Airbnb is about hospitality and helping people to Belong Anywhere and the Community Support team supports this mission with a vision to ‘build the world’s most loyal travel community through exceptional service’.

In your role as a Sr Manager, Service Management, you will manage a small team of Service Managers overseeing our volume tier services. You’ll be directly responsible for management of the team and allocating Service Managers to both Services and cross-Service initiatives. 

You will work as part of the overall Service Evolution team, overseeing all the Volume Tier-related Service Managers who are responsible for owning a service area end-to-end from initial configuration to a mature state of continuous improvement. Service Managers are the architects for their services and the key experiences they enable. The ultimate remit of this Sr. Manager role is to ensure that all Service Managers are focused on designing, prioritizing, and delivering exceptional experiences for our Community, even if interactions span across multiple Services. You’ll develop and manage the same structured methodologies to ensure key experiences bring people, process, and product capabilities to bear. 

You will be involved in setting customer experience journey targets, as well as Service-specific targets. You’ll also need to take a global approach, but understand regional and market nuances in order to act as a leader and innovator in your area of expertise and advising others on the team.

To achieve this, you should have a strong subject matter expertise in end-to-end Service Design, operational performance management, business process excellence, and customer experience and contact center solutions. You will liaise with Business Engagement Managers and ensure priorities are aligned to customer segment priorities. 

You’ll work closely with senior levels of Operations leadership (Global Director, Regional Directors, and Regional Ops Managers), Head of Product, Product Managers, Business Process Improvement, CS Analytics, Voice of Customer, and Design, Research & Writing teams members. Specific core responsibilities include:

• Program delivery: Proven track record of delivery against goals with minimum noise and true cross-functional alignment.
• Operational excellence: A strong operational mindset and background to ensure that CS has a convincing voice at the table with both businesses and delivery teams.
• Inspire Teams: Champion Airbnb’s Mission to help teams understand how their work contributes to end goals. Work with direct reports to create team cohesion and fulfillment.  
• Strategic Thinking and Analytical Skills: Ability to look at each problem or data set from many different angles to find innovative and simple solutions.
• Communication/Interpersonal Skills: Embrace the adventure with Peers, Partners, and teams and use superior communication skills to cultivate professional relationships with Key Partners. Use innovative channels of communication to keep teams up-to-date with day-to-day changes in expectations and goals that are relevant to their roles. Be an inspirational leader that can infuse enthusiasm within the team.
• Leading Service Design and Service Architecture approach: You will be responsible for driving the service design approach for the new service managers in the team. You’ll also be responsible for developing Service Managers into Service Architects who can marry and orchestrate people, process, and product capabilities to deliver exceptional experiences.

Educational Requirements

Degree/Diploma

Degree level (BA/BS)

MBA (or equivalent Masters) is strongly preferred

Experience Requirements

Essential:

• Significant and progressive experience, a minimum of 10 years, navigating complex or matrixed environments.
• Experience managing multiple programs in a fast-paced tech environment
• People management experience
• Familiarity and/or experience with Service Design and Business Architecture concepts and processes in complex customer support environments.

Competencies:

• Community Focus: Is passionate about delivering world class customer support, seeks to understand stakeholders’ needs through feedback, balancing the needs of customers, employees, and Airbnb in business decision-making.

• Results focus: Very numerical; drives decisions with data. Is able to dig into the details of the data, but also zoom out and see the bigger impact. Considers all stages of the customer journey and drives for results, but is also willing to experiment and take risks.

• Cultivating relationships: Can establish strong relationships across levels, teams and departments at Airbnb (Regional Directors, Regional Operations Managers, Support Products, Shared Services, and within the business units or platform teams), and has an ability to work cross-functionally to deliver results.

• Dealing with ambiguity: Accepts challenges with imperfect information. Works to always get more clarity and is an open and transparent communicator about what is known and not known.

Skills and Abilities

• Coaching and developing talent
• Creating compelling vision and supporting roadmap - Uses knowledge of service best practices (internally & externally) to easily translate that into a compelling vision that is aligned with Airbnb’s mission and business priorities.
• Excellent communication skills - Including the ability to present to large and senior audiences, inspiring the global team, providing clear direction to teams, and communicating on results.

• Creative thinker & problem solver - You can assess a problem, opportunity or business challenge quickly and make strong decisions based on facts presented or based on previous experience. You look for new and creative ways to move the business forward. You use your contacts internally and externally to solve problems quickly and efficiently, with the best outcome in mind. 

Service design skills - Has an understanding of the approach and tools & techniques needed to drive a service design mentality and focus within your service area remit.