Did Airbnb kill the PM role?
The evolution of product management
On June 22, 2023, CEO Brian Chesky said during a talk that Airbnb had gotten rid of the product manager function.
The audience (mainly consisting of designers) broke into applause and laughter.
Cue a minor Twitter storm.
But later in the talk Brian said,
“make no mistake product managers are critical, but they shouldn’t be doing the job of designer”.
In addition, there are still Product Manager positions open on the Airbnb careers page today.
Clearly Airbnb does value product managers, and Brian didn’t actually mean they got rid of product managers? Right?
So what did he mean? How has the role of PM evolved at Airbnb?
What does this imply for PMs in general?
Many questions to explore, so let’s dive in. 🚀
Let’s start with the full quote from Brian’s talk;
“The designers are equal to product managers. Actually we got rid of the classic product management function. Apple didn’t have it either. [Applause and laughter] Well. Lets be careful. We have product marketers. We combine product management with product marketing and we said you can’t develop products unless you know how to talk about the products. We made the team much smaller. We elevated design. By the way, I started thinking who is the product manager when you design a building? The architect. So we thought of designers very much as architects.“
Ok, so Brian wants designers at Airbnb to be more like architects.
The architects are the craftspeople leading the overall vision for a building.
What does this mean for designers?
Brian hints at this later on in the talk;
“They are responsible for the entire user flow, not just screens. “
The role of designer at Airbnb is more than just to take what the engineers build and make it look beautiful, but to think through the entire user flow. It’s about empowering designers more in the product process, putting product, design and engineering on an equal footing.
Brian clearly feels strongly about elevating the the role of designers. This makes sense, as he likes to say he is the only designer CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Many companies treat design as a service, while Brian as a designer and CEO puts him in a unique position to build a design-led company.
Ok, so designers are going to be elevated in the design process, but how does that impact PMs?
What happened to the PM function at Airbnb?
What happened at Airbnb, as at many companies was that as it grew, they added more people. But as they added people and pursued more projects, the less the app changed and the more costs went up.
As Covid hit, Airbnb hit a crisis point that could have killed the company. Instead, Brian used this as an opportunity to reassess many of the way the company ran.
Including the roadmap.
The classic PM role would own a roadmap for their particular part of the product. It’s clear that Brian didn’t want this. He wanted one unified product vision for Airbnb.
That vision would be driven from the very top of the company.
He pulled decision making closer.
One product vision, one roadmap.
"If it’s not in the roadmap, it can’t ship”
So how does that change the PM role?
What Brian did is integrate product marketing with product management. Here he is talking about it in another interview;
“…their job is to keep the entire company stitched together and make sure we understand the story we’re telling, who the product’s for, and make sure everything we deliver ships to that product”
Combining these roles means product managers need to not only know how to define the product, but also how to communicate it to to users.
Tony Fadell’s (co-creator of the iPhone) also advocated for a similar approach. From his book Build;
Brian goes on to argue that not only design, but marketing should also lead product direction;
“We like to start a lot of product development with marketing, because we want our marketers to have a vision and figure out how we can tell a story.”
Marketing has a much stronger role, and product managers at Airbnb need to be able to talk about the product.
A deep knowledge of the product can position PMs well to inform marketing, avoiding fluff, inaccuracies and helping communicate better the value proposition to users.
What does this mean for product management in general?
Product management is a diverse role, one that can vary significantly from one company to another.
Some organisations want PMs that are heavily technical, such as Tesla/SpaceX. For other organisations such as Airbnb, marketing skills are clearly more heavily weighted.
Airbnb have taken the PM position and crafted it to work for their organisation.
The way they have done this makes total sense to me.
As a product manager you need to understand the customer problems you are solving deeply, which means you also should know how to communicate your product to users.
“A lot of products fail because they are not well marketed. If you ship a feature and nobody knows, did it really matter? Lots of time people give up on features too soon. Did you tell people about it?”
Airbnb have found what work for them. This doesn’t mean it has to be like this for every PM role, but you should think about your skillset and which type of organisation you would suit best.
5 lessons for product and design from Brian’s talk.
I will leave you with 5 more takeaways from Brian’s talk;
Takeaway 1: If you do an A/B test it should be hypothesis driven.
“If we do A/B testing. We are only going to do it if we have a hypothisis. If B is better than A, you have to know why B was better than A, otherwise we are stuck with that for like the next 10 years.“
Takeaway 2: Only ship something you are proud of.
“Only ship things that you’re proud of. If you don’t want to put your name on it, don’t ship it”
Takeaway 3: Designers should try to simplify every single thing they do. Simplifying is distilling something to its essence.
“Designers should be trying to simplify every single thing they do. And I was thinking that simplifying was removing things. It’s distilling something to its essence. And to simplify, you have to deeply understand it. It’s physics. It’s first principles. And I think there has to be a sense of craft. Obsessing over every single detail.“
Takeaway 4: Pair engineers and PM with designers from the beginning. Design should not be a service organisation.
“I would like to often tell engineers, the best thing for you is to pair you with design. Because otherwise it’s like running and one of your legs is shorter than the other. You’re not going to go very fast. And the best thing for engineers and the best thing for PMs is to pair them with great design from the beginning.”
Takeaway 5: Metrics are not a strategy.
“metrics are not a strategy, growth is not a strategy, we all want to grow”
The whole talk is worth a watch, you can catch it on Youtube here.
Until next time,
Jamie
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