00:00:17

So to set some context for the next talk, I wanna make some observations about certain choices we've made about the conference programming over the last 15 events. I had mentioned on day one that in 2014 we really designed the conference to be one about large complex organizations. Uh, we wanted the conference to be not about the unicorns, the Facebooks, Amazon, apples, Netflix, Googles, Microsoft, but instead organizations that have been around for decades or even centuries. And a little trivia fact, the oldest organization that ever presented was her Majesty's revenue collection service in the uk, founded in the year 1200. But over the years, we've increasingly had speakers from Amazon Prime, Google, S R E, Microsoft, Netflix, because there was so much that they can teach us. But as a percentage of talks, uh, the number of these, uh, talks from those companies is growing. And I think it's because it's becoming so evident that they're facing so many of the same challenges that this community does.

00:01:07

Challenges that require great leadership, great architectures to overcome issues around coordination costs, architectures that have outgrown, um, the problems, culture issues and leadership. So for all of those reasons, I'm ridiculously excited for this next talk. Um, so it was John Smart, uh, who on the program committee who introduced us to Anna Steele, who leads the ways of working center of enablement at community for community support at Airbnb. And I learned just how important the community support function is because they are the people responsible for helping customers when they have problems. Whether it's a guest showing up at a property, not being able to check in, get a key, or if the listing is not as described or if they feel like they're in danger. And because Airbnb is a two-sided marketplace, community support also helps the listers. So she's part of an organization of over 10,000 support ambassadors in 26 countries. And she will tell the amazing story of a problem she saw that she felt was incredibly important and what she did about it. And she'll be co-presenting with Marcus Brazel now a partner at Sooner, safer, happier, uh, coming from a long career solving these types of problems at banks and retailers. Here is Anna and Marcus

00:02:14

In the middle of our thank you in the middle of our

00:02:27

Hi does Vegas. My name is Marcus and I'm from Sunna. Safer, happier. Hello

00:02:31

Las Vegas. I'm Anna and I'm from Airbnb. Today we're here to tell you about community support, uh, and our ways of working journey at Airbnb. Now we're community-minded at Airbnb, so we've been so looking forward to sharing our story with the Doss community this week. It's also been amazing hearing and learning from all of you. Now this is chapter one of our story, which is all about ways of working in a customer service operational environment. Uh, but to get us started, Marcus, can you tell us a little bit about Airbnb?

00:03:05

Thanks Anna. So we began working with Airbnb in 2021 and we all know who Airbnb is, but just so we're on the same page, here's a little bit of information here. Airbnb was founded in 2008 by three founders and by 2011 it was a unicorn, which is a privately owned startup with a valuation of over $1 billion. And today you can access Airbnb in 100,000 cities. There are 4 million hosts, there are 6 million listings on the platform and there have been over 1 billion stays on Airbnb. Now these are impressive numbers, but for me the most impressive thing about Airbnb is its host like culture. You really feel welcomed when you're working at Airbnb and that's a privilege to work there. So Anna, you mentioned this is chapter one of our story. Where does it begin?

00:03:52

Well, our story begins with community support. So we're the team that provides customer service to our hosts and guests. We like to say that every day millions of our hosts and guests are sharing meaningful experiences on Airbnb. And when you need our help, we're there to answer the call or the email or the chat. With over 10,000 support ambassadors worldwide, there are over 100 million trips on Airbnb every year. But 87% of the time people never need to contact us. We're there if they do in the moments that matter most, ensuring that your experience is positive, memorable, and meaningful. To put it in context, community support is an integral part of platform operations at Airbnb. Now the service we provide is our core product, but we work with many other teams from hosting to technology to marketing to develop the core services and policies and products that improve the customer experience.

00:04:50

So as we've heard, Airbnb is an undisputed success story. It's been such a privilege to be a part of that journey and in community support we're passionate about our mission. So why did we want to improve our ways of working well? Uh, improving ways of working began here. Over the years, Airbnb has scaled rapidly and as we scaled, so did our complexity. Whilst we still very much have startup in our D N A all too often, it felt like we were running fast but failing to deliver on the outcomes we really wanted to see for our community and move the needle on time to market or time to value. And over those same years, we tried to improve our ways of working, but all too often those improvement efforts just didn't stick. They were too top down, too process focused. They only resulted in more bureaucracy, further compounding the complexity we were already grappling with.

00:05:43

So in early 2021, as a leadership team, we're really thrashing with this. We know that we want to be more agile. Uh, we don't want a rigid methodology. We're starting to play with this concept of what would more nimble ways of working look like for us, in part because we didn't want that capital a, capital T agile transformation inflicted on our teams. And it's around this time that our then chief of staff happens to pick up a copy of sooner, safer, happier, which really crystallized our emergent thinking. If we were to be successful in our ways of working journey, we would need to focus on outcomes over outputs. And with this focus we started to play around with what the future might look like for us. We developed these from and two statements to better our articulate and communicate the why of our ways of working effort to our teams. And it drilled down into this central core. We wanted to feel like one team striving towards clear outcomes, guided by shared understanding and teams feeling psychologically safe, delivering incremental value. So with that vision in mind, Marcus, how do we get started?

00:06:53

Thanks Anna. Well, as Anna mentioned, we didn't want a rigid one size fits all approach. And here's how we got started. We began with a discovery process to learn more about the ways of working landscape. This involved interviews with the business and a ways of working survey and we learned that Airbnb has an amazing culture. However, the discovery process also illuminated a number of challenges. We learned that the E N P SS for ways of working was minus 71, which meant that people weren't very happy with how outcomes were being achieved. We also learned there was a work in progress challenge or a WIP challenge. So for example, there were over 30 priority number ones and the question of is WIP manageable in our survey had response of minus 74%. And these headwinds and these verbatims really sum things up for me. So the first two were headwinds where people felt that operating in silos with a culture of not wanting to rock the boat.

00:07:47

However, this is contrasted by these tailwinds where there is an amazing collaborative culture at Airbnb and really strong deep passion for its purpose, which is very hard to replicate. We also wanted to create alignment for the direction of improving ways of working. So we set about together to create this vision and a couple of key call outs here. First of all, we wanted long live multidisciplinary teams working towards clear outcomes and importantly a psychologically safe environment where people can do their best work. And we've since found this to be a really great rallying call and it stood the test of time.

00:08:23

We also didn't want a big bang learn slow capital a capital T agile transformation approach as we were looking to think big, start small and learn fast. And one of the first steps we did was to set up a cross-functional multidisciplinary team, which in Airbnb we called a seedling team with the following criteria. Firstly, we wanted to be strategically important. We knew that if it was high profile, it was more likely to get the air, sunlight and water it needed for growth. Secondly, fertile ground, an environment fit for experimentation, fast learning loops and ideally some quick wins along the way. Next we're looking for a caretaker leader who would protect the seedling help to remove impediments. And this is represented by the glass house that you can see sitting around our first seedling. Next we want this to be a experiment and so in to to prove this out in context. And so we didn't want this to be a short term project.

00:09:22

We also didn't want a mandated approach to improving ways of working as we were looking for invite over inflict. And we began with early adopters and we set about finding the curious early adopters to join our first seedling team. And early adopters are the people in your organization who say hell yes when it comes to new ways of working. And these trailblazers have helped us to create the social proof to cross the chasm from our early adopters to our early majority. And here I'm referencing Everett's Diffusion of innovation. So there's a bit about how we got started. Anna, what did we do next?

00:09:57

Well we created a fledgling center of enablement. Now this was as much to support those early seedling teams as it was to help engender that broader shift in culture and mindset that we were seeking. We did a few things. We started with regular communications, uh with news and updates vertically and horizontally across the com, the organization. We also launched a podcast. We created a ways of working community of practice. We also heavily invested in coaching and training on everything from business agility to Kanban to leadership development. Again, not focusing on any particular methodology but rather on the patterns that would help our teams apply agility in their own unique context. And this all laid a ground, a groundwork that allowed multiple seedling teams to start coming out of that glass house, survive on their own, supported with the tools and new language that we were giving them.

00:10:51

And we saw some really exciting early wins with those seedling teams. Flow efficiency, doubled lead time, halved engagement within teams had never been higher. We were regularly seeing N P Ss of a hundred percent and that came through in testimonials. We were hearing from our teams, people are saying, I've never felt so productive and I don't wanna go back to our old ways of working. Our seedlings also helped put a spotlight on our system of work. So for the first time we start measuring things like work in progress, throughput, lead time. We hadn't measured these before and it had been a big blind spot for us. And as we start measuring them, we run experiments, we limit work in progress, we see throughput go up significantly as you can see here in April. And as you can also see even thereafter, it was hard for us to manage our work in progress.

00:11:42

So seedlings are helping to reveal those systemic challenges, those impediments, the broader organizational challenges that we need to overcome in our context. But wealth challenging. We know that impediments are the path and so it's at this point in our journey, we're confident we're on the right path. This is also where the change got really hard for us. This is what we were seeing our organizational structure and role-based silos meant. It was really difficult to form those long lived multidisciplinary teams, even in a protected seedling environment. And our traditional approach to portfolio management with work passing through stages was only reinforcing big upfront design. And a combination of an output centric culture with high whip meant it was really difficult for us to see outcomes or experiment or work iteratively. And against the backdrop of these impediments was just that challenge of changing mindset, of changing culture.

00:12:41

And there's a really great quote, our VP of Cs often references, which resonates with me. When I think about that broader arc of change and a ways of working journey. And it goes like this. All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it's accepted as being self-evident. So to get to self-evident, you need the social proof and impediments are really important part of that story. So with all things being clear in hindsight, here's what came into view for us in an output centric environment, transparency of outcomes was going to be a culture change for us. And in a culture of good news for impediments, transparency, we needed to make it safe, psychologically safe for our teams to share what was getting in their way of continuous value delivery. And to form those teams we needed to break organizational silos, dependencies rather than manage them. It's at this point we're also seeing we need even greater leadership buy-in. Now we had tremendous support from the top with our VP of Cs as well as our director sponsor. But what we were learning is we needed all leaders to really lean in role model and most importantly, incentivize improving ways of working. So armed with these learnings, Marcus, where do we go next?

00:14:04

Thanks Anna. So armed with the insights from our seedling teams and center of enablement, we set off for a leadership team offsite. Um, and this is a really pivotal moment for us. Uh, so it was June, the entire CS leadership team was gathered for A Q B R and we presented on the seedling team results and we also pushed for a workshop on value streams and we'd had amazing support from our sponsors up until this point. But what we saw at this stage was the entire leadership team begin to lean in and start to rally behind the change. So it was an incredibly exciting moment for the center of enablement. And here's what we presented. We stepped through the anatomy of a value stream and conducted a hands-on exercise. And we found this really helped to create shared understanding for this, this concept. And here are some of the key elements. Firstly, we want a biz and it embedded in the value stream. As Anna mentioned, we want to break dependencies, not manage them. Next we want a clarity on who the value consumer would be for the value stream, be an internal consumer or consumer.

00:15:11

We also wanted nested alignment from teams through to the strategy in terms of outcomes with progress being transparently measured through the use of OKRs. Next was multidisciplinary teams whose primary identity would be to the value and the value stream rather than a functional silo. And we recommended a number of these patterns and practices such as customer jobs to be done, a single backlog for the value stream and all the capabilities needed to get to done embedded within the value stream. And next we look for these three leadership roles. The value outcome lead supporting the what and the why, the team outcome lead supporting the how and the product outcome, lead supporting the technical how. And importantly we're looking for these to be at all levels including team and value stream. We also wanna get crisp on how we'd measure improving ways of working. And at its core is value. And again, how that nested laddering occurs from team up to the strategy. And the important thing here is to use both leading and LA lagging indicators. We created these four quadrants of quality time to value team engagement and safety. And what's important to note about this is balance. For example, we didn't want to have speed at the expense of quality. So Ana, I think that draws to a conclusion chapter one. Where are we heading next? Thanks

00:16:37

Marcus. Well that leadership offsite in June was a really big moment for us. The takeaway was that we needed to go all in on nimble ways of working. Thankfully not in the context of big bang change, but rather with renewed leadership support to organize and intentional value streams that would help us deliver on our multi-year objectives. So as we turn the page to chapter two, focus will be key and nimble ways of working will be our how. This summer we began to organize for outcomes For the first time we're bringing work to the people instead of people to the work. We're looking for continuous value delivery and seedling teams that are now starting to evolve into saplings. We're getting crisp on our outcomes and key results and also starting to optimize end-to-end delivery governance through lean portfolio management. Gratifyingly. We're also now seeing leaders lean in now more than ever.

00:17:30

And that's all helping us make that shift from early adopter to early majority. And as a result we're starting to see more pull for ways of working and it's been really exciting to see these efforts start to pay off in our H one ways of working engagement survey Survey, we saw a 42 basis point lift in overall ways of working E E M P S. And for those of you who are paying attention to the numbers, yes, overall E M P S is still negative. However, we have seen improvement across every major industry in our ways of working, uh, survey. And that's been, uh, really reassuring and also a first in my 10 years at Airbnb, uh, we've created new platforms and mechanisms to drive engagement and learning in teams and as a result have expanded our ways of working footprint to 26% of global css.

00:18:23

Well it's a great story Anna and I particularly like the way we've overcome some of those impediments. But don't just take our word for it folks. Let's hear from the people who matter most, the teams in community support.

00:18:38

I've been seeing a lot more of these coordinated efforts between teams where everyone within those meetings has a voice.

00:18:45

I like that we're shifting our focus to the outcomes we wanna drive for our community. Um, and most importantly, that we're empowering c s team members to help figure out how we're most likely to achieve those outcomes.

00:18:56

This new ways of working has empowered us to deliver at a higher speed because now we have a diverse and capable team where everyone compliments each other. Do you

00:19:05

Think what's most important? We've finally started to focus on the right things and that's just the beginning of the journey.

00:19:11

So from the time we identify which project we're going to take on to doing our root cause analysis, to getting kinda help from analytics to help size it to to move towards experimentation has really, really speeded up small,

00:19:22

Empowered, multidisciplinary teams of early adopters aligned to a business outcome and with a bias to action. This created the social proof.

00:19:32

I like how we started acknowledging that we just shouldn't try to do more or do things in a faster way, but actually trying to focus on the outcome and in the impact that the teams are generating, which is really

00:19:40

Good. Really giving the teams the autonomy to make decisions about improvements that are going to improve our agents' experience as well as our customer's experience down.

00:19:51

I often hear new ways of driving conversations from senior leaders to ensure we are considering our work in a more visual way and calling on blockers for impediments. Number

00:20:00

One, I think we are more focused. Uh, it's always needed if you want to do, uh, impactful work.

00:20:07

I love the energy and passion about the work, um, and the focus on the engagement. Um, to deliver value that comes along with working with a dedicated team is has been amazing. So

00:20:18

While we have a ton of work left to do, we're starting to see that we're able to move faster and we're starting to move faster together. And that's really important.

00:20:25

Changing ways of working is really hard. The team has done an incredible job guiding us through every single step of the way. Starting small, delivering big thank

00:20:35

You guys. It's collaboration. Collaboration is at the heart of what we do where everyone can come to the table with their ideas regardless of the team that they work in. Great minds, different perspectives and insights truly gathered together to achieve ideal states optimizations and really ambitious goals.

00:21:00

So a big thank you to our early adopters at community support. And so where are we heading next? Well now you can see the full journey start to open up and our aspiration is to work towards a generative learning organization. The first and hopefully, hopefully you can see a question mark there. And that represents our emergent mindset. Improving ways of working. There's no crystal ball, it's unknowable. It requires a probe sense response approach. However, we avoid by our early experiments and we have confidence moving forward. We're also aiming for a generative organization. It was fantastic to hear Ron Westrom talk about the yesterday. And the point here is, uh, mission identity with the purpose of the organization, we're also aiming for a learning organization using data and insights experiments, uh, to learn and also where it's safe to fail. And finally, most importantly, a psychologically safe environment where people can do their best work and where work is humane. So Anna, would you like to recap chapter one?

00:21:53

Thanks Marcus. So quickly, these are the patterns that resonated with us when we thought about our chapter One starts with outcomes over outputs in an approach that's not one size fits all. We needed to think big, start small, learn fast, and an invite over inflict approach that helped us find the patterns that work best in our context. Impediments are the path they illuminate the dependencies and challenges we needed to overcome to chart that course ahead. And to navigate. We needed to be laser focused on our outcomes, organizing and in intentional value streams that are optimized for the fast flow of measurable value for our community. Uh, thank you again so much. It's been a privilege sharing our story. Uh, we hope these resonate with you, uh, ways of working journey, being a journey of years. Uh, we know we've much yet to learn and would love your help.

00:22:41

Thank you. We'd love to continue the conversation <laugh>. So in the break, please reach out to us about any of these topics. Anna, we also might be something else we'd wanna talk about.

00:22:49

One last thing, we also love talking about dogs, so if nothing else, we'd love to hear from the other Frenchy owners in the audience. And we'd that huge thank you Las Vegas. We look forward to keeping you updated, uh, on our chapter two in the future.

00:23:01

Thank

00:23:02

You. Thank you again.