Building Products at Airbnb

Airbnb wants its leaders to be more than managers, they want them to be creators. But it results in a much more top-down company.

The typical time horizon for a product team’s north star, or long-term vision, is three to four years out. Usually it’s a document describing like what the world will look like and what the user experience should be like and what’s different from today.

“Airbnb is grand about the vision for a product. With Airbnb Plus we rented out homes, redecorated them, and photographed them to help people understand the vision. On another project, the PM worked with the creative team to film a movie of what the experience would look like, the production value was extremely high. This goes back to the Disney in

Brian and most everyone at the company is comfortable failing publicly, which I admire.

“ Brian talks a lot about building ‘eleven star experiences.’ That really means challenging us to think about what the perfect experience would be, without being constrained by scale or other technical constraints. In our storyboards, we’re encouraged to figure out how to get a few users to really love the product, then we can figure out how to sca

historically the company’s strength has never been grounded and rooted in execution. The only new product launch that succeeded was Airbnb.com. Every other big launch over the last eight years has actually been a complete flop. Our strength and the focus of leadership has always been marketing and storytelling. It was never been about technology ex

There was a period of time where everything required an experiment and oftentimes the experiment would run for years and nobody will realize that and decide to end the experiment.