Airbnb

Defining a new business line post-M&A and developing an innovation pipeline to sustain the business.

Design research/qual
Brand building
Innovation pipeline

  • Airbnb acquired Gaest, an online meetings and events marketspace, to jumpstart their next endeavor: moving into the events booking industry. Shortly after the acquisition, the company quickly realized that they needed a strategy that would extend beyond their initial pilot plans.
    Airbnb’s ambition was to disrupt the status quo of the event spaces category, but first needed to understand their own identity. 


  • Across 16 weeks, we used a classic design thinking methodology to move through immersion, discovery, and definition to graduate from what we don’t know/could be to what we do know/should be.

  • Through a series of facilitated workshops, we defined Airbnb Event Spaces north star by confirming white space opportunities, validating market sizing and share, and ultimately creating a manifesto, shared beliefs, and business definition. With a consensus on the “why”, we were able to pivot, define a targeted territory for growth, and build a 3-year Innovation Roadmap + Initiatives that set the stage for the next wave of sustainable growth and success.  

The images below illustrate some of the project deliverables. Certain details have been redacted or covered to protect client confidentiality.

We kicked off the project with an interactive work session that culminated into an Ideation Canvas, where we generated a preliminary set of future ideas using the newfound assets.

With the addition of internal stakeholder interviews, we summarized the outputs from an internal discovery exercise with brand positioning findings to arrive at a set of foundational insights describing the current state of the business.

38 ninety-minute interviews across four cities, coupled with captured key consumer feedback helped to create a consistent picture for the customer journey.

Then, we turned our focus to a blend of qualitative and quantitative research to validate the competitive landscape…

…And completed a market sizing exercise to confirm the total addressable market for Airbnb Event Spaces.

Finally, we illuminated key consumer truths using research to pave the way for future whitespace opportunities.

Through the lens of the key stakeholders, we used the journey map to identify key friction points, emotions, and ultimately needs that, in combination with the inside out and outside-in insights, moved the team towards developing preliminary hypotheses on how to solve for the issues.

From Hypotheses to Strategy, our role was to help the Airbnb team align on priorities and create a collective vision for moving forward.

We built a set of hypotheses designed to fill the future innovation pipeline and challenge set conventions.

While aligned on broad direction and priorities, the project team still needed to agree on the soul of Airbnb Event Spaces…

So we created one, beginning with a business definition. And then, we created a manifesto that captured the essence of Airbnb Event Spaces, honoring the art of gathering.

From the manifesto, we built a vision, Simply Connected, and aligned the updated hypotheses, now initiatives, to the vision.

With an alignment on who they were, why they were, and what they were doing, we had permission to create a high-impact Innovation Roadmap that was relevant, had buy-in, and executable.

Each initiative was backed up with a full description, was supported with a business model canvas to outline the opportunity definition and considerations.