Ep. 172: Airbnb’s Hiroki Asai on Designing Environments for Creative Teams to Thrive

The Nugget

Creativity needs a structured environment and support to thrive, rather than striking like lightning only for a gifted few. Hiroki Asai emphasizes the importance of fostering a healthy creative culture with strong program management to enable innovation and effectiveness, especially within in-house teams at companies like Apple and Airbnb.

Make it stick

💡 Lightning vs Structure: Creativity isn't just a lightning bolt but also needs structure and support to flourish.
🏢 In-house Advantage: An in-house team can be closer to problems, more effective, and produce higher quality work compared to outsourced agencies.
⛑ Protecting Ideation: Early stages of creativity are vulnerable, and negativity bias can kill innovative ideas.
🌐 Macro Sociology: Airbnb's response to changing travel and living habits post-pandemic is a lesson in adaptive, user-focused product development.

Creativity is often misunderstood as a sudden, divine inspiration, but it actually requires a structured environment to thrive.
Key to fostering creativity is protecting the ideation phase from negativity and ensuring rigorous development afterwards.

Working in-house allows closer interaction with problems, facilitating more effective and considered solutions.
Hiroki’s experience at Apple taught him the value of having robust, healthy in-house teams and this approach continues at Airbnb.

Great program management is likened to the circulatory and nervous systems of a body, essential for coordinating and enabling the creative “organs” to function effectively.

Creative teams at companies like Apple have proven that being close to the problem allows for highly impactful and quality work.
Hiroki emphasizes that the creative output is significantly enhanced when teams operate close to the issues they aim to solve.

The introduction of categories changes how people find travel accommodations on Airbnb, making the process more intuitive and exciting.
The pandemic has shifted travel patterns and Airbnb adapted by allowing searches that align with the new flexible living and working models.

"Creative work and the creative process need some kind of a structure to it."
"The reality is creativity needs a structure and protection, especially during the vulnerable ideation phase."
"An in-house team, if healthy and structured well, can thrive and produce work far superior to that of outsourced agencies."
"What really kills the ideation process is negativity bias."
"Our introduction of categories on Airbnb allows guests to discover unique homes they wouldn't have known to search for."

This summary contains AI-generated information and may have important inaccuracies or omissions.