Building International Products at Airbnb

The international team at Airbnb will shed some light on the processes and tools that enable them to build services and products that cater to the needs of users in 192 countries:

• Airbnb’s user methodology captures unmet needs and desires and shares them across all teams. You’ll learn about things that don’t scale which Airbnb did in the early days to ensure rapid growth in international markets, and experience some of the experiments we run today to understand user behavior in our global strategic markets. One example covers how Airbnb conducted remote user research to inform the design of an experimental landing page for top Asian markets in a collaborative, fast-paced approach.

• What would Airbnb look like if it were designed for Asia? Learn about visual design and front-end aspects of Airbnb localization.

• Front-end developers don’t want to have to manually curate databases of phrases. Translators shouldn’t have to mindlessly reduplicate the site for each language variant, in particular for language variants such as Swiss German. We’ll look at how Airbnb automatically keeps the phrase database up to date and automatically generates language variants.

• More than 60% of Airbnb’s trips cross international borders. How can we help guests find hosts who speak the same language as they do – or support guests and hosts who don’t speak the same language? How does Airbnb assess users’ desire for localized language content, and the effect of supporting user content generation in multiple languages?

Speakers:

• Dr. Thomas Arend is Airbnb’s Head of International Product. Before joining Airbnb, Thomas led Twitter’s International Product, drove Mozilla’s mobile effort, and ran strategic international initiatives at Google. Thomas holds a Masters degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Berlin Institute of Technology, and earned his PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction in 2003.

• Jason Katz-Brown has been a software engineer at Airbnb since 2011. He developed Airbnb’s localization infrastructure and works with product teams to make Airbnb feel native around the world. Jason holds a Masters from MIT and previously worked in Google’s Tokyo office on search quality and Google Translate’s translation quality.

• Anne Kenny is a user researcher and interaction designer at Airbnb. For the past few months, she’s been thinking about how to adapt Airbnb for the Asian market. Prior to working at Airbnb, Anne designed mobile experiences for Tellme Networks and Microsoft and studied Engineering Psychology at Tufts University.

• Tanya Breshears is a designer and front-end engineer who has been with Airbnb for two years. She lived in Asia and designed some of Airbnb’s most visible web assets and product features for international markets.

• Jessica Long has been a software engineer at Airbnb for about two years, and has worked on a variety of services. She joined the internationalization team recently, with a particular interest in supporting users using the site in non-English languages. Jessica holds a master’s degree from Stanford, and has previously managed data for a rural hospital in Burundi and worked for Rosetta Stone in Virginia and Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing.

• Jason Bosinoff is the the engineering manager for growth and internationalization at Airbnb. Prior to that, he was VP Engineering at TrialPay, building a global transactional advertising platform. Jason studied at MIT.

Schedule:

6:30-7:00 Social time with snacks
7:00-8:00 Presentation and discussion
8:00-8:30 Social time

Disclosure policies: Airbnb requires all visitors to their office to sign a non-disclosure agreement in case you see or hear anything Airbnb-confidential while at their office. Note however that all information shared at the meet-up itself is considered public and may be used by anyone at the meet-up with no restrictions. Therefore, please do not share proprietary information or intellectual property that you or your organization would not appreciate to become public knowledge.

The Airbnb office is in easy walking distance from Muni bus lines 12, 19, 22, 27, and 47. The San Francisco Caltrain station (with additional Muni bus and metro lines) isn’t too far off, although after dark you might prefer taking a taxi.