7: Judd Antin of Airbnb

We kick off the second season with Judd Antin, the Director of Experience Research at Airbnb. Judd and I speak about their model for embedding talented generalists with product teams, skill-sharing among researchers, and just what exactly makes research "sexy." I don’t know of another way to do things better than to give and get feedback. It should flow like a river. And I think that can be hard, to be open, to focus on strengths rather than weaknesses. To be humble is a thing we’re always seeking to be better at, but that’s how I approach the task of building a team. - Judd Antin Show Links * Judd Antin * Follow Judd on Twitter * Airbnb * Trello * Alex Schleifer * Kathy Lee * Janna Bray * Steffen Kuhr * Natalie Tulsiani * Brian Chesky * Joe Gebbia * Katie Dill * Adrian Cleave * Improv and user research * French Culinary Institute * Your Data Are Wrong: The Hype and Reality of Big Data * The Incredible Hulk Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter (and Stitcher) and take a moment to leave a review on iTunes. Transcript Steve Portigal: Welcome Judd. Judd Antin: Thanks, Steve. Steve: It’s great to speak with you. Maybe let’s just start as we always do with just kind of the broad strokes. Do you want to introduce yourself? Tell us a bit about you and what you do, what your role is. Judd: Sure. Sure, happy to. So I am the Director of Experience Research here. So experience research at Airbnb is a team that was formerly called Insights, but what we really are is a UX research team. We are embedded in our design organization so we have designers, content strategists, product managers, engineers, data scientists as our partners and we’re a team of 17 folks at the moment. We have a pretty diverse group of people on the team which is something we do on purpose. And everybody is sort of embedded in their teams, working directly on the day to day of products for guests and hosts all the time. So, yeah. Steve: That’s good. And of course those intros, as we know from research, like we could just follow up on all the things that you said. That would probably fill our whole interview. Let me go back to some things. Steve: Can you explain Airbnb? Judd: Sure I can. Let’s see if I can do this in a nutshell. So Airbnb is a marketplace that let’s hosts who have space come together with guests who need it. So...we provide an opportunity to travel in a much more local way. So I think you know, it’s – you know Airbnb has been one of the poster children for the sharing economy but I think for us the way that we think about it is that Airbnb is an opportunity to connect hosts an...