Summary
At Airbnb, we're in the midst of integrating service thinking into a product-minded culture, aiming to harmonize our high digital standards with the realities of operational service delivery. This collaborative, iterative effort involves partnerships with product, policy, customer support, and more. In this talk, Airbnb Service Design leader Rebecca Gimenez shares learnings from this ongoing journey, offering insight on the practice of service design within a complex organizational system.
Key Insights
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Airbnb's service design emerged over a decade, beginning with foundational journey maps like the Snow White Frames created in 2012.
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The company faces unique challenges as a two-sided marketplace balancing both hosts and guests in a travel service context.
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Airbnb’s internal culture is predominantly oral and networked, making knowledge sharing relational rather than documentation-driven.
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Ambiguity and rapid change are normal at Airbnb, requiring service design deliverables to be positioned as temporary snapshots, not fixed sources of truth.
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Airbnb staff exhibit 'process allergy,' preferring flexible practices that do not disrupt their fast-moving workflows but allow occasional deep interventions.
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Rebecca’s team initially focused on redesigning customer support and insurance claim services, proving service design’s value amid complexity and regulation.
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The service design team developed self-serve toolkits and educational programs to scale their impact beyond direct projects.
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Design is deeply embedded in Airbnb’s culture, with many cross-functional partners eager to actively participate in design processes and tensions.
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Rebecca aims for service design to drive internal harmony in business systems, company legibility, creative iterative cycles, and collective inspiration.
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The Community Blueprint, a detailed, executive-sponsored mapping of Airbnb’s ecosystem, is a major milestone demonstrating service design’s growing influence.
Notable Quotes
"Service design is still so new in Silicon Valley product environments that no one really knows what maturity looks like."
"People are the interface at Airbnb—it’s an oral culture where knowledge is shared directly rather than through documents."
"Instead of positioning journeys and maps as definitive, we say these are just snapshots of a moment in time."
"If you asked our partners what service design is, they’d say, I’m not totally sure, but I know that we need it."
"Airbnb suffers from process allergy—a sensible adaptation when change is constant and ambiguity is normal."
"Design is in our DNA here; everyone is ready to engage and step into the design role."
"I hope service design can make these cycles feel less chaotic and more productive by introducing healthy collaboration patterns."
"Our mission to build belonging and trust inspires me every day. Service design helps create space to zoom out and have critical vision conversations."
"The way things are shapes how we practice service design."
"Building a business function that lasts and adapts as the company changes is a very long game—we are just getting started."
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