Airbnb

At Airbnb, transitioning from a request-to-book to instant-book model grew instant bookings from 5% to over 80% in two and a half years by setting an ambitious 100% north-star goal.

At Airbnb, opening listings in a new tab so users wouldn't lose their search results turned out to be one of the single biggest conversion wins.

At Airbnb there was a very strong correlation between teams that drove significant impact and teams that were organized around outcomes rather than product surface areas.

Organizing teams around outcomes rather than features was a critical ingredient in Airbnb's success because it breaks the idea of clean divisions of product surface-area ownership and prevents over-optimizing features that aren't driving impact.

At Airbnb, CEO Brian Chesky was famous for doubling proposed goals or pushing for 10x, and teams were often shocked at how close they came to hitting these wildly ambitious targets.

The most important product to get right in a product org is how you organize your people; the ideal is dedicated cross-functional teams with a clear mandate that can move autonomously, and any missing resource or added dependency cuts impact immensely.

Some of the biggest guest conversion gains at Airbnb came from simple tweaks that gave users fewer things to think about, such as opening listings in new tabs, extending session length, and removing links within the payments flow.