Bureaucracy Isn’t Inevitable — Here’s How Airbnb Beat It

Airbnb VP Engineering Mike Curtis on the practices and principles you can put in place to bust bureaucracy before it starts.

Outline

Mike Curtis may not have the typical background of someone dedicated to vanquishing bureaucracy. AltaVista, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook — he’s a veteran of some legendary Silicon Valley behemoths. Now VP of Engineering for Airbnb, he's at the helm of a small but rapidly growing team. With nearly two decades of innovation at tech giants under his belt, he's become an expert at chopping through red tape.

As it turns out, one simple lesson guides Curtis' approach to building effective teams: the antidote to unproductive bureaucracy is good old-fashioned judgment — having it, hiring for it, and creating conditions that allow people to exercise it. Armed with this truth, he’s tackled the challenges of scaling a world-class engineering team at Airbnb, from taming the beast of expense reports to dramatically improving site stability. And he’s done it by eliminating rules, not making them.

At First Round’s recent CTO Summit, Curtis shared actionable tactics for what he calls “replacing policy with principles” that can guide fast, flexible growth and progress. Every startup looking to dodge a fate dictated by increasing structure and processes that inevitably slow you down can benefit from these tips.

Build a Trustworthy Team By Hiring Trustworthy People

Minimizing rules that become roadblocks in your organization will only work if you’ve built a team that will make good decisions in the absence of rigid structure. Your hiring process is where you can take the biggest strides toward preventing bureaucracy.

The most important question that you have to answer when you're hiring somebody is ‘Is this person going to be energized by unknowns?’

No company will ever achieve perfection, ever. So when things break, you want people who will be motivated by solving problems — those are the people who won't pause to place blame, and blame is wasteful. Even if you have a honed process for screening and interviewing candidates, it's worth revisiting how you test for culture fit to make sure this is part of it.

At Airbnb, Curtis found that these four moves truly extract the most value out of this type of interview:

Let them shine first. For the first 15 minutes of your culture interview, let a candidate describe a project they’re particularly proud of. The idea here is to get a sense of what excites them — is it technical challenges, for example, or perhaps personal interactions? “Try to suss out what gives this person energy,” Curtis says.
Then make them uncomfortable. The other side of that coin is that you want to learn how candidates react when they’re not excited, too. Ask them about difficult experiences, or moments when they were somehow not in control. Some of Curtis’s go-to questions are: “Describe a time you really disagreed with management on something. What happened?” and “Think of a time you had to cut corners on a project in a way you weren’t proud of to make a deadline. How did you handle it?” This exercise is all about reactions.
Calibrate your results. It’s easy to see if someone nailed a coding challenge. It’s a lot harder to get comparable reads on candidates when you’re working with a group of different interviewers. It takes time to get on the same page, but you can help the process along.
Watch out for signs of coaching. If a candidate seems to have uncanny command of your internal language, take note. The public domain is exploding with tips and tricks from past interviewees and journalists.

Make the Most of First Impressions

Ideally, your culture interview ensures that you’re hiring a diverse set of people who share your beliefs and work ethic while introducing new ideas and perspectives. Once they’re in the door, you have your next key opportunity to establish shared priorities. “Your first week is the chance for you to set expectations with new engineers,” Curtis says. He’s found that adding a few key elements to the onboarding process pays off big down the road:

1. Remind new hires they’re working with the best. 2. Emphasize the value of moving fast. 3. Make imperfection an asset, not a liability. 4. Review your engineering values. 5. Welcome new hires to the recruiting team. 6. Establish direct lines of communication. 7. Conduct a series of initial check-ins.

Your questions to these team members can be very straightforward. Curtis suggests: “How are they ramping up in an unfamiliar code base?” and “What issues have they encountered and how have they reacted?”

Build the Managers You Need

When it comes to hiring and onboarding managers, though, there’s another layer to consider. These are people who are going to actively shape your company's culture, personality and progress every day. At Airbnb, a commitment to helping managers make good decisions has manifested in an unusual policy:

“We have a philosophy that all managers start as individual contributors.”

Unsurprisingly, this can make it more difficult to hire managers. But he's devised a four-step process engineering leaders can use to find managers who will be best for their companies long-term:

Set the expectation.
Conduct a coding interview.
Try pairing.
Give it more time than you think.

What It Means to Replace Policies with Principles

At this point, through careful hiring and training, you’ve built a team with good judgment. So how can you leverage that to streamline how you run your organization? “Now you can start taking a more principled approach to how you govern the organization,” Curtis says. To bring this point home, he provides several examples that succeeded at Airbnb:

OLD POLICY: All expenses require pre-approval. NEW PRINCIPLE: If you would think twice about spending this much from your own account, gut-check it with your manager.

OLD POLICY: Engineers can’t create new backend services without approval from managers. NEW PRINCIPLE: While working within a set of newly articulated architectural tenets — conceived by a group of senior technical leaders — engineers are free to develop backend services.

Getting Changes to Stick

I have a theory that the only way you can affect cultural change on an organization is through positive reinforcement and social pressure.

Your team’s goals may be different, but the steps that Curtis used to effect this principled change can serve as a template for any paradigm shift:

Make it possible. Create positive examples. Apply social pressure. Address stragglers.

In roughly two months, Curtis had made peer code reviews the overwhelming norm without establishing a single policy. “This is the power of positive reinforcement and social pressure to bring about cultural change in an organization. I didn't hand down any edicts, I didn't say ‘It has to be done this way from now on,’ I didn't put any formal policy in place,” he says.

At the end of the day, though, Curtis is not advocating for the unilateral elimination of all company policies. Sometimes you need rules. “A good example for us is when you're traveling overseas, there are very specific policies about what kind of data you can have access to and what kind you can't,” Curtis says. When the health of your organization depends on something that can’t be left open to interpretation, go ahead and make a rule — but do so sparingly.

The real trick is to recognize that a policy doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it interacts with every policy that went before it — and adds to a collective mental and documented overhead that adds up the bigger you get. You want to minimize this overhead however possible, and the easiest way to do that is to trust your team, and clearly articulate your values.

It really comes down to putting your faith in people with good judgment, making sure you hire good judgment, and then guiding them with principles.