I am finally catching up on the big “Airbnb canceled PMs” debate of 2023, and like most online arguments the whole thing seems pretty silly to me. First, here’s a good overview from Aatir Abdul Rauf, in which he publishes the full quote from CEO Brian Chesky:
“…The designers are equal to product managers. Actually, we got rid of the classic product management function. Apple didn’t have it either.
5-second applause
(smiling) Let’s be careful. Hold on.
We have product marketers. We combined 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 and we elevated design.”
Aatir does a great job of putting the quote in context of the entire talk, so it’s well worth reading. The TL;DR is this: “Airbnb didn’t kill PM. They relabeled it and consolidated their team roles.” That seems like a completely reasonable organizational change to make within the context Airbnb is in, and considering the thought they clearly put into that decision. It definitely won’t work for every organization, but it’s also clearly not some kind of thought leadership mandate that they want to force on the entire industry.
I say good for Airbnb for making a decision that aligns their organizational design with the way they believe they can design and develop products most effectively. One last plug for Aatir’s post: he does a great job explaining the Product Marketing function, and what product managers can learn from it.
Now, the real topic I want to get to with this post is this idea of merging PM into other roles. That concept has been around as long as the profession itself. As with so much in product, it’s not inherently good or bad, it’s about the context of the change. Here’s another example (that I happen to agree with). In Melissa Perri’s response to the controversy she made a slightly different case that the PM role will start to merge with the GM role:
Product Management has always firmly sat between business, tech, and the user/customer. In SAAS companies, the Product Management role has always been about figuring out how to grow the business by solving customer problems with the right software. In other companies that are not software-native, you saw this same act being done by GMs of the business, but just with the tools available to drive the business at the time – sales, marketing, and human operations. What does a GM look like in a product-led business? Someone overseeing the teams that build the things you sell.
As more and more companies become predominately software companies, I believe the Product Management role and GM roles are going to merge. You won’t be a great GM unless you deeply understand software, along with understanding your domain. Product Management was never purely about “tech” and if companies were treating it so, of course, they didn’t see the value of the role.
The point is that organizations will always need someone who understands the product, customers, technology, and the broader market—and guides conversations towards what that all means for priorities and what to work on to help the business grow. In the current SaaS environment we’ve settled on that role being filled by product managers. That’s great, but it might not always be so, and that’s ok too. It doesn’t mean we’ll lose our jobs. It just means we’ll keep evolving.