This thought experiment from Brian Chesky helped shape Airbnb’s magical customer experience.
The idea is that most companies aim to deliver a 5 star experience to their customers. That’s great, but what would it look like to deliver a 6 star experience? Think about how you could make your offer so much better that customers would give it another star. Then, think about what it would take to make it a 7 star experience? And you keep going up and up until you have an 11 star experience.
Things get out of hand quickly, as you start adding extravagant pieces to the experience, but that is the point. Build the ideal scenario that people would LOVE. Then work backwards from that ideal until you have something you could actually create.
Airbnb recognizes that they aren’t delivering an 11 star experience yet, but this exercise helped them in the early days figure out what features to build. It’s a powerful little thought experiment that I hope to do in a workshop soon.