PowerMaps

Adapting Fast — the Case of AirBnB and Cuba

In the previous post⁠1 we introduced the secret sauce of the most successful firms in Silicon Valley and Shenzhen (China) — the 40 universally-useful principles they all operate by. Furthermore, we suggested that any organisation, in any industry anywhere, could level up their game by adopting these principles.
Now, we’re not fans of case studies (just because something worked well in one place doesn’t mean it’s going to work well for you as your context will be different). Rather than blindly copying “best practices” you need to learn WHY something worked and think HOW it can be adapted to your situation. But we know that many of you look for case studies — so this is for you:
Case Study: How Principles Helped AirBnB Conquer the Cuban Market.
AirBnB has been disrupting the traditional hospitality industry and reshaping the way people travel. In 2015, after the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with the U.S., a new and unexpected opportunity opened up for the travel and tourism industry in Cuba. And AirBnB managed to set up and start running operations while its rivals were still assessing the situation. How did they do this?
Instead of simply adding the ‘Cuba project’ to the already busy workloads of existing teams AirBnB decided to ‘think small (as in teams)’ — one of the 40 universally-useful principles. They created a dedicated, cross-functional team (of designers, engineers, data scientists, legal, operations, and comms) to take on the unique challenges of entering this highly-restricted market.
This team ‘focused on user needs’ (another of the principles) to ensure they were creating operations to delivered outcomes that end users wanted (as its users that ultimately determine your success or failure by buying or not). This team also adopted another principle — ‘Be transparent’ — to make sure everyone was aligned around the same common objectives.
However, AirBnB’s big breakthrough came from adopting the ‘Pioneer—Settler—Town Planner’ model. They understood that they needed a different type of Product Manager for this project — someone who was great a making a product fit a market. They needed a ‘Pioneer’ — someone who is capable of building something for the first time (vs. somebody who maintains something).
But once this Pioneering team had established the new product (AirBnB operations in Cuba) ‘Settlers’ — those who are obsessed with growth and optimisation — took over. This was a team with a very different attitude, made up of highly-analytical people driven by metrics and passionate about reaching a lot of people. At this point the ‘Pioneers’ move onto their next ‘frontier project’.
Eventually, there comes a point where another type of team takes over — ‘Town Planners’ who take what has been built successfully onto the next level, building the infrastructure to handle massive scale (which is what Silicon Valley firms do so well — creating mass platforms like social media for the B2customer market, or internal shared services for the B2business firms).
This ‘Pioneer—Settler—Town Planner’ model sits at the heart of another of the universally-useful principles (‘Think aptitude and attitude’), which guides organisations to getting the right people in the right place: ‘Pioneers’ for dealing with uncertainty; ‘Settlers’ for achieving product growth; and ‘Town Planners’ for eventually creating platforms that deliver industry-wide scale.
And this is what enabled AirBnB to be so successful, so quickly when entering the Cuban market. They understood that they needed to learn and adapt quickly so sent in their ‘Pioneers’ first. Once they had established a foothold in the country they were disbanded and a team of ‘Settlers’ took over to grow what the ‘Pioneers’ had broken ground on.
This is what AirBnB, in the case study here⁠2, meant by harnessing ‘the power of elastic teams’. It shows the power of intelligently deploying the universally-useful principles we’ve been discussing in this series of blogs so far. And in the final blog, coming next, we’ll show you how successful organisations are structuring and running themselves using these principles.

Adaptive Leadership