Airbnb · Strategy · Senior · 45 to 60 minutes

How should Airbnb decide what to build?

Airbnb is an online marketplace where guests book short term stays from hosts. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

Product strategy
Operating model design
Metric design
Executive communication
Change management

The situation

You are a senior product leader at Airbnb. The CEO and executive team have asked for a recommendation on how the company should decide what to build over the next 12 to 24 months. Airbnb has spent years running frequent A/B tests and letting product teams pursue many local improvements. This system still produces measurable wins, but some leaders worry those wins are no longer adding up to a meaningfully better end to end experience for guests and hosts. They fear the product may be improving in pieces while the core experience gets harder to understand, less cohesive, or less delightful. Others argue that continuous testing keeps risk low, creates accountability, and prevents leadership from making expensive bets based on opinion. The decision matters now because the next planning cycle is approaching, and any change would affect roadmap ownership, how teams coordinate, how product managers are used, and how launches are evaluated. Your task is to recommend an operating model for product development and planning, not a feature list, and explain why it is the right choice for Airbnb at this moment.

What to produce

Write a 1 to 2 page strategy memo to the CEO and executive team.

Your answer must

Diagnose the product and organizational problem Airbnb is trying to solve, including why many small experiment wins might fail to improve the overall marketplace experience.
Present at least two operating model options for how Airbnb could decide what to build, and compare their tradeoffs on speed, quality, coordination, accountability, and risk.
Recommend one approach for the next 12 to 24 months, including decision rights, planning cadence, and the role of experimentation within that model.
Define success metrics and review windows that capture both near term business performance and longer term product health for both guests and hosts.
Identify the biggest execution and organizational risks, including impact on product managers and cross functional teams, and give mitigation steps.

Constraints

Use only the information in the prompt, do not rely on outside facts about Airbnb.
Assume no major increase in headcount or marketing spend.
Your recommendation must preserve a credible way to learn from data, even if you change how experiments are used.

Format

Use five sections: diagnosis, options, recommendation, metrics, risks.

How Airbnb actually played it

Describes Airbnb's 2022 shift from continuous A/B testing and a classic PM function to a unified roadmap and two big narrative releases a year, after small test wins stopped improving the core experience. It includes booking numbers for the years after the change.

Many small test wins can hide a decaying core experience
A single roadmap forces big bets
Judge the new model on outcomes over years, not months

Built from Brian Chesky Killed Airbnb's A/B Tests and Product Managers. Revenue Hit $11 Billion. by James Bickerton (Your Product Sucks).