I led a team of product managers, designers, and developers to envision a unique Airbnb host experience. The brief: increase host retention and cut call-center volume by giving hosts a place to learn from one another.
- Role
- Product & design strategy lead
- Team
- Product managers, designers, engineers
- Focus
- Host retention · support deflection
Airbnb’s host support ran through a call center, and hosts were churning.
The forums that existed were scattered and hard to search — there was no coherent product where a host could get an answer, pick up a tactic, or find another host in the same situation.
The mandate was concrete: increase host retention and decrease call-center volume by envisioning an online host community.
“Design thinking to make decisions from the outside in — solving problems from an Airbnb host’s point of view first.”
Discover + Define
We ran 1:1 interviews with hosts and asked “what makes a good host?” rather than “what do you need?” The answers were about motivation and identity, not features.
The core finding: hosts were leaving because there was no host-to-host engagement. We built personas from the interviews and survey data so the rest of the work stayed anchored to real people.
Ideate
I led two interactive experience-design workshops with cross-functional teams. Each ran in four parts: Moments that Matter (the point-in-time interactions worth winning), Story Writing (real-to-life community narratives), Sketch (low-fidelity visual ideation), and Prioritize (scoring concepts on host value and speed to deliver).
Design + Prototype
We built a clickable model in Sketch and InVision, wrote it up as user stories, and tested it with hosts. The prototype doubled as the alignment artifact for Airbnb’s brand and internal standards.
Test + Learn
We paired the clickable prototype with a survey. Hosts felt the community fit the Airbnb brand and would integrate well. The Cities feature read as unclear. And hosts consistently asked for personalization — content that reflected their specific stage of the host journey.
Launch
To ship it, I worked with Airbnb to build a design-thinking-to-agile operating model: insights feed ideation, ideation feeds an incremental build. We sequenced the features into an MVP driven by what the testing told us.
The community performed well in its first year:
- Meaningful call-center deflection, directly attributable to the community.
- Continued investment — Airbnb added an ideation center and private clubs.
- The platform grew into a space for local political advocacy.
2016 — year to date
