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This is ReinaMoto's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi everyone, welcome to The Creative Mindset, a podcast about what the future holds at the
intersection of creativity and technology. I'm ReinaMoto, the founding partner of I&CO,
a global innovation firm based in Yokohama, Tokyo. Continuing from the last episode,
today's guest is Tim Allen, the head of design and research at Instacart.
If you haven't listened to part one of this conversation where we talk about how Tim
built a career in tech as a designer, please do go back and listen. I recently had him come to
the course that I teach at Cornell University in New York City and asked him to give a lecture.
パンデミック時のエアビーアンドビーの挑戦
In it, he shared his experience working at Airbnb. He started working there in 2020,
a few months before the pandemic. So that was a really challenging time for the company,
for obvious reasons. One of the first things that he had to do was to lay off a big portion
of his staff. In addition, he was specifically asked by Brian Chesky, the CEO and the founder
of Airbnb, to work with him directly and a small select group of people to design a way out of this
mess, quote unquote. So in part two, I asked him about how he was able to play a pivotal role
at Airbnb, working with Brian Chesky in getting the company out of the pandemic.
So let's get started. You were at Airbnb during the height of the pandemic, and Airbnb is a
business that relied on real world travels and people staying at other people's places. So it was
very COVID unfriendly. Your boss Brian Chesky and a select group of people, including yourself,
thought about and identified, hey, here's an opportunity, or here's what we should do,
and drastically improved. Yeah. So perhaps, can you talk about that particular turnaround
that Airbnb had, and then eventually, shortly after that, the company going public as well?
Yeah. That's definitely been the biggest career adventure I've been on. You go from in,
what was that, March of 2020?
Yeah.
Staring into the abyss of bankruptcy, really. Being a accommodations platform in a period where
people were restricted to their homes is not the best place to be. But what was shocking about that
was everybody was betting against Airbnb, Wired Magazine, to any sort of editorial outlet for the
industry. And there was this calm confidence that Brian Chesky had, and he would just keep saying
that this is a design problem, and he was going to approach it like a design problem. That was
astonishing at the time, still is. And he just focused on understanding what people's needs were
what they were at the time, and where he was projecting they would be.
And it was an extreme show of compassion. Because you think about the hosts have these properties,
they're in need of assistance, right? How can you help them? You have people that are trapped at
home, right? How can you help them as well? One way to do that is to offer inventory for first
responders. And so, we did that in a creative way. And that was the start of climbing out of
that abyss. Another thing we did was starting to understand that people probably wanted to
stay in rural areas, not urban areas, that's obvious, right? But also stay for longer periods
of time. So, he was like projected and predicted that as well. That was another facet of like this
reinvention. Another facet was building on the Airbnb experience platform we created
just recently before the pandemic, and creating online experiences that had just as much of
that notion of belonging anywhere, or you could be in Colorado, and be learning pasta making from
Anona in Italy, or so forth. Like making that happen, magic happen.
That was another sort of facet of it. Anyway, there was four themes that came out of this
sort of like design sprint that you referenced as like a small group of people working on.
And that was the blueprint for the whole company. Brian being a designer, understanding power design,
coming up with a human centered sort of thematic approach very quickly and fairly calmly
in the midst of all this chaos. And then us implementing it because he also not only was
a designer, but is lead of the company as well. And having the intuition and the confidence
to implement all those things was pretty fascinating.
成功への道
And then seven, eight months later, GoPublic being extremely successful. That was amazing.
Yeah. And then, so not just for the guests, but also for the hosts, how to onboard those guests
in the first place. Yeah.
We reinvented a large part of the onboarding process to make hosting and just quicker as well.
Prior to us redesigning that host onboarding experience during the pandemic,
going from zero to host took multiple days and the new priority was basically zero to
host in 10 minutes. 10 minutes. Wow. Okay.
Yeah. So that was basically the design challenge and we stepped up to the challenge and
we can go into details, but ultimately now the onboarding experience is
drastically different than it used to be. It used to be basically a glorified form
that you would fill out and maybe if you wanted to read a bunch of documentation, you would
understand and gain some confidence on what it would be like to be a host and how to create a
listing that people would enjoy. But the new process was not only faster, it was media, videos,
it welcomed you in a different way. It was just viscerally better. Yeah. That helped out too,
just in terms of creating more hosts because at a certain point, we needed more inventory
in different places, mainly those rural communities I was talking about too.
The problem became, how do you onboard those new hosts?
共感から行動へ
Yeah. Understanding what the friction or what the desire might be and then re-empathizing with
that need and then turning that into action and then connecting that back to the user.
And then that then deepens the understanding of the user even more. And it's interesting that
it's not just like one big thing that you did, but it's actually a collection of different things.
So that one thing you went through the cycle, understood better, and then there was another
thing that you implemented and so forth. So that's the flywheel.
Yeah, exactly. It's basically this flywheel that goes from understanding people and context
to compassion, which is one step further than empathy. I think the more you understand
people and their needs, the more you're compelled to act. So, compassion is not only putting
yourself in someone else's shoes, but it's also being compelled to act because you've done that.
And then compassion leading to the actual action itself of executing or implementing
a solution and then feeds back into understanding because obviously once you've created a solution or
a proposed solution, you can understand even more. And to a certain extent, that's like
just design in general. But I think the compassion, the point of compassion and the point of
that compassion leading into action is the nuance. I think that requires a certain
additional level of I don't know if it's humility or curiosity and maybe even like a dab of like
courage to get to that point of like true compassion. As with any design exercise,
the farther you get into that flywheel, the more understanding you get, the more insight
Airbnbの新しいアプローチ
you receive and the better the outcome is. All that work led to what is now the Airbnb
home state of the categories and like this more flexible way of approaching merchandising and
browsing accommodations and potential homes. Yeah, it used to be more like spearfishing where
people would come, you already know where you want to go and usually it's the approximate time frame
and you just it's very get to point A to point B as quickly as possible and now it's about
discovery, right? I just want to explore great pools or I want to explore and I think they just
released icons as a new category of like homes that were featured in films and so forth. It was
fascinating how understanding people which is like the core of design led to so many different
innovations during that time of panic and also like just now. So, I love that. Yeah, yeah. You
were talking about some of the challenges that you've had. Digging a little bit deep into a
more recent and it could be as recent as in the last couple months or it could be the last couple
years or so but what are some professional challenges that you faced and how have you
overcome them? The most recent one and challenge has been Instacart. Instacart is fascinating
brand and company because there's four sides of the market. You have the consumer application
which a lot of people use to get their groceries delivered. You have the gig worker side of
600,000 shoppers. They have their own product ecosystem as well so that they can fulfill those
orders. You have the retailer platform for like actual grocers and retailers that we use to
digitally enable the actual retail locations themselves and then you have an ad platform
for consumer packaged goods companies to allow them to advertise on the platform too and that's
a whole ecosystem of tools as well. Super complicated and they're all interconnected
and so forth and to approach that rightfully, you have to be... It's a very technical,
文化的変革の課題
technically complex problem to solve and so, a lot of times the approach to solving problems is
very technical and complex. And so, coming into this organization, there is this need and desire
to infuse creativity into that very technical approach which fascinated me too. Again,
this theme of like utility and function with emotion and creativity. And so,
getting to your question of the challenge was culturally, how do you approach an organization
that is used to approaching problems from a more analytical metric and experimentation side into a
more sort of intuitively led viscerally emotional and creative approach or at least combining those
two facets ways to approach things. That's been the biggest challenge for me. At first, a lot of
my peers and they'll say this now, like when I arrived I was saying things they were like,
why is this person speaking about design and poetry and emotion and so forth and
this mission we have of nourishment and food when we have to shave off milliseconds of
shopper's ability. It was very foreign to a lot of people and now it's very interesting. Yeah,
it's caught on which is great. Yeah, we're thinking much more creatively and that's not
just because of me, it's just a different way to approach the problem set and it's been fascinating
what was very challenging at first, catch a lot of momentum. We're using that combination of
creativity and like functional understanding in the way we hire people as well which is
fairly new. This notion of craft and quality and pride in what we make has grown as well.
So yeah, it was a huge challenge at first which is why I signed up for it coming from Airbnb where
all that was set to a place that needed more of that was like a big challenge.
Yeah, yeah. Airbnb perhaps because of the founder who's got a design background,
he understood what it means to be a right brain individual or right brain organization whereas
Instacart sounds a lot more analytical or at least was a lot more analytical coming from the
left side of the brain so to speak. Yes, exactly. That kind of process never ends at a certain point
but other than you talking about those things in meetings, what was some specific things that
you did to shift the cultural mindset of an organization? One was just not to be
timid about disruptive thinking. I think a couple of months into my tenure at Instacart,
just commissioned a design sprint based on what should this product feel like.
And what could it feel like without any boundaries like what's a vision, what's a
destination for this product and got some very talented people to work on it together. And we
created something that was pretty compelling and inspiring fairly quickly and it was met with
mixed emotions. Some people were super inspired by it, some people were offended by it that we
for various reasons, some people probably I think were outright scared by it like how could we
do that. It was very disruptive but I think that going through that and mitigating some of the
things like rough edges of that really helped open up people's eyes to what was possible.
If we really thought about this mission of delivering nourishment and food to communities
and giving people access in like the most efficient, simple and delightful way possible,
it's different from the problem of how do you make grocery delivery profitable which is an
extremely difficult problem and it's taken like a decade to chip away at and to create a solid
business. The way to think about that problem is very different than what people were confronted
with this new design sprint was like a very different approach. So anyway, yeah it was
デザインの重要性
disruptive and also effective. So that was part two of my conversation with Tim Allen, the current
head of design and research at Instacart and the former head of design at Airbnb discussing how he
along with Brian Chesky designed a way out of the pandemic and not only did they manage to do so
but also make the company go public. The three key takeaways from part two of my conversation with
Tim were number one, design can be a lifeline for company's future. Number two, embrace the
flight wheel of product design. And number three, time is something you make not something you get.
So key takeaway number one, design can be a lifeline for company's future. When I asked him
about how he and Brian Chesky and the select group of people at Airbnb designed their way out
of the pandemic, he was very specific in telling me about the little improvements that they did
sequentially that end up becoming and producing a bigger result for the company. So there were four
specific things that they designed that eventually helped the company get out of the pandemic. The
first thing that they did was to offer discount fees for medical professionals. So if you remember
during the pandemic, obviously there were a lot of medical professionals who had to work long hours
to help the patients. So what Airbnb did in response to that was to offer discount
stays for those medical professionals who had to be away from their own homes to serve the community.
The second thing that they noticed was that stays in rural areas outside of big cities
were increasing because for obvious reasons people were getting out of these big cities
and trying to stay in suburbs and countryside. So that was another thing that they noticed
and quickly tweaked the platform. People can book stays in rural areas more easily.
That then led to them helping people book longer stays. So again, during the pandemic, it wasn't
just a two-day trip or three-day trip that people were taking, but a week, two weeks, if not month,
and multiple months at a time that people were using Airbnb to get out of places like
New York City, where there was such a surge in the cases of the pandemic. A new behavior that
they didn't quite see on Airbnb, but quickly redesigned certain elements of the process
so that booking stays in rural areas, booking longer stays became easier. And finally, another
thing that they did was the overhaul of the onboarding process for new hosts. They realized
that more and more people were hosting places for guests to come to. But at the time, it took
anywhere from a week to 10 days or more for these new hosts to sign up for Airbnb so that they can
become official hosts. Instead, they took a hard look at that process and they shrunk the onboarding
process from a week to 10 days to literally 15 minutes. Prior to taking a hard look at certain
aspects of the platform, that part, the onboarding for hosts, is something that was functional and
many hosts were successful in becoming hosts. But the brilliance of using design to reassess
an aspect and then make a major change, relatively quickly, but drastic enough that it cut the process
from 10 days to 15 minutes. And that's something that if you didn't look beneath the surface,
it was part of the site that was working fine, but it took a much harder look at that situation
and it took the pandemic for them to realize and to redesign that particular aspect, which seems
like a small portion of the site and it might be, but making that process drastically easier for the
hosts, who are really the foundation of Airbnb's business, that was such a pivotal change that they
made to the company. And that eventually helped Airbnb go public in the least likely time that they
could have gone public. So that leads to my second key takeaway, embrace the flywheel of product design.
プロダクトデザインのフライホイール
So this concept, the flywheel of product design, is a Tim Allen original, as he put it.
It's something that he had been thinking about for many, many years. And if you picture a diagram,
and it's something that we talked about during the conversation with Tim, a picture of diagram
at the circle, you have understanding at top, you have compassion to your right, you have assistance
to the bottom, and you have connection. And repeating the cycle of understanding, compassion,
assistance, and connection, that's what he calls the flywheel of product design. So once you find
something by understanding the situation, the context, the user, the behavior, and then empathizing
with compassion, and then finding a way to assist that realization, and then creating that
connection. That circular process then leads back to understanding something else, being compassionate
about the challenge, the situation that the user might be in, and then providing solution, and then
connecting that to the back to the user, is in his eye, what he calls the flywheel of product design,
is an endless cycle of the process of this product design innovation. And it's such a simple and
elegant concept that I think many people talk about in different ways, but this was the first time
that I heard this term, the flywheel, applied to product design, and he made it understandable
for everybody else to see this process in this circular motion, so that it's a never-ending
process. So if you take this concept, the flywheel of product design, and if you look back at the
デザインの役割
point that I made in key takeaway number one, design can be a lifeline for a company's future,
and for specific changes that they made, it was one thing leading to the next thing, and the next
thing, and next thing. So it's the flywheel of product design in action that Tim, Brian Chesky,
and the select team were able to do to make the company get out of the pandemic, or design their
way out of the pandemic mess. And finally, key takeaway number three, and this is more of a
personal anecdote, which is time is something you make, not something you get. He talked about the
fact that he is a morning person, he wakes up at five o'clock when everybody's asleep, and an hour
or two before he gets busy with his family, his kids, he said that jokingly, but seriously, he said that
he's a chief drop-off officer, he's got two young kids, and he takes them to the kindergarten
and elementary school. And I can sympathize with that, because I'm also the chief drop-off officer
of my family, or my household, but I don't wake up at five o'clock, I'm not a morning person, but he is
a morning person, but he makes a point of making his own time to be able to do the thinking,
the deep work that he can concentrate before anybody else in the household wakes up,
and before he is getting bombarded with email and Slack messages. And this idea of time is
something that you make, not something that you get. A lot of people complain, including myself,
that, hey, you know, I don't have the time to do this, or I don't have time to do that,
but it's really up to you to make that time to do something that you aren't able to. And it takes
that kind of discipline, it takes that kind of mentality to be able to make time so that you
have a moment of silence or moment of focus that you can do deep work. To summarize, the three key
takeaways from my conversation with Pim are, number one, design can be a lifeline for a company's
future. Number two, embrace the flywheel of product design. And number three, time is something that
you make, not something you get. If you like our podcast, please follow us wherever you're listening.
And if you could leave us a 5-star rating, we'd be so grateful. If you have any questions or comments,
please send them via the link in the show notes. I'm Reina Moro, and this is The Query Mindset.
See you next time.
