Airbnb Transitions to Market-driven Product Management
Background
Brian Chesky is the co-founder and CEO of the Airbnb lodging service.
On June 22, 2023, Kevin Gao tweeted, "Brian Chesky just told the audience they got rid of the product management function at Airbnb. The crowd of designers erupts in applause".
Without supporting, clarifying, definitive, and substantive information, this tweet and similar notices ignited a rumor and speculation mill, which quickly went out of control.
A flurry of farfetched and baseless assertions proclaiming the demise of product management, the overtaking of product management by engineering and design, the beginning of a tectonic shift reshaping the product manager's role, the call for product managers to rethink their career choices, etc.' flooded social media.
Many social media posts leveraged Chesky's statement about product management as clickbait to get more views and likes.
In response to the growing wave of misinformation and doomsday rhetoric, Brian Chesky tweeted the next day, on June 23, 2023, "I should have been more clear. We morphed the function into an Apple-style product marketing function".
The Interview at Config Figma
What happened was that Brian Chesky, an industrial designer himself, was interviewed at the Config 2023 Figma design conference, where he said:
"The designers are equal to the product managers. Actually, we got rid of the classic product management function. Apple didn't have it either. We combined product management with product marketing and we said that you can't develop products unless you know how to talk about the products."
Chesky also noted, "Product managers are critical, but they shouldn't be doing the job of a designer."
Following is a youtube clip of Chesky making the previous statements (start viewing at the 10:45 marker):
Additional indicative information is found in an interview on The Verge website in early May 2023, where Chesky clearly distinguishes between product management and program management.
The Transition
Airbnb's product management function is evolving, maturing, and adopting market-driven product management, similar to the Blackblot PMTK Methodology™.
The product management function at Airbnb, to begin with, was possibly a mix of the Generalization and Technology approaches in which product managers were doing likely product architecturing (aka product design) and perhaps some general management and program management.
Airbnb's executive management has realized the connection between product planning (aka product management) and product marketing and is now joining the two disciplines.
This realization at Airbnb follows the first PMTK foundation rule: "Product management is comprised of product planning and product marketing".
Airbnb management is offloading tangential responsibilities from product management and organizationally placing the product planning and product marketing functions together to facilitate merging product planning and product marketing.
The new market-driven product manager role at Airbnb may be responsible for simultaneously performing product planning and product marketing activities.
Summary
Airbnb is transforming its product management function, moving away from a generalized program/technology/feature orientation and reshaping the product manager role with market-driven principles.