The Community You Will Join:
The Service Optimization team is a key operational function within Global Service Optimization, focused on making Airbnb's Community Support more efficient, effective, and adaptable. You'll lead a team of Business Process Improvement analysts and leads, working at the intersection of people, process, and technology. This role collaborates closely with cross-functional partners across Community Support, operational working groups, and broader business stakeholders to drive systemic, continuous improvement.
The Difference You Will Make:
The BPI Manager will be a key leader within the Service Optimization team, part of the Community Service Organization. This role will deepen the team's discipline across both continuous improvement and proactive process engineering, designing systems where problems do not occur while continuously improving the processes that exist today. A key focus will be engineering processes that are reliable, measurable, automatable, and self-correcting by default, while driving a systemic view across people, process, and technology that keeps pace with the evolving capabilities of AI and automation.
A Typical Day:
Leadership Responsibilities
- Manage a team of business process improvement analysts and leads.
- Build and strengthen team capabilities in problem solving, systems thinking, process design, and engineering systems for AI-readiness and automation by default.
- Lead the team in operating across both continuous improvement and proactive process engineering, applying the right discipline to each problem, improving what exists and designing systems that prevent failure from the start.
- Apply systems thinking to every initiative, mapping full upstream and downstream context before prescribing solutions and identifying where the real problem lives rather than where it surfaces.
- Lead change management for process transitions, ensuring new designs are adopted effectively by agents, teams, and partners and that the change is sustained over time.
- Contribute to the strategy and evolution of process engineering as an operational discipline and lead it in practice, providing recommendations to decisions in supported business focus areas.
- Execute in alignment with the strategic objectives of Community Support.
- Make decisions on the best approaches based on data-driven analyses, identifying opportunities appropriate for incremental improvement and systemic redesign.
- Apply the right suite of process analysis, design, and automation tools to drive well-defined future state processes at scale.
- Maintain execution ownership end-to-end. Strategy without follow-through to measurable outcomes is not the standard.
- Relentless focus on continuously improving both the customer and employee journey in key business focus areas.
Tactical Responsibilities
- Manage demands and associated resourcing of initiatives from the Community Support roadmap, operational changes, and various working groups.
- Collaborate cross-functionally to align priorities and inform trade-offs.
- Partner with Product and Technology teams to ensure process requirements inform tooling design and that new capabilities are engineered for how agents and customers actually work.
- Implement ways of working that enable efficient flow of value-based outcomes from the team, providing clear direction when needed and removing impediments.
- Drive Process Engineering maturity by embedding the discipline's principles into how the team scopes, designs, measures, and iterates on every initiative, including training and building practitioners.
- Ensure every process design is evaluated against three standards: does it reduce agent and customer burden, is it measurable from day one, and can it be automated or self-correcting over time.
- Develop the team of problem solvers through coaching, mentoring, and other employee engagement activities.
- Support stakeholders with a leadership perspective in process improvement project scoping, definition, design, and implementation.
- Hold the team accountable to outcome ownership, tracking results post-launch and iterating until the objective is achieved, not just delivered.
- Communicate regularly with stakeholders on how the work of BPI aligns to outcomes and continue to improve as part of a holistic solutions-based approach.
Your Expertise:
- Preferred Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Engineering, Engineering, or a related field.
- 7+ years of experience in a customer support operations environment, process management, or process improvement field.
- 10+ years of domain experience including process analysis, process design at scale, and applying improvement methodologies using multiple technologies, tools, or platforms to drive process optimization.
- Demonstrated ability to design processes for AI-readiness and automation, engineering systems that can hand off to AI as capabilities evolve rather than simply optimizing existing workflows.
- Experience applying a systems thinking lens to process design, identifying upstream root causes and downstream impacts before prescribing solutions.
- Experienced people leader with a track record of leading teams through a shift in operating discipline, building the capability and culture around a higher standard.
- Demonstrated experience leading organizational change, including stakeholder alignment, communication planning, and adoption measurement.
- Lean/Six Sigma Black Belt or equivalent process management expertise. Additional consideration given to Agile, service design, and other relevant experience.
- Proven track record of leading and coaching successful complex process improvements.
- Proven ability to interact and communicate with people at all levels of the organization in an open and transparent manner.
- Proven ability to work collaboratively with a wide range of stakeholders, demonstrating ability to lead and influence, express opinions, and structure arguments clearly to drive alignment to measurable outcomes.
- Demonstrated focus on end-to-end customer journey and customer-centric outcomes.
- Prior experience developing business processes in customer support operating models that balance multiple stakeholder interests.
- Demonstrated creative problem solving and analytical skills with a pragmatic sense of how to get things done.
- Ability to travel up to 20% of time.
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