Airbnb was open plan (it still is, I’m just not there anymore). They also have an amazing Food team who would occasionally, randomly, bake treats for us (this is relevant, I promise).

There was no sales bell, but there was an outage gong. Any time we had an outage affecting the “Book It” flow and revenue stopped flowing that gong rang out. Hearing the gong meant engineers would abruptly leave meetings or lunch to come help fix the issue.

As we scaled and hit the limits of various systems we had periods where the gong rang out semi-regularly (a few times per month). These were hard times for engineers.

Soon, engineering started to push back on Product requests, took the time to re-architect and build better systems, and calm was achieved. Months went by without hearing the gong ring out, then years passed. People joined the company and got promoted, never having heard it ring. Until one day in 2018.

I was working near a pod of project managers, and I hear the gong. Like Pavlov’s dog, it triggers an immediate wave of anxiety in me: something is very wrong. But my blissfully unaware PM colleagues have no idea, it’s the first time they’ve ever heard the gong.

One lady looks up from her laptop and asks: “oooh, did the Food team make cookies?”

Love this story! As someone that joined the industry remote, its stuff like this I sometimes worry im missing out on.

To me, this seems like a positive problem.

Of course it is good, if the sales team succeeds. But it is bad if that means that the developers are unable to do their work.

I think what ends up happening is that you sell a lot of stuff that gets steadily worse over time.

Depends how you feel about $NOISE