Someone then steps up and says they can build the solution themselves. Often, their motivation isn’t entirely pure; yes, they want to solve the problem, but they also think it’d be a fun project to take on. Everyone loves a hack day, and creating internal tools can feel like all the good parts of software development without the annoying ones. You start from a blank slate with no debt, you know your product will get used, and you can often shortcut the tedious things—deployment, security, testing—that are required for customer-facing products.
Though Minerva is undoubtedly quite useful to Airbnb, much of its value comes from how tightly coupled it is with Airbnb’s dashboarding suite, data catalogs, A/B testing and ML platforms, and operational tools.