Day 1, Work in Progress: Service Design at Airbnb

What will hear is will coalesce pattern of things you heard from other speakers today,

Bit of preamble, as I gave talk on work I was doing at Whitney Museum of American Art, and the above image comes to mind

• It’s a production still from the Muppet Movie and an exuberant mess

Found exciting in my own design team work at Whitney Museum, and turning it into core function at museum

• 15 years later it is true

Image here is good luck charm for service design at Airbnb

As for me, I lead the service design function at Airbnb and you may have come across our work when Brian Chesky tweeted about our blueprint

Really big deal for team and months of work with cross-functional team of experts to create blueprint

Big deal CEO was sharing it with the world

• Easy to conclude that service design was mature and integrated

Still, so new, that we don’t know what maturity looks like, and not my mission to define

Rather building durable capability so service design becomes lasting part of Airbnb and inspire similar thought experiment for each of you, and how service design can work at your company

Some backstory before service design, in order to set stage

Airbnb is household name, verb, and many attendee here might even be hosts

• What shapes service design is unique nature of business challenge

Airbnb is a two-sided marketplace and consider impact of managing supply and demand of both hosts and guests

• • Travel company, as quintessential service, and intangible value to quality provided
  • Hospitality and connecting them with guests, and textbook service design challenge and delivery business

The service design mission pre-dates my team by about a decade, and in 2012 developed guest and host journey and foundational framework

• • Known as the Snow White frames
• Permanently installed at Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters
• Summary of intent: Remind us to think holistically about Airbnb experience and ground work in user journey

The Snow White frames remained organizing framework for company despite 80x increase in company revenue over five years

• • The more analog business functions scaled so fast that they built plane while flying
• We had an analog transformation period
  • Where non-digital business needed digital capabilities, but born digital company needs growth of operationally intensive part of business
• Started working with Airbnb as consultant, and at a botique design strategy firm

We embedded our within Airbnb for our customer service business function, and solved variety of issues that might occur while working with Airbnb and worked with team to develop five-year vision, and two-year capabilities roadmap

• • This roadmap was realized
• Two years later 2020 happened and changed the company forever
  • Covid triggered lay-offs and major restructuring
• Important in that Airbnb moved to a single functional org, where department worked on same goals and same roadmap

I joined full-time in 2021 with mandate to build service design as capability

• • Team of five and stellar practicioners, and delivery amazing highly visible work, and under ambiguous circumstances
  • Immense credit to my team

How we describe what we do to internal business partners

• • Look at journey through the customer’s eye
  • Bridge gaps between functions like operations, product, policy, and other functions

Spans service experience and underlying capabilities of business

• • Front-stage teams design journeys to build journey they need to do
  • Backstage business processes sustainable for business
• Outline expectations for typical deliverables and work products, and not too perspective and what will deliver at any time

 

Most time spent embedded with teams supporting product launches

Example of aircover functionality, where Airbnb is reimbursing host when guest damages property and scalability of future services like insurance claims and example of showing value for insurance space

• Insurance has lot of process complexity like evidence collection, and dispute resolution

As team gew, demand started to exceed supply, so invested efforts to scale the underlying practice and introduced a self-serve toolkit

• Joined with design education team for courses on service design
  • Including service design 101 and #1 course in design learning program

Class to introduce service thinking and thinking in journeys and thinking holistically and touch-points in business systems and other functions

Documentation work in how Airbnb works — community blueprint that continues Snow White work by mapping every Airbnb product, policy, and operational service to journey

• Dedicated team, operating system
  • All happened in first two years of team at Airbnb
• Felt like dog that caught the car, but building business function to reliably do work and have it last as company grows and changes and long-game in mind
• With long-game in mind had quieter accomplishments

Place in company structure and compensation study done

• Career framework and huge deal for us to have stated performance expectations and mapped to company job ladder and becoming part of company
• Foundational Insights— Working with research team for insights upon how service provided
  • Was awash in insights about product and busines functions, but couldn’t infer insights on service
  • Global study for how guests and hosts feel about Airbnb and big win for us

So how do we work on this?

Mapping facilitation, co-creation are common tasks, but certain conditions make Airbnb,

• • This unique combination and set of conditions is common across all companies, so service design will need to adapt accordingly to the company culture
• To sum up our strategy
  • The way things are shape how we practice
• People are the primary interface at Airbnb
  • We are not a documentation forward culture, but an oral one— segment manager might not have presentation deck explaining what he does, but instead
    • Behavior of seeking out experts and learning from them is second nature to everyone at Airbnb
    • Nerve-center for all of this
  • We have to think how extensive network and health of relationships, and broad cross-section of company needs to be understood and touch based on

Ambiguity is expected, as since we are in a more oral corporate culture, less emphasis on writing stuff down and sources of truth, but challenge to figure out what end is done

• • Observed flocking behavior of not knowing where true north is, but trusting someone might
• Works against effort for source of truth that business unknowable
• Position our documentation as temporary result, and indicating a shared work surface and don’t position selves as knowledge holders,
  • Instead facilitate creation through shifting landscape

Sensible adaptation when change and ambiguity so constant, and service design feels like a boatload of process

• Most days we show-up, read theroom, and apply selves in way that adds value
  • Partners know we are are needed, despite fuzzy definitions

 

Design in DNA as key part of Airbnb culture, and even non-designers step in to influence experience

• • People ready to engage so everyone treated as designers

Work in progress to talk about impact in company, so ask in five years for more definite conclusion

• Harmony
  • Internal harmony— Not just no conflict, but harmony in how business designed, connecting business systems, and all invisible things that impact customer experience
    • Airbnb app is marvel of craft and attention to detail and systems thinking
    • Easier to see patterns that go deeper into business
• Service design can help company become more legible to itself, as frameworks could manage with high-growth and fast- changing environment
  • By describing and documenting system as it is, we can build shared meaning and understanding across the organization
• Hope that work can enhance creativity
  • Design comes through iterative process, and if hoping for linear sequential process, design feels like swirl— but part of process getting closer and closer to great design
    • Cycles of successful approximation as you get closer and closer to ideal design
    • Service design can introduce healthy collaboration patterns, as part of this goal

Hope work fosters inspiration

• • Airbnb is a huge company and so many problems to solve, and effort to solve anyone of them and tunnel vision and service design to create and vision of future
• Will leave with note that slides are very much Airbnb
  • Executive team is all designers and creates a unique capability, so reflect on environment’s capabilities and what it unlocks for you as practicioner

Questions

1. What is systems that sits around designing for marketplace, and how are other people impacted by it?
   1. Marketplace design challenge and feel like words end-to-end used a lot, but service design is trying to string variety of end-to-end processes into a coherent ecosystem
   2. Metaphor of oceans and different time-scales and organisms
      1. The ocean is not whale or krill centered, so journeys might help you focus on guest and host to show how journeys and time-scales can interact with each other
      2. Goal to set table for experts to come in and look at things in a different way
2. How did you get Bryan Chesky to tweet about the service blueprint?
   1. Very happy and pleasantly surprised