Airbnb announces their ‘2022 Summer Release’

A couple weeks ago Airbnb announced a new remote work program for their employees, and with that CEO Brian Chesky briefly touched upon their plan to have two major releases each year:

The backbone of how we operate will continue to be our single company calendar with our multi-year roadmap. It’s centered around two major product releases each year—a May release and a November release. Even though not everyone directly works on these product releases, we’re organizing our entire calendar around them to maintain company-wide alignment.

The first of these major product releases is now rolling out, and although many on Twitter are panning it as a letdown after Chesky teased that this announcement would include “the biggest change to Airbnb in a decade”, I think the bigger story is that Airbnb is switching up the typical fortnightly “bug fixes and updates” release notes with a strategy to make a bigger splash twice a year.

I appreciate their different approach.