How to be a design-led company 101.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky drops a masterclass playbook on building a design-led company and replacing traditional product roles.
Here’s why Airbnb is design-led and 16 lessons on how Airbnb builds (genius strategies):
1. Walk the talk. You cannot build products if you cannot talk about products; everyone in the company should know how to talk about them.
2. Get your core service right. If you want to launch new things for customers, get your fundamentals right first, not the new fancy features.
3. Ship things you’re only proud of. Airbnb focuses on shipping things that they’re proud of. « If you don’t want to put your name on it, you don’t ship it. »
4. CEO should be the keeper of the roadmap. They have a 3-year roadmap, which gets fuzzy as you go further out. The long-term roadmap changes every week. There’s a simple rule. If it’s not on the roadmap, it can’t ship. And it must be on one roadmap.
5. Leadership in product reviews. Top people in the company get everything reviewed by the CEO and, operate like a single function.
6. Design is not a department but a way of thinking. It is not just to move pixels around.
7. Simplifying is not removing. Design is not removing things till something becomes simple. Distilling something to its very essence.
8. Engineering (and PMs) should be paired with Design from early on—design challenges tech, and tech inspires art.
9. Issues with A/B Testing. If you *are* going to do an A/B test, it should be hypothesis-driven. If it works, you should be able to say why, not just what.
10. Drawback on design systems. If you can only pull from this system, you’re never going to be able to take a giant leap if it breaks the system.
11. PMM (product marketing) and designers decide how to present an idea (anything new).
12. Product marketing not product management. A lot of times people give up on features too soon. They ship something, the data says it doesn’t work, and they kill the feature. Well, did you tell people about it? Do they know about it?
13. Health of a company = relation between marketing and engineering. Marketing is like waiters, and Engineering is like chefs. When waiters try to enter the kitchen, the chef usually yells at them—this is not healthy.
14. Involve marketing early — and hence the importance of PMM (PM + outbound marketing skills)
15. Anything new starts with an insight — storyboard the journey of personas — get a bird’s-eye view of your product/service—map out touchpoints—systematically fix the core product/service
16. When faced with two bad options, the right answer is often a third option—this needs creativity, it needs a heart. This is where designers excel.
What’s your 2c?
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