Vision strategy of Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia｜Designing vision through storyboards

Storyboards are a method for visualizing the flow of a narrative and the user experience, originally used in film and animation production.
Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, describes the importance of storyboards as follows:
“Bringing words to life, storyboards show you things that words can’t.”
“Storyboards breathe life into words, revealing what cannot be expressed through language alone.”

To clarify the world view of the Airbnb brand, storyboards were employed as visual narratives—illustrated sequences that mapped out the service experience. By making the process tangible, the entire organization was able to align around a shared vision of the future. As a result, the team could collectively hold a unified perspective and give concrete direction to the evolution of the service.

・Materializing ideas → Sharing a unified vision across the entire team
・Designing the user experience → Identifying key moments within the user journey
・Building a strategic foundation → Clarifying challenges and enabling leaps in thinking

Storyboarding proved to be more than a simple tool for visualizing ideas; by enabling teams to step back and review concepts objectively, it became a critical means of expanding and elevating those ideas into more developed visions.

The founders of Airbnb did not limit their thinking to the future of their own company—they extended it to envision the future of society as a whole through storyboards.
Business exists as part of a broader social context. By understanding larger societal movements and anticipating future shifts, companies can better define their essential role within that landscape. This process goes beyond merely following market trends; it involves reading emerging needs and evolving values, and considering how a company should meaningfully engage with them.
As a result, Airbnb set out not simply to provide accommodation, but to create a platform where people around the world could encounter different cultures and form new connections. In doing so, it established a value system distinct from that of traditional hotels.
To design a vision is to clarify a company’s role and direction while imagining the future state of society as a whole. In this regard, storyboarding becomes an exceptionally effective approach.

Sharing a vision is essential to the success of any organization. It goes beyond simply setting goals; it is about clearly articulating the future the company seeks to create.

Deeper employee understanding:
When the company’s future is clearly articulated, each member can more easily recognize their own role within it.
Greater alignment in decision-making:
With a shared goal across the organization, inconsistencies in judgment are reduced.
Stronger team cohesion:
A common vision fosters a collaborative environment, making it easier for teams to work together.
At Airbnb, all staff—including designers and engineers—expressed and shared their individual visions through storyboards. This practice enabled personal aspirations to align with the company’s broader vision, creating an environment where innovative ideas could emerge more naturally.

In an era of rapid change, where the future is increasingly difficult to predict, there is a growing need to imagine brighter possibilities and to cultivate the ability to shape them in positive ways.
When designing a vision, storyboarding is not merely a tool—it serves as a compass that aligns the entire team and guides them forward with a future-oriented mindset.
Airbnb’s success demonstrates just how effective this approach can be. Why not try using storyboards to collaboratively design your own vision?
We hope this article offers insights that prove useful to you.