Mark Levy

Why organisations work with Mark Levy

• He built Employee Experience as a discipline inside Airbnb during the years it was named Glassdoor’s #1 Place to Work, so the playbook he teaches is one he has actually shipped.
• He treats culture as something designed, instrumented, and operated, not as a values poster or a wellness programme, which gives CHROs and CEOs a concrete way to talk about it with the board.
• He has done the same work twice at very different scales, at Airbnb in hypergrowth and at Allbirds through global expansion, so the frameworks travel beyond one company’s circumstances.
• He is co-authoring the Wiley method that is becoming the reference text for EX practitioners, alongside Dean Carter of Patagonia and Samantha Gadd, which gives his sessions a body of work rather than a personal anecdote set.
• He speaks fluently to the alignment between CMO and CHRO, where most internal-brand efforts break down, because he has run the function that sits between them.

Biography highlights

• Pioneered the Employee Experience function at Airbnb, replacing the traditional HR model with an end-to-end employee journey approach.
• Led the people and culture work during the year Airbnb was named Glassdoor’s #1 Place to Work.
• Most recently led Employee Experience at Allbirds during its global expansion.
• Co-author of Employee Experience Design (Wiley, 2026) with Dean Carter and Samantha Gadd.
• Earlier corporate roles at Best Buy, Levi Strauss & Company, Gap Inc., and Thomson/Technicolor in Paris.
• Board director at First Graduate; former Gap Foundation board member; advisor to Backstage Capital and MixR.
• JD/MBA from the University of Colorado.

Biography

Airbnb hit Glassdoor’s #1 Place to Work ranking in 2016 with a people function that did not look like a people function. It had been rebuilt as Employee Experience, with culture, workplace, and social impact reporting alongside traditional HR. The person who designed that structure was Mark Levy.

He came to it from a long retail and consumer career: Best Buy, Levi Strauss & Company, Gap Inc., and two years at Thomson/Technicolor in Paris. The pattern across those roles was practical, not academic. How does a company actually live its brand internally, in the systems and rituals employees experience every day, rather than in the language printed on the wall?

At Airbnb he turned that question into an operating model. The result, codified now in the Wiley book he co-authored with Dean Carter of Patagonia and Samantha Gadd, treats employee experience as something you design with employees rather than for them, and instrument the way a product team would. Most recently he led the same work at Allbirds as the company scaled internationally.

What organisations get from him is the rare combination of a builder who has actually run the function and a teacher with a published method. The audience he is sharpest with is the CHRO who needs to translate culture into board-readable substance, and the CEO and CMO who want the company their customers experience to match the company their employees work in.

Key speaking topics

• Employee Experience design
• Belonging and the internal brand
• Culture during hypergrowth and global expansion
• The shift from HR to end-to-end employee journey
• CMO and CHRO alignment on brand
• Hybrid and distributed work

Ideal for

• CHROs and Chief People Officers redesigning the HR operating model.
• CEOs and founder-led companies in scale-up where culture is starting to fragment.
• CMOs and brand leaders working with people teams on internal brand and employer brand.
• Boards and executive committees treating culture as a governance topic, not an HR topic.

Audience outcomes

• A clear distinction between Employee Experience as a discipline and HR as a function, with the structural implications of each.
• A practical model for designing employee journeys the way product teams design customer journeys.
• A working language for the CMO and CHRO to align internal and external brand.
• Specific examples from Airbnb and Allbirds of what design-led culture looks like when it is built and instrumented.
• A reference point in the Wiley method, including how Patagonia, Airbnb, and other companies have made it operational.