👋 Hi, it’s Naiomi and Erik and welcome to Demand our weekly newsletter to help you become a top 1% marketer. In today's article, we are going to cover Airbnb's product launch philosophy and deep dive into their Winter 2023 release. A special thank you to Hannah Hughes, Kim Wohlleb, and Maansi Dommeti for their collaboration, input, and feedback! 🙏

This is the third post in our series how leading tech companies launch products.

Part 1 | PLAN: Start with the end in mind 🧠

• Foundational go to market frameworks underpinning product launches

Part 2 | EVOLVE: How launch strategies evolve as companies grow 🌳

• We’ll cover how launches differ by company stage including investment level 

Part 3 | DEEP DIVE: A behind the scenes look at how Airbnb launches products (☝️ this post)

• This was originally going to be a set of companies but we decided to separate these into individual posts

Part 4 & Beyond | More Deep Dives across Consumer and B2B 🚀

• Launch examples from companies such as Stripe, Shopify, Figma, and Canva

Launch Philosophy

Airbnb has evolved from scrappy launches to twice-a-year launches, known as Winter and Summer releases. Brain Chesky, the founder of Airbnb, advocates that each of these releases are “chapters” to build awareness and support the broader company “story”. The narrative dictates what product builds and this all flows downstream to what teams work on, the timing of alphas and betas, and what is packaged in each launch. Who writes this narrative? It’s primarily authored by Product Marketers and the Communications team with input from Design, Eng, Marketing and Creative (what they refer to internally as their ‘Primary team’). As Chesky has pointed out “Ultimately, it’s the story that will connect with customers and it’s the story that should become the North Star for internal teams.”