In 2012 Airbnb was growing fast, and its founders were looking for what came next. Over the Christmas break, Brian Chesky read about how Walt Disney made Snow White, and how Disney's team planned the film as a series of storyboards, scene by scene, before anyone animated a frame.
Chesky brought the idea back to the office. Airbnb worked with Nick Sung, a former Pixar story artist, to draw the Airbnb experience the way a film gets drawn. There were stories for the guest, the host and even hiring. Every frame was an emotional moment: a guest arriving at a stranger's front door and deciding, in a few seconds, whether booking was a good idea.
Once the whole journey was on the wall, a pattern was hard to miss. Most of the moments that mattered happened away from the website, out in the world, on the way to someone's home and inside it. That pointed the company at mobile, and at the parts of a trip it had never designed for.
A feature list tells you what to build. A storyboard shows you why, and in what order. When you can see your customer's whole story, the next quarter's priorities usually pick themselves.