solely relying on performance marketing which doesn’t create accumulating advantages.

17. Rolling Two-Year Roadmap

Adopt a rolling two-year product strategy roadmap, updated every six months with releases, to ensure the entire company works together and rows in the same direction.

18. Story Dictates Product

Begin product development by defining the product’s story, as it helps create a cohesive product and dictates how it will be communicated to people.

19. Re-establish Design Roots

Prioritize re-establishing design roots and long-term investment over solely obsessing about short-term metrics, which can lead to a loss of cohesive understanding and difficulty getting work done.

20. Document & Prioritize Projects

Require all ongoing projects to be documented, then drastically cut the number of initiatives to focus on a vital few, ensuring teams do fewer things but do them together.

21. Minimize Management Layers

Reduce layers of management to create a flatter organization, allowing leaders to be closer to the teams and enabling faster communication and decision-making.

22. Lean, Senior Team

Operate with fewer, more senior employees, as adding more people to a project can often slow it down, focusing on quality over quantity in staffing.

23. Executives as Domain Experts

Ensure every executive is a deep expert in their functional domain, with their primary responsibility being the work itself, as it’s impossible to effectively manage people without managing their work.

24. Centralize Decision-Making

Pull decision-making upwards and centralize it among top leaders to create a single, shared consciousness across the company, rather than pushing it down.

25. Roadmap Over Metrics

Make metrics subordinate to the calendar and a clear roadmap, ensuring that strategic planning and timely execution guide the work, rather than being solely driven by short-term metric optimization.

26. Biannual Product Launches

Commit to two major product launches per year (e.g., May and November/October), and enforce that nothing can be shipped unless it is explicitly on the company’s roadmap.

27. Rigorous CEO Reviews

Implement a regular CEO review schedule for all projects, with cadences ranging from weekly to quarterly, to track progress, identify bottlenecks, and ensure alignment.

28. Reviews Enable Flexible Work

Leverage rigorous review cycles to effectively track work quality and progress, which in turn enables flexible work arrangements without needing to mandate office presence.

29. In-House Creative Agency

Develop an in-house creative agency to handle both advertising and product creative, ensuring a cohesive aesthetic and message across all customer touchpoints.

30. Unified Writing Function

Consolidate UX writing and marketing writing into a single function, ensuring that all communications—emails, app text, and ads—speak with one consistent voice.

31. Interconnected Product Managers

Foster an environment where all product managers are interconnected and aware of each other’s work, avoiding independent silos unless teams truly have no dependencies.

32. No Pure People Managers

Avoid roles where the sole responsibility is managing people; instead, ensure all managers are also domain experts deeply involved in the work, as effective people management requires understanding the work itself.

33. Focus Multiple Teams on One Goal

Instead of one team trying to accomplish five different things, assign multiple teams to focus on a single, shared objective to improve efficiency and impact.

34. Package Releases as Stories

While shipping frequently (e.g., hourly or daily) is possible, package these smaller releases into larger, cohesive product stories for launches to effectively communicate value to users.

35. Design & Eng Report to CEO

For product-led companies, ensure engineering and design report directly to the founder/CEO (who acts as CPO), and avoid placing design under product management unless the product leader is also a designer.

36. Expand PM Role to Storytelling

Expand the responsibilities of product management to include distribution, deep customer understanding, and the ability to teach others how to tell the product’s story effectively.

37. PMs: Art & Science Blend

Seek product managers who possess a blend of ‘art and science,’ capable of working effectively with both technical and non-technical functions, rather than being purely technical.

38. Flat Org, Dotted Line Reports

Maintain a flat organizational structure with few layers, and as a CEO, treat your direct reports’ direct reports as implicit dotted lines to stay connected to the work and people.

39. Releases as Story Chapters

Frame each product release as a chapter in a larger, ongoing 5-10 year company story, providing a cohesive narrative and long-term vision for development.

40. Invest in Host Tools

To deliver an excellent guest experience, prioritize building great tools for hosts, as empowering hosts with superior resources directly enables them to provide better experiences for guests.

41. Careful Design Inspires Care

Invest significant care in the design of your product, as users (e.g., hosts) will notice and be inspired to put more care into their own contributions and interactions.

42. Hypothesis-Driven A/B Testing

Conduct A/B tests with clear hypotheses to avoid getting stuck with suboptimal solutions, and always consider how changes impact the entire cohesive product system, not just isolated elements.

43. Elevate Design’s Role

Avoid treating design as a mere service organization; instead, integrate it as a core part of the product development process to prevent designers from feeling frustrated and compromising their work.

44. Balance Data, Research, Intuition

Teams should balance data analysis with qualitative research and intuition, remembering that ‘you can’t delegate understanding’ and deep insight comes from a combination of these approaches.

45. 10X Thinking for Innovation

Challenge teams with ‘add a zero’ or 10X thinking to encourage them to approach problems differently and unlock innovative solutions that wouldn’t be possible with incremental improvements.

46. Set Decisive Team Pace

Founders and leaders must set the pace for their team, understanding that speed is often driven by decisiveness and a bias for action, rather than just the number of hours worked.

47. Bias for Action

Foster a ‘bias for action’ by making decisions and assigning immediate next steps in meetings, rather than deferring discussions, to accelerate progress.

48. Foster Growth Mindset

Leaders should see and nurture potential in people that they may not see in themselves, creating a growth mindset organization where pushing for better performance is seen as a sign of belief.

49. Alternate Work/Rest Weekends

To avoid burnout, adopt a schedule of alternating weekends: one weekend for intense work, and the next weekend completely dedicated to rest and no work.

50. Prioritize Health Basics

Consistently prioritize physical health by never missing a workout (e.g., daily cardio, weights 3-4 times a week), eating very healthy (e.g., bodybuilding diet), and getting sufficient sleep.

51. Nurture Friendships & Shared Experiences

Make a conscious practice of staying in close touch with a core group of friends, including old ones, and actively create new shared experiences (e.g., trips) to keep relationships fresh and meaningful.

52. Prioritize with Finite Horizon

Re-evaluate and prioritize your time by imagining a shorter, finite life horizon, which can fundamentally change what you say yes and no to, focusing on truly meaningful work and relationships.

53. Shamelessly Ask for Help

Don’t be afraid to shamelessly ask others for help, as it’s often an honor for them to feel useful, and you don’t need to only seek advice from those far ahead of you.

54. Seek Peer Advice

When seeking help, don’t limit yourself to mentors many years ahead; advice from peers just a year or two ahead can often be more relevant and useful for immediate challenges.

55. Embrace Constant Becoming

Adopt an artist’s mindset of ‘constant becoming,’ always evolving, learning, and growing, rather than feeling like you’ve ‘made it,’ to ensure continuous development and wisdom.

56. Cultivate Holistic Thinking

Develop a well-rounded, holistic way of thinking about the world, drawing from diverse fields and perspectives, as this broadens understanding and problem-solving capabilities.