I love the animation style and the VO is solid (anyone getting ScarJo vibes?) but it was when the first verse of the Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles kicks in after the Paris tour bus scene, that it really kicked in for me.

Lots of fun touches and thoughtful elements (Nessie in the River Seine). Ultimately Airbnb made an ad about them an ad about you and their partners. That’s what it’s all about!

As an aside, I’m writing this on Friday afternoon during the Napoli-Cagliari match and DoorDash’s “Hay Comida En La Casa” came on during halftime. What a great spot! It’s an English language commercial that prominently uses Spanish with no translation because the idea of “there’s food at home” is so universal.

A few weeks ago I promised you I’d cover pods but things got a bit wild (I launched OhSnap!) and I ended up sticking to topics that were a bit more timely or topical. Then last week I saw this post from Con Cirillo and I knew I couldn’t kick the can any longer.

Work in pods!

What is a pod?

A pod is a decentralized group of individuals working towards a shared goal. In English, it’s a bunch of people from different teams working together on a project. It’s an opportunity for them to break down the silos of working within their centralized teams and collaborate directly across the entire working process to achieve their goal.

It’s pretty dope when it works because you get rid of all the usual gatekeeping—and delays—that happen as things get passed from one department to the next (that’s what a waterfall is).

Centralized? Decentralized? What’s the deal?

So you’re not gonna believe this but I love centralized teams. I think every company should have centralized teams. Yes, those same silos that not 3 lines ago I was hating on, should exist—but not for getting actual work done.

I love centralized teams because they allow members of the same skillset to share knowledge and be led by functional experts. Think about a design team here. I don’t want my designers to be led by a growth marketer or product manager because they’re not going to be able to provide the right level of coaching to help the designers grow. On top of that by having all of the designers in one place, they can more effectively share systems and learnings from working across the business.

And working across the business is where the decentralized part comes in.

The magic of pods is that you identify a job to be done (let’s say it’s a product launch) and you build the best team for that job. You’ll include:

• the product marketer responsible for the launch

• a performance marketer focused on ads

• a content marketer that will write the blogs and email

• a project manager to keep the trains on the tracks

• an art director and a designer to get the look down

• a dev or two to build the landing pages

• someone from social to make sure the campaign is tight

• and anyone else that’s required to make the launch a success

These people become a dream team (the ‘92 version) that is responsible for the product launch start to finish. They don’t disappear on each other and come back with a big reveal instead they’re in standups together, they’re asking each other questions to make sure they have all of the context, they’re sharing work and collecting feedback together to make sure you have a consistent experience across the campaign.

That’s how you make it good.

Why are waterfalls bad?

In a perfect world they’re not but as we know, this world is faaaar from perfect. We’re all constantly battling competing priorities, multiple projects, different stakeholders, maybe even a personal life. On top of that the idea that a single person or team will have everything they need (including answers to questions) to hand a project off that’s completely ready to go for the next team is absurd.

What ends up happening is team 1 hands over to team 2, team 2 goes back to team 1 with questions before simultaneously passing to team 3, team 3 is unclear on something team 1 did, so now all 3 are chatting. All of this ends up taking way too much time and poor team 4 is left with mere moments to do their job while also missing a ton of context.

It’s not a waterfall, it’s a whirlpool!

It's not a waterfall, it's a whirpool

It gets messy, things fall between the cracks, and most things need to be repeated 3-4x because none of the teams sat together as the work was getting done.

What are the benefits of pods?

Relationship building and trust

One of the (if not the primary) reasons that silos develop is because of a lack of trust. Each team/department thinks they know what’s best and that they’re the only ones who get it. This makes collaboration really difficult.

Pods break down those trust issues because everyone gets to work together across team lines. Pods win together. Pods lose together. The more time the pods spend together, the more they start trusting one another.

Constant communication

When working in waterfalls, one of the biggest risks to getting good work done is missed communication or assumptions being made. When the right people are in the room together (zoom rooms are fine too), things don’t get missed because every angle is up for discussion. That conversation leads to better work.

Modular teams

When you’re building teams for a job to be done, you get to pick and choose from your roster. That means you get to pick the best people for the job instead of whoever is available. The pods can be big or they can be small but you get to staff for whatever the job is.

My favorite part about this is the impact on hiring because you can stop thinking about general skillsets and start hiring specialists to fill in the gaps that your team is missing. And if you don’t have headcount, you can always bring in a trusted freelancer or agency to fill the role.

SMEs working with SMEs

This is an extension of the previous point but when you’re staffing the right people for the right job, you get to pick the people that are the subject matter experts (SMEs) in their field and pair them up with other SMEs. It’s one of those “1+1=3” situations.

Knowledge comes back to the centralized teams

The centralized teams benefit from pods as well too because when different designers or devs or editors are working on different parts of the business they’re learning. They’re becoming better partners. They’re creating and sharing reusable components that are proven winners for their teammates to use.

This is a critical lever to scaling because you’re building deep expertise across different segments of the business that then get translated into shortcuts for other pods to use.

How do you build a pod?

I’ve found there are two ways to do this. The first is a more dedicated model and the second is more ad hoc. They both have their pros and cons but if I’m working at a larger company I want the dedicated model. If I’m at a smaller company, I want it ad hoc.

Dedicated pods (better for large teams)

When I was at HubSpot, there were a few workstreams that were more important to the business than anything (web strategy, acquisition, and INBOUND were 3 of them). Picking and choosing people on a per project basis didn’t make sense because there was a consistent and ongoing stream of work for each of these groups.

What we did was create a system we called “Lanes.” Lanes were dedicated pods for each of these groups. What it would look like was a consistent working team that would be assigned projects for 6-12 months. For Web Strategy that meant we had CROs, copywriters, SEOs, project managers, designers, and developers all working together. We could loop others in if there was a need—video is a good example—but that core team was the Web Strategy lane.

This was great because the work was consistent and the different teams represented in the pod learned to trust each other and consider one another as they did their part. That made every next project move faster and become more successful. On top of that, the learnings would come back to the centralized teams so that the lessons learned could be applied across the entire team (this was great for building out self-service resources down the road).

The two major cons to lanes were:

1. Once you assigned someone to the lane—unless there was an extenuating circumstance—they stayed in that lane and their direct skills couldn’t be used elsewhere.

2. As more priorities arose unless we got headcount, we couldn’t fully staff lanes—it broke for us at 14 lanes. We’d have people dedicated for like 17.5% of their weekly time to a certain lane and you couldn’t really measure that. It was silly. We solved this by evolving from “Lanes” to something we called “Portfolios” (multiple lanes sitting within a VP org with a dedicated group of creatives per portfolio) but ultimately this is a prioritization issue because you have to make tradeoffs.

Ad hoc pods (better for small teams)

Sometimes you don’t have the resources to dedicate to a single workstream (this is actually no different from when you have too many priorities) so you need to put the right people on the right project at the right time.

This requires a few things:

1. A good strategy because you don’t want to waste time or resources

2. Solid prioritization with the ability to outsource and delegate tasks

3. Strong creative ops and project management that will help identify the needs of a project

From there you need to create the brief and staff the project.

What’s great about this model is that you will always have your most talented players working on the highest priority projects. The downside to that is that you may not have them for the rest of the work. Again, this is where self-service and outsourcing becomes critical because everything can’t be a priority.

Pods are amazing! They change the game, but what about the work that gets deprioritized or not enough attention? This is where your brand systems come into play. If you’re 100% reliant on your internal team to do the work, you’re creating a bottleneck for yourself and work that may still make an impact might not get done.

Brand systems is what we build at OhSnap! Our systems include everything from your brand strategy and visual identity, to your Figma design system, your brand tech stack (Canva, CMS, DAM, etc.), AI + automation, of course, and all of the enablement for these materials to allow for business impact on day one. If you’re ready to remove your brand bottleneck, let’s talk.