A CX Lesson From Airbnb's CEO, Brian Chesky: 11-Star Experiences
Revamping your approach for ideation mode.
Oprah wants you to do it, I want you to do it, and so does Brian Chesky; we want you to get more gold stars for your experience. Every experience we design or come across as consumers has the opportunity to be better, and Brian Chesky’s revamped the process for doing so.
He discusses his strategy with examples from Airbnb on Reid Hoffman’s podcast, Masters of Scale. When designing a stellar experience that’ll have your customers telling all of their friends about it, the idea is to map out what would give the experience five stars, if it’s not already there. Then take it up a notch (with no guard rails) - what do six stars look like? What do seven, eight, nine, ten, and finally eleven stars look like? If you truly remove the bumpers on the bowling lane here, you should have a completely out-of-the-box, possibly impractical experience that you cannot easily implement. But that’s okay; that’s the point! Those outrageous, innovative, progressive ideas are what you’re looking for.
Now, where is the happy medium between that infeasible 11-star experience and the good (but always room to be better) 5-star experience? Finding the sweet spot between the extreme and the good allows you to play around in a newfound zone to deliver a unique experience.
Last week at work, I did just this. For some background, I recently started leading a workstream that involves a monotonous experience and is screaming for a bold, new approach. I've done a fair amount of generative UX research on this experience and coming out of synthesis, my brain was swirling with ideas for tests and experiments to implement. I wanted my team to feel the same excitement and inspiration that was pumping through my veins about the possibilities in front of us, so I put my spin on Brian’s 11-star approach and organized a two-part workshop with my colleagues and stakeholders.
Here’s how I did it:
I split up the workshop into two, 90-minute blocks on separate days. Part one was focused on individually mapping out an experience completely unrelated to our industry. Part two was focused on mapping out the experience we wanted to improve within our industry.
Before part one, I sent out an email with some links and instructions to get the team prepared:
I encouraged them to watch a short clip of Brian’s explanation of the 11-star experience and read through IDEO’s 28 Things We’d Love to Redesign in 2024 to get inspiration on what experience they’d want to map out.
The workshop would be hybrid, with some of us remote and some of us in person, so I shared guidelines to inspire an out-of-the-box mindset, whether someone was sitting at home or in the office. I requested that each person wear something different than they normally wear, sit in a different location than they normally would (whether at the office or home), pick a different beverage to sip or snack to munch on, or anything else that would change up their normal routine, and in turn hopefully change up their typical way of thinking. I wanted this team to get as provocative, creative, and audacious as possible with the activity.
For part one, I created templates that each team member would fill out on an experience of their choosing; think the process of finding the perfect running shoes, traveling around a foreign country whose language you don’t know a lick of, learning to knit, etc. Within the template, the top row made space for them to map out the current experience, the second row enabled them to map out the 5-star experience, and the third row was for mapping out the 11-star experience. They would spend the first half of the workshop mapping the experiences solo, and then we’d spend the second half together, with each of us walking through what we mapped, asking questions, sharing ideas, and leaving comments. Each person was encouraged to leave small blue dots on aspects of other journeys that were inspiring or could provide perspective for the journey we wanted to improve in part two.
For part two, we used the same template as part one, but we worked together as a full team to map the current, 5-star, and 11-star experience. Doing this collaboratively allowed us to build on ideas that someone else would share, and to leverage the diverse knowledge of the cross-functional team.
The result? A bunch of great concepts and ideas we could test and experiment with, that might’ve not come to mind in an ideation session that hadn’t required zooming out to think about experiences in unrelated industries.
I hope this method inspires you to take a different approach the next time you’re headed into ideation mode. Whether you’re at a large, traditional company or noodling on ideas for your start-up, stepping outside of your typical headspace to push the boundaries of what’s possible can allow you to execute results beyond what you ever imagined.
Also,
compiled a list of great spots and ways to get/cultivate inspiration (outside of pinterest) that I will prioritize adding to my step #2 when I do the workshop again for a different workstream. You should too!If you’ve got variations to try within this 11-star method or other approaches you take to get outside of the box for new ideas, I’d love to hear your thoughts!