Steve Jobs put on product extravaganzas. Every CEO should.

It was minutes before the Apple event in 1984 that would change everything for the company. At the end of Jobs’s presentation that day, the nervous young entrepreneur in a bow tie walked across the stage to a table with a mysterious bag on top of it. Inside was a computer. As the soaring theme from “Chariots of Fire” boomed, the computer flickered to life and began talking.

Hello. I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.

Since that moment, the product launches that Jobs made cool have become standard across Silicon Valley. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Meta—they all host flashy events to unveil the release of their newest, sleekest technology.

Now imagine all that hype, drama and glitz to reveal the latest…Taco Bell chalupa.

Would you watch it?

Brian Chesky probably would. The chief executive of Airbnb, Chesky is one of tech’s most influential leaders these days, and he’s become an evangelist for the value of annual product releases.

In fact, he thinks they are so powerful that he made product launches the organizing principle of his company.

I recently asked Chesky to explain the benefits of product releases—and his eyes lit up with excitement. You would have thought I told him that Buckingham Palace wanted to list rooms on Airbnb.

“I’m very, very passionate about this,” Chesky said.

These releases are not just PR stunts. He makes a very, very impassioned case for product announcements as a management strategy—a way to focus a company’s attention and even accelerate the pace of innovation.

After all, if you commit to showcasing products once or twice a year, you have to actually come up with products worth the showcase.

Chesky’s enthusiasm for annual product releases began with his admiration for Jobs, who traded his bow tie for black mock turtlenecks as his keynote speeches became cultural spectacles. The iPod in 2001, iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010—Chesky remembers watching all of those events and waiting for the next one.

But he didn’t think annual product releases made sense for a software company in the business of home-sharing and short-term rentals. Unlike Apple, Airbnb wasn’t selling new products every year.

“What would we be releasing?” Chesky said.

Even when Airbnb became one of the world’s most valuable startups, he didn’t change his mind. But after the company went public in 2020, Chesky felt the absence of a cohesive force. Without a shared destination, too many teams ended up working on their own projects and heading down paths that too often didn’t converge.

“It’s really hard to get everyone to work together,” he says. “The mechanisms that people use to get everyone together are, like, strategic priorities and metrics. That doesn’t really work.”

It’s understandable why executives at most public companies wake up every morning thinking about the next earnings call—not the next product release. Their performance is measured in financial quarters, so that becomes the rhythm of the entire company. “Because it has to be something,” Chesky says. He just thinks it should be something else. “I’m certain that for Apple in the 2000s, earnings calls were not the thing the entire company focused on,” he says. “The releases were.”

The emphasis on product releases, not strategic priorities, doesn’t just result in better work. It also leads to happier workers—which Chesky learned for himself whenever he tried to recruit people away from Apple. “It was impossible,” he says. And every time he was turned down, he was given a similar explanation: I just want to stick around for the next launch.

All of which inspired him to bring launches to Airbnb.

After the company went public and came out of the pandemic, Chesky listened to customer feedback and felt it was time to fix everything that was wrong about the Airbnb experience. And he knew exactly how to do it.

The company held its first product release in 2021 and has since put on two events a year to announce new features. In the past three years, Airbnb says it’s shipped more than 500 updates to its app—significantly more than the three years prior.

The launch cycle had another useful effect: It warped the company’s internal cadence. These days, Airbnb employees and executives push themselves under deadline pressure—and then take a deep breath. Chesky finds racing toward a product release as a team more fulfilling and less exhausting than feeling like you’re on a treadmill, running as fast as you can without actually getting anywhere.

And the experience of reorienting Airbnb left him convinced of one more thing.

“That most consumer companies would benefit from just talking to the public at least once a year about what they’re doing,” Chesky says.

Of course, it’s easy to see how this could descend into parody, with executives cosplaying as Steve Jobs and treating every product like the original iPhone.

But it has become an effective strategy even for companies where the idea of a dazzling product launch might sound absurd—like Taco Bell.

Last year, the chief marketing officer of the fast-food chain was watching an Apple event when he had an epiphany.

“More people in the U.S. eat at Taco Bell than have an iPhone,” Taylor Montgomery thought. “Why can’t we do something like that?”

They could. So they did. Earlier this year, Taco Bell organized Live Más Live to publicize what it called “an unimaginable lineup of food innovations,” from crispy chicken nuggets (marinated in spiced jalapeño buttermilk!) to a revolutionary cheesy street chalupa (“the shell has cheese on the inside!”).

In the months before the event, Montgomery studied Jobs’s keynotes to prepare for his time on stage in a pop-up venue the company built in Las Vegas for the occasion. After he introduced the Cheesy Chicken Crispanada and Mountain Dew Baja Blast Gelato as menu additions, he paid homage to the showman who famously tantalized crowds with the plot twist of “one more thing”—one last magical Apple product that had been a secret until that moment.

“Should we do one more?” Montgomery said. “I present to you: the Cheez-It Crunchwrap.”

The inaugural event was such a massive success that the next one was immediately scheduled for January. Meanwhile, it has already changed the way people inside the company dream up ambitious products.

“Is this idea big enough to be on stage at Live Más Live?” Montgomery said. “That’s the new bar for a big idea at Taco Bell.”

Write to Ben Cohen at [email protected]