Airbnb: Designing the Whole Experience

In 2009, Airbnb was dying. Revenue was flat, growth was slow, and the founders could not figure out why. Trained as designers, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk decided to diagnose the product the way designers do: go look at it in person. They flew to New York, stayed with their hosts, and found the problem was not the website at all. It was something embarrassingly simple, fixable without writing a line of code, and once they fixed it revenue in the city roughly doubled.

For anyone building a product, this is a case about the parts of your customer's experience that happen off your platform, in the gaps you have quietly handed off to operations, support, or chance. It sharpens the question of when you last went through your own full journey, first contact to finished job, as a customer would. The thought exercise Chesky used to push his team past industry norms, and how to run it yourself, is the part the app holds back.