How Airbnb bridged cross-functional teams

“Product organization is on one canyon. Marketing is on another canyon and they’re connected by a long, narrow suspension bridge. Every day, a few brave souls will attempt to walk across. What we need to build is a solid bridge structure like the Golden Gate Bridge where there’s high volume of traffic daily going across on both sides.”

– Brian Chesky, Co-founder and CEO of Airbnb

Following my previous post on “An Extroverted Conference For The Introvert Designer” where I talked about the value of stepping out to meet and learn from different people regardless of your personality, this post will touch specifically on the second night’s panel session at Epicurrence — The Montues.

The Airbnb team shared very valuable insights on their rebranding process, their journey working across marketing-product-engineering-design teams, as well as how they setup their teams and organizations for success and effectiveness.

I had the opportunity to speak to Katie M. Dill, Head of Experience Design at Airbnb and one of Airbnb’s Experience Designers, Alvin Hsia. We hit off on several different topics ranging from previous startup experiences, points of view on social economics in Asia and Singapore, and trade insights into how each of our team works. In typical Silicon Valley serendipity, I met Alvin again the following week at a Greylock Design community event and decided to follow up with more specific questions.

Team Structure

Airbnb’s Design team is made up of 4 main pillars — Experience, Production, Insights and Content Strategy. Otherwise known as EPIC. Katie leads the Experience design team which is likened to product and user experience designers in the industry. The ratio of Experience to Production designers is about 10:1. More on the relationship between Experience and Production designers later in the post.

Rebranding

Airbnb’s “Belong Anywhere” rebranding was initiated and driven by marketing. One tip Katie gave for large organizational rebrands was that it would be good to have someone from the Executive team to push forward for you. This is helpful especially when working with several cross functional teams. Having support from upper management could potentially help resolve any questions on the why and when we should do it.

Communication

When Airbnb first started working on the rebrand, the color palette worked great for print but did not necessarily translate well for Airbnb’s web and mobile products on digital screens. If your organization has separate brand and product design teams, learn to communicate and get each other involved in different stages of the process.

Flipping the switch

Airbnb decided to flip the switch all at once — new homepage, new website, new mobile apps. It took them around 5 months to implement all the redesigns and changes, with designers and engineers maintaining and work on two separate designs and codebase during that period.

Bridging Marketing and Product

When a company grows beyond a certain stage when teams start running in various timelines and their individual roadmaps, communication becomes a challenge, especially in a high-growth agile company whereby plans change on-the-fly, finding clarity and making sure everyone’s working towards the same goals and on the same page gets harder as it grows.

Photo by Erin Conger

Q&A with Alvin Hsia