Airbnb threw out twenty years of optimization to grow. You might need that as well.
Airbnb spent two decades optimizing a search box, then threw it all away in 2022.
You type in the city, pick some dates, hit search. That was the industry standard, and they’d spent twenty years tuning it.
What replaced it was Categories: browsing by the type of place rather than the location, the biggest change to Airbnb in a decade.
Not because dates-and-destination was bad. Because twenty years of small wins had walked the whole industry up one hill, and nobody checked if that was the highest one.
That’s a local maximum. You’re at the top of the wrong hill, and every tweak from here makes it slightly different. It feels like progress, but you haven’t checked if it’s really where you want to be.
That’s also a fair description of a stalled design career.
You get better at execution every year. Files get cleaner, turnaround gets faster. But it’s the same title five years…