Origin Story

You probably want another weekly update from your boss like you want another hole in your head.

Image by vectorportal.com, CC BY

Or, that’s what I thought when I started to write weekly updates. It was 2012-ish, and I was working for Facebook as a UX Research manager. It was high times for Facebook — before Cambridge Analytica, before election scandals, before Mark Zuckerberg showed up in the metaverse looking like a peeled pear with googley eyes. These were the good old days.

Whatever you may think of Facebook, they had their shit together in many ways. There was a well defined way of doing everything, and it was well lubricated. Sending out weekly updates was no exception. And so I was introduced to the HPM format.

Highlights, People, Me

HPM, everyone. Highlights, people, me. On the face of it, it’s not a bad premise. Each of these elements works on a problem that I’ve heard about from teams:

1. A terse and pithy synthesis of highlights and goings-on helps solve for information asymmetry. It helps people do their jobs with context and plugs them into the broader team.
2. At that time, Facebook was in hyper-growth mode. Rarely did a week go by without a new team member or someone switching teams. People were taking vacations, leaves-of-absence, and having kids. There were always lots of updates about colleagues, and people collaborate better when they know about their colleagues.
3. Getting to know a bit about a leader, outside of purely work focused interactions, helps humanize them. It creates stronger personal connections and a solid team bond.

And so I started writing HPMs. But why do a good thing the right amount, when you can do it too much? There was so much HPM. HPMs coming from everywhere, not just from my team. Roll up HPMs, so more senior leaders could aggregate, and so also HPM deadlines.

It became the HPM-industrial-complex. And along with it, a few problems that I bet you’re already seeing. First… so. many. words. With HPMs from everywhere, it became thousands of words to keep up with. Who had time to digest it all? And which things really mattered? If everything is a highlight then nothing is. Second, HPM (inevitably, perhaps) became a stage for performance. Not only did leaders use things like the length and number of highlights as a way to try and demonstrate impact, but team members started to see inclusion in an HPM as impact itself.

The HPM-industrial-complex started to take a long time, too. I began to wonder how many collective hours we were all sinking into materials for HPMs - writing, editing, aggregating.

And so, in the best tradition of bureaucratic tech companies, a generally good thing became corrupted, out of the control of the people meant to own it.

Do less.

When I moved to Airbnb in 2015 I wanted to keep sending weekly updates. But, obviously, with some tweaks. My idea was to take what was good about HPM and radically simplify. It was meant to be fast to write and faster to read. It was meant as a focusing tool, and a way of sharing a salient topic.

So the format became:

1. One personal thing about me, because that humanness, transparency, and connection thing in leadership felt real. If someone could share my love of BBQ or the pain of being a life-long Knicks fan, then maybe it would help us work better as a team? Far fetched in that particular case, I guess, but still.
2. Kudos (aka appreciations), but solicited from my team, just one or two each week, with an eye towards evenly distributing them over time. Everyone’s a winner, people.
3. And… One Big Thought.

I sent One Big Thought emails almost every Monday for more than 5 years. I kept them short — just a few minutes of reading to kick off the week and get the wheels turning.

Holy shit, some of it was drivel. But a lot of it wasn’t. I got plenty of feedback, learned which types of thoughts people found useful, and I improved (I think). I started to get sign-up requests from others outside my team, the mailing list expanded, and I took it as motivation to keep going.

One Big Thought

But how did I figure out what to write? What counts as One Big Thought? I’ll admit that I’m retrofitting structure on something that was pretty emergent. But since I’ve cataloged 5+ years of emails to see what they were about, some patterns have emerged.

1. A practical idea about leadership, management, and work. A thing to practice which I felt had helped me in some way.
2. A tip, trick, or bit of advice for getting things done or just getting along. In an environment of usually unbridled chaos, I wanted to share strategies for simplifying, driving action, and staying sane.
3. A simple, focusing theme or idea which I hoped would help folks grow and be more effective.

Surprisingly, very few OBTs were actually about Airbnb. Certainly many of them had the context of what we were doing. But rarely were they strictly about the business or product we were building. (Obviously those details aren’t things I’d ever share publicly.) Looking back, I found that nearly all of the OBTs I thought were worth the pixels they occupied were more generally applicable.

Here we are.

Maybe now you can see how this publication was born. In the hopes that these thoughts will be useful to others, every week or two I’ll publish One Big Thought. The topics will be varied, but you can count on a hefty dose of leadership, career and personal development, management, and how to survive at work thoughts. You can also count on a hefty dose of sarcasm, real-talk, and hopefully a laugh or two. If you laugh, you might also remember.

Thanks to all the people who gave me feedback, both positive and critical, over the years I’ve been doing this. Thanks to everyone who encouraged me to start sharing these thoughts more broadly. And thanks to all of you for reading.

I welcome your feedback. If you love it or you hate it, that’s what comments are for. I won’t be feeding trolls, but I would love to be participating in a conversation with you. Send me an email at judd@onebigthought.com if you’d rather do it privately.

So with all that said, onward to the first big thought:

Remember That No One Has Any Idea What They’re Doing