Senior Manager, Product Specialist Program

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community You Will Join: 

Airbnb is a global hospitality platform that connects travelers with unique accommodations and experiences around the world. Our mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Community Blueprint is a team under Global Operations that aims to improve the quality of the end-to-end customer journey and bridge team silos across product, operations, and policy. To do this, we need to be experts in the guest and Host experience and in how the product, operations, policies function together to deliver the Airbnb experience. As part of the Community Blueprint team, your role will be instrumental in driving data-driven decision-making, connecting data across product & operations, and enhancing the guest and Host experience.

The Difference You Will Make:

We are seeking a highly experienced and skilled manager to lead our Product Specialist Program with deep expertise in program management, strategic planning, and team development. As the Manager of the Product Specialist Program, you are a leader that will be responsible for driving forward product excellence, developing insights that identify user experience gaps, and growing the team’s impact on the business. The ability to connect the dots across different teams and expand the visibility and impact this team has will be critical to success. This role will also be presenting to and influencing leaders at the highest level, meaning strong communication skills will be essential.

The Product Specialist Program (PSP) is part of the Frontline Insights & Execution (FIX) team within Community Blueprint. This is a highly cross functional team, this means you will collaborate with many different functions across all of Airbnb to drive strategic initiatives and inform decisions that will ultimately improve the guest and host experience. We are looking for a scrappy self-starter with an entrepreneurial mindset who thrives in ambiguity and can deeply understand the nuances of our rapidly evolving business and use data to make key decisions.

A Typical Day: 

• Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of Product Specialist Program Managers, providing regular feedback, coaching, and performance evaluations.
• Foster a collaborative and supportive team environment that encourages growth, knowledge sharing, and innovation.
• Oversee workload management, resource allocation, and project prioritization for the team.
• Manage and scale the partner product specialist program program in-line with business requirements and budget.
• Drive program performance, ensuring optimal scheduling, coverage and task prioritization to successfully achieve all targets and SLAs.
• Develop and implement key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure team effectiveness and impact on product success.
• Track and measure program related performance data and provide regular updates to key stakeholders covering, SLAs, performance to targets, plus highlights and challenges.
• Collaborate with cross-functional leaders to align Product Specialist efforts with broader company goals and objectives.
• Leverage LLMs/generative AI tools to enhance the effectiveness of the team.
• Develop strong working relationships and collaborative partnerships with the various internal teams such as Product, Engineering, Training, Knowledge Management, Incident Management, Business Process Improvement, Partner Management, Finance, Research, and others.
• This is a global program, which means this role will be working with people from many different time zones and requires flexibility in the hours they’re available to take meetings.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest industry trends and advancements in quantitative and qualitative data analysis techniques.

Your Expertise:

• An undergraduate degree with a strong preference for candidates holding an MBA or equivalent advanced degree, with 12+ years of industry experience in a Program Management, Product Insights, Product Operations or equivalent role.
• Proficiency in SQL, data analysis, and data visualization.
• Proficiency in Jira and Airtable (optional).
• Self-starter, thrives in ambiguity, and has an investigator mindset of wanting to get to the bottom of problems. 
• Strong problem-solving and critical thinking abilities, with a keen