Scaling Commerce Products at Airbnb by Airbnb Product Managers
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Main takeaways: - What is Commerce at Airbnb - Challenges of Commerce at Airbnb - Success, and what it takes - 3 real-life case studies
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Scaling Commerce Products at Airbnb by Airbnb Product Managers
- 1. www.productschool.com Scaling Commerce Products at Airbnb by Airbnb Product Managers
- 2. Join 40,000+ Product Managers on Free Resources Discover great job opportunities Job Portal prdct.school/PSJobPortalprdct.school/events-slack
- 3. CERTIFICATES Your Product Management Certificate Path Product Leadership Certificate™ Full Stack Product Management Certificate™ Product Management Certificate™ 20 HOURS40 HOURS40 HOURS
- 4. Corporate Training Level up your team’s Product Management skills
- 5. Victoria Ku & T O N I G H T ’ S S P E A K E R S Jennifer Yu
- 6. Scaling Commerce Products Victoria Ku & Jennifer Yu 10/16/19
- 7. Agenda ● Intros ● Commerce at Airbnb ● Challenges of Commerce ● Real life examples ● Success at Airbnb
- 8. Who we are Airbnb Style ● Tenure at Airbnb ● Previous roles ● Favorite Currency ● Which personality trait has been the most useful ● What did you last Google ● Favorite travel hack ● Everyone should own a...
- 9. Commerce What is Commerce at Airbnb?
- 10. Commerce without borders. Our vision is to cultivate financial freedom to unleash our global community and help our community thrive.
- 11. We achieve this by building guest & host interactions that facilitate the global exchange of value - from the front-end user experience to the backend platform components.
- 12. Scaling Commerce at Airbnb - Top Challenges Enabling teams to move 10x faster, increasing speed to marketSpeed and EfficiencySpeed Providing the right regulatory & financial protections, to protect our community & Airbnb Speed and EfficiencyProtection Scaling growth for a two-sided marketplace, as new categories & verticals are being built & launched Speed and EfficiencyGrowth Creating a seamless & cohesive user experienceSpeed and EfficiencyQuality Providing insights to inform data-driven product strategySpeed and EfficiencyData
- 13. Payments 7M+ Listings worldwide 13 500M Guest arrivals all- time 100K+ Cities with listings Airbnb growth, by the numbers
- 14. Payments 191 countries 14 70 pay-in currencies 40 payout currencies Airbnb Payments, by the numbers
- 15. Shifting to a Platform Mindset Who are your customers? We develop our offerings to meet the needs of 3 customers: 1. Businesses (1st line of customers) - Unlock 100s of businesses to exchange value globally 2. Community (Customers of our customers) - Delight our community with localized payment and payout experiences 3. Developers - Empower thousands of people to self-solve and bring innovation / ideas to life that seem impossible or impractical to do
- 16. Real Life Cases
- 17. Quick Pay Airbnb’s Checkout Experience
- 19. ● The purchase experience had unintentional inconsistencies across businesses & platforms ● Spinning up a new business was an arduous and lengthy process ● Optimizations from one business couldn’t be leveraged for another business ● Modification, iteration and troubleshooting were difficult ● Additional compliance work was required for each integration with checkout Quick Pay: PAINS
- 20. Quick Pay v2: Extensible Payments Platform Extensible components Reusable components & clear how to guides Consistent experience All products × All platforms Compliance benefits Regulatory controls and minimized risks to business continuity Alerts & monitoring Reliable experience and faster resolution Faster to build & ship Clear APIs, clean code & documentation 🌟
- 21. COMPONENT 1 COMPONENT 2 COMPONENT 3 COMPONENT 4 COMPONENT 6 COMPONENT 7 COMPONENT 8 COMPONENT 5 COMPONENT 9 COMPONENT 10 COMPONENT 11 COMPONENT 12 COMPONENT 13
- 22. ● Centralized a. Can’t be replaced b. Product agnostic / configurable c. Own by Payments team ● Hosted a. Product agnostic / configurable b. Can be replaced by a custom implementation c. Own by Payments team ● Custom a. Product specific b. Own by Businesses Design Philosophy
- 23. ● The purchase experience is consistent across businesses and platforms ● Optimizations from one business can be leveraged for another business ● Seamless integration for partner teams ● No additional compliance work required for each integration ● Experience is optimized for performance Quick Pay: WINS
- 25. Payments 25 Our vision Empower hundreds of businesses to employ the best incentive & loyalty offerings, at the right time, to the right user, with confidence.
- 26. Payments 26 What are Incentives? CASH CREDITS COUPONS
- 27. PROBLEMS WHAT ARE WITH USING INCENTIVES?
- 28. 1. Hard to move fast PROBLEMS
- 29. 1. Hard to move fast 2. Risky for the company PROBLEMS Bad actors can take advantage of our incentive programs Incentives can be issued without the right protections to prevent abuse or fraud
- 30. 1. Hard to move fast 2. Risky for the company 3. Broken user experience PROBLEMS
- 32. Payments ChinaExperiencesHomes Transportation Risk Checks Unified Incentives Platform Create, issue, redeem incentives offerings Budget Management Data Insights Host Referral Guest Referral Host Referral Guest Referral Host Referral Kanjia Campaign A Campaign B Unified incentives platform that powers new & existing programs Summer Supply Sprint Ambassadors Host-issued coupon Campaign C FREE🎉
- 33. Payment 33 Claim View SpendEarn We integrate with Airbnb’s risk systems to offer defenses and reduce fraud.
- 34. Payment Budget Alerts & Forecasting Monitory and manage budgets 34
- 35. Payments Data Insights & Performance Metrics Measure ROI against spending
- 36. Payment 36 Screenshot master tracker Onboarding is easy You can register their program today through our tool...
- 37. Payment 37 … And engineers can integrate to the platform in a few lines of code. request = { "program": "PROGRAM1", "user: "1234", "incentive_type": “CASH”, "amount": 100, "currency": USD, } send(request)
- 39. Success at Airbnb We look for PMs with these traits: ○ Communicate clearly ○ Adaptable ○ Lead with servitude and humility ○ Creative thinking ○ Utilize frameworks ○ Lead with an expertise
- 40. Thank you! Victoria Ku Product Jennifer Yu Product
- 41. APPENDIX
- 42. Stargate, the Developer Portal
- 43. PM asks an engineer to scope out a payments product USER JOURNEY, PRE PARTNER PORTAL Engineer contacts someone they know to scope, or find a POC Engineer slacks POC and Schedules a 30 min meeting Engineer receives process, if lucky. Engineer waits for payments resourcing Resourcing gets prioritized Implementation begins Scope creep ensues; Payments code is complex BU didn’t know they had to contact legal and/or finance PM irons out issues with stakeholders, build could pause Payments hooks up the product with payments code FinInfra & Finance need to test events. An additional 2 weeks Product launches
- 44. Integrating with commerce products is a completely painless experience VISION
- 45. Baseline Payments Knowledge Process + Guidelines Seamless Integration and Configuration Self Serve Hierarchy of Engineering needs RESEARCH
- 46. Our roadmaps and resourcing plans are unaffected by spontaneous acquisitions Changes made by business units are always in compliance We are focused on complex, high impact work that drives quantifiable value (such as Pay Less Up Front) PAYMENTS BENEFITS, POST PARTNER PORTAL
- 47. Imagine the world when Partner Portal exists
- 48. PM asks an engineer to build a payments product USER JOURNEY, POST PARTNER PORTAL Engineer goes to Partner Portal 1. Engineer registers a product 1. Engineer follows steps to configure product 1. Engineer tests product 1. Stakeholder team ok’s Product launches!
- 49. www.productschool.com Part-time Product Management Training Courses and Corporate Training
Editor's Notes
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- As well as individual courses we provide corporate training across the world! If you’d like to upskill your product team this is the best option for you. We have trained employees from multiple companies such as Deloitte, Salesforce, JP Morgan, Bank of America amongst many other companies across all industries.
- Tonight's talk is “ Scaling Commerce Products at Airbnb ” with Victoria and Jennifer. Welcome.
- Victoria - Hey Everyone! Today we’re going to talk to you about scaling commerce products.
- Victoria: Here’s a quick overview of what we’ll cover
- So in true Airbnb fashion, we are going to introduce ourselves with a list of fun facts. Nominate Jennifer first, then Victoria
- Victoria: Now that we’re done with introductions, let’s literally get down to business and discuss Commerce. Firstly, what is Commerce at Airbnb?
- Victoria: Over at payments, our vision is to cultivate...
- Victoria Building these commerce products (examples shown here: gift cards, guest wallet etc.) has been extremely rewarding. As you may have read on the news, we just surpassed a record 4 mm guest stays booked in a single day, However, that doesn’t come without its challenges.
- Jennifer These are five of the top challenges that we face scaling commerce at Airbnb. Victoria will highlight the growth challenges we face
- Victoria - (start) Airbnb has gone through meteoric growth over the years, and with it our Payments team has also had to grow with this trajectory. We now have 7M listings worldwide...
- Victoria From a payments perspective, this means we operate globally across almost every country Our marketplace connects hosts and guests across 191 countries. There are 180 currencies in the world. We support 40 payout currencies today. Fun fact, on this day, We broke our [very well known] bank’s payout limits.
- Jennifer: Given the scale of payments at Airbnb, we’ve developed our commerce products with a platform mindset. We’ve developed our products to meet the needs of 3 customers: business, community, & developers As platform PMs, we need to: Look around the corner and pre-solve problems for multiple businesses and use cases Build extensibility meaning the solutions can be scaled agnostic of business-specific requirements
- Victoria - OK so let’s look at how we actually shifted Airbnb towards a platform mindset. We’ll go through two real life case studies,
- The first case study is a product we call Quick Pay
- Core to each business is a purchase and check out experience that enables our guests to book our products (which today encompasses Homes and Experiences). At Airbnb, what you see here, is the experience called Quick Pay
- Prior to shifting to a platform mindset, Airbnb commerce experienced some real growing pains. Purhcase experience, (i.e. Zip Code & billing information collection) Because it wasn’t a platform Again, because it wasn’t a platform
- Understanding the pain points, we came up with 5 goals we wanted to achieve with Quick Pay v2. The vision was an Extensible Payments Platform, and Our first goal was a consistent experience across all platforms and products. The second was Extensible components, which were defined as reusable “plug and play” components. Followed by Compliance benefits, Alerts & Monitoring, which you got for free if you onboarded to the new Extensible Payments Platform, and lastly but also obviously for any product team - the ablility to build and launch quickly!
- In the spirit of extensibility, We thought of the new version of checkout as a toolkit, or a set of components that came together to create the purchase experience. There are areas of the experience that we decided that businesses could edit themselves, and areas where due to compliance reasons, we would need to protect.
- With our observational audit, we came up with the following design philosophy: There are three types of components: Centralized Hosted Custom Through this design, it’s clear to businesses what must remain, and what they can play with.
- We’re proud to say that Quick Pay v2 was a success. While the project took a significant amount of time convincing all businesses to onboard to the new platform, and prioritize this work on their roadmaps, the value created was significant for the company as a whole. Because businesses are united on a single platform, any changes made from the commerce team impact all businesses For example, we were able to simplify the dev environment and decrease Web checkout time by 10% for our community. A huge win!
- Jennifer: The second case study is the Payments Incentives Platform
- Mission: Deliver the foundational building blocks to unlock incentives across multiple businesses Drive greater efficiency and higher quality delivery of consistent incentive experiences
- Incentives power growth & deepen enagement for Airbnb businesses. Today, we have a limited set of offerings: Cash are funds sent directly to a user (e.g. Homes Host Referral program). Credits represent value can be accumulated and redeemed on Airbnb (e.g. Guest Referral Credits). Coupons are discounts that reduce the total price of the booking (e.g. marketing coupons).
- What are some of the problem we were looking to solve with the incentives platform?
- Prior to launching the platform: it was very difficult for our developers & business teams to: move quickly & to keep track of what to do when Here’s an actual visual of what a team put together keep track of the process & all the stakeholder teams involved
- Without a unified solution, product teams were forced to develop one-off fragmented solutions - which was really risky for the company. Without unified guardrails:
- In addition, fragmented implementations also lead to a broken user experience - which negatively impacts our user community and business. Here’s an example where the error message doesn’t make sense within the context of the price -- and this within the critical path of the booking flow, which negatively impacts both conversion and CX contact rate
- Script: -Earlier this year, the Incentives team aimed to start solving the problems we just saw
- We want to make incentives a first-class citizen in the risk check-flow throughout the entire lifecycle from issuance to spend - so we integrated our platform with Airbnb’s risk systems. By doing so, every program on platform gets access to risk checks - for free!
- In additon, the platform will also give teams the capability to monitor and manage their campaign budgets. No more manual tracking with spreadsheets and worrying about exceeding your budget. By having proper monitoring and alerts in place, you can redirect campaign resources effectively.
- Fianlly, the incentives platform provises out of the box data dashboards, enabling business to monitor the efficiency of their poragms - without needing to hire a data analyst or run multiple SQL queries.
- We’ve also made onboarding easy by creating a self-serve tool that anybody can use - even if you don’t have a technical background. As part of this onboarding flow, we’ve streamlined the process for obtaining the necessary stakeholders approvals -- which was previously difficult to navigate.
- Integrating onto our platform is simple, easy and fast What use to be a 120 line script has now been reduced to less than 10 lines of code for programs to issue incentives. It use to take 4-6 weeks to launch an incentive campaign at Airbnb - but now it takes a matter of days
- Victoria: Alright, so now you’ve heard of some of the most complex platform transformations Airbnb Commerce has lead across the company. Being a Payments Product Manager at Airbnb is exciting, impactful, but also incredibly challenging even relative to Airbnb overall. And contrary to popular belief, you don’t always have to start within Payments. Some of our best PMs (such as Jennifer) didn’t come from a payments background.
- Jennifer: At Airbnb, we look for PMs who exhibit these traits: Communicate clearly (wide group of stakeholders - some of which are techncial) Adaptable Lead with Servitude and Humility Creative thinking Utilize existing frameworks to streamline the product development process ( there’s too much information to not have frameworks Lead with an Expertise Jennifer comes from Tax Victoria comes from all over (Research, Engineering, Startup, Big Corp)
- Find us on Linked in! We’re also happy to take questions at this point
- Tighten up - payments too broad, developer platform taglines
- Usability tests, pains identified for internal developers. Based on that, stack ranked the problems that need to be solved
- Another point - for any business to integrate with Payments easily (not only internal and external)
- Feel free to speak with me and I can point you in the right direction (explain where to apply). Or you can visit www.productschool.com Have a good night!