Embracing chaos, inquiry over advocacy, poking the bear, and “impact, impact, impact” | Vlad Loktev

(instrumental music) What was it like managing me, Vlad? Most importantly, how painful was it to manage me?

Man, how much time do you have?

(laughs) I used to joke with people that you're kind of this Jedi, where you get crazy stuff done, really hard stuff done, in a really subtle and a really unique way.

I've always used inquiry versus advocacy. A lot of people approach a conversation with a point of view and they begin advocating immediately. "We should do this," or, "No, we should not do this," right? Me, I always took the opposite approach. I inquire first. I'm gonna ask a ton of questions because I fundamentally believe maybe there's something I don't know and there's information that I need to understand to make a better decision.

Is there something you can share about just what you learned from Brian about thinking big?

I remember talking to Brian one day and he was like, "Something just feels off right now." And I remember asking him, like, "What do you mean? Our numbers are up and to the right." His response was, "Things are just too calm." Sometimes you want to create chaos in an organization to push the organization to think creatively and to actually, like, make leaps in product development and I've always told myself, "Don't be afraid to poke the bear."

What are some skills that you believe helped you be as successful as you've been?

Impact, impact, impact, impact. That's the only thing that mattered.

(instrumental music) Today, my guest is Vlad Loktev. This is a very special episode for me because Vlad was my manager at Airbnb for many years and he's the person that I credit most for teaching me how to be an effective product manager and product leader. Within Airbnb, Vlad started as an ICPM, five years later was leading product for the core Airbnb business, the Homes business. A few years later was GM of the core Homes business, reporting directly to Brian Chesky, managing over 1,000 people, including design, engineering and other functions. He's also one of Brian's most trusted partners for most of his time at Airbnb. Before Airbnb, Vlad was a founder. He was also a Senior PM at Zynga where he grew the game Words With Friends to over 14 million daily active users. Even though Vlad recently moved into venture capital as a partner at Index Ventures, he will always be a product manager at heart to me and I'm very excited for more people to get to learn from Vlad. In our conversation, Vlad shares the skills and behaviors and mindsets that most contributed to his success, including a ton of really tactical stuff, also the strategies and tactics that he's found most helpful in building and scaling a fast-growing org, and his thoughts on Airbnb's current ways of working, including their move away from traditional product management and also their approach of thinking very top-down, which I thought was really insightful and so much more. This podcast, I guarantee, will make you a more effective product leader and I am very excited to share it with you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Vlad Loktev. Vlad, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.