AIRBNB GLOBAL LEARNING
Program Leadership · Brand Strategy · Learning Design
Bringing design thinking, service design and product marketing into employee experience to make learning and development programs easier to find, understand and use across Airbnb.
IMPACT
Introduced design thinking, service design and product marketing into Airbnb Global Learning, reshaping an employee learning ecosystem serving 6,700+ people through shared service architecture, brand standards and redesigned digital experiences.
MAKING DEVELOPMENT LEGIBLE FOR REMOTE WORK
Airbnb’s Global Learning team supported more than 6,700 employees through courses, manager programs, leadership development and learning resources. As the company became remote-first, however, employees increasingly encountered those offers through a fragmented mix of platforms, program names and communications. Valuable learning existed, but understanding what was available, who it was for and where to begin required too much effort.
I joined the team to establish a creative-strategy capability spanning brand, content, product marketing and employee experience. Over time, that mandate became broader: helping the team rethink Learning itself as a design challenge. I introduced design-thinking and service-design practices that started with business goals and employee needs rather than the programs we already had, helping partners move from “how do we deliver this course?” toward “what experience does this person need, and how should the service around it work?”
GIVING LEARNING A SHARED IDENTITY
In partnership with program leads and learning designers, I helped the team build a shared learning design language and reorganized its portfolio around four audiences—employees, managers, leaders and teams—giving the organization a clearer way to define who an offer served, what problem it addressed and how someone would discover and participate in it. That thinking extended into product marketing and content: clearer propositions, more consistent naming, stronger pathways between communications and learning experiences, and a shared standard for how programs showed up to employees.
The work quickly moved from strategy into products. I helped transition the team's learning presence from Confluence into a more intentionally designed internal site, supported the design and launch of a new LMS, and partnered across the organization on user-needs assessments, communications and program design. I also helped convert Airbnb’s foundational Manager Onboarding program into a self-paced learning experience in two weeks, demonstrating how the same service-design principles could make an existing program more scalable without losing its humanity.
FROM LEARNING PROGRAMS TO A DESIGN PRACTICE
In parallel, I directed the refresh of the Learning @ Airbnb identity with Ground Control and other creative partners, creating a recognizable system across the internal site, LMS, campaigns, courses, microlearning and manager programs. The brand became part of the service architecture: shared language, design standards and product-marketing principles helped employees understand what an offer was for and gave program teams a consistent way to bring new experiences to market.
The work also changed how the team operated. I facilitated problem-framing and ideation sessions, introduced user-needs and service-design practices earlier in program development, and created shared methods for designing and launching new programs through a unified approach. Across an ecosystem serving 6,700+ employees, the lasting contribution was a more design-led operating model for learning at Airbnb—connecting organizational needs, employee insight, service architecture, product marketing and creative execution.
