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.

Technology and product

Pledge To Executives →

Marty Cagan’s latest is all about the agreements between product teams and executive teams. This point about deadlines stood out for me:

Product teams ask that only the product team that will be responsible for delivering on a promise be the one to make that promise, and they not be asked to make a promise or deliver on a commitment where they don’t know what is involved and what would be required to succeed.

How will AI affect workers? Tech waves of the past show how unpredictable the path can be →

A good piece by Bhaskar Chakravorti, also discussing AI’s impact on DEI in the workplace:

For example, while the broad shift toward remote work could help promote diversity with more flexible hiring, I see the increasing use of AI as likely to have the opposite effect. Black and Hispanic workers are overrepresented in the 30 occupations with the highest exposure to automation and underrepresented in the 30 occupations with the lowest exposure. While AI might help workers get more done in less time, and this increased productivity could increase wages of those employed, it could lead to a severe loss of wages for those whose jobs are displaced. A 2021 paper found that wage inequality tended to increase the most in countries in which companies already relied a lot on robots and that were quick to adopt the latest robotic technologies.

Also worth noting this discrepancy, which we seem to hear about a lot these days:

A 2022 study showed improved efficiencies for remote work as companies and employees grew more comfortable with work-from-home arrangements, but according to a separate 2023 study, managers and employees disagree about the impact: The former believe that remote working reduces productivity, while employees believe the opposite.

SparkToro Year 3 Retrospective: Investor Payback, Systemic Challenges, and V2 on the Way →

I enjoyed Rand Fishkin’s extensive and transparent thoughts on how their business is doing. A couple of things especially stood out. First, this point about marketing attribution:

In businesses like ours, most top-of-funnel marketing happens months or years before conversions do. When someone buys SparkToro, we have no way to attribute it to the three videos they watched on LinkedIn or the word-of-mouth recommendation from an ex-colleague at their previous agency, or the podcast they heard Amanda on last month. This would drive a lot of CMOs and CFOs bananas, but if you can lean into the process of trusting your “vanity metrics” (views, likes, comments, shares, emails, I-heard-about-you-ons), you can build a marketing flywheel that’s almost entirely devoid of competition.

I had to read that last sentence a few times to make sure it’s not a typo. This may be the first time I’ve ever seen someone speak positively about vanity metrics. Definitely food for thought…

And then there’s this important point about market segmentation:

Great products aren’t enough, either. To be “great” is, in my opinion, not nearly as valuable as being irrelevant to 99% of people, but exactly perfect for the 1% who deeply care about the problem you solve. Extra bonus points: target your product at a group that’s well-connected to others in their field, and gets value from sharing new things. Nothing’s better than word of mouth marketing. Nothing.

Other interests

The customers might be human, but the audience is Google →

This is a really interesting exploration of how “the SEO arms race has left Google and the web drowning in garbage text, with customers and businesses flailing to find each other.” Some small businesses deal with by having two websites: one for humans and one for robots.

How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever →

This is a really good history and retrospective of Google Reader. Dang, I feel for this team. It was so much more than an RSS Reader, and they didn’t even like that name. It was the first true social media feed: curated content you care about.

In other words, Fusion was meant to be a social network. One based on content, on curation, on discussion. In retrospect, what Shellen and Wetherell proposed sounds more like Twitter or Instagram than an RSS reader. “We were trying to avoid saying ‘feed reader,’” Shellen says, “or reading at all. Because I think we built a social product.”

Why aren’t smart people happier? →

Really interesting exploration by Adam Mastroianni, and a history of how messed up our definition of “smart” has become:

My grandma does not know how to use the “input” button on her TV’s remote control, but she does know how to raise a family full of good people who love each other, how to carry on through a tragedy, and how to make the perfect pumpkin pie. We sometimes condescendingly refer to this kind of wisdom as “folksy” or “homespun,” as if answering multiple-choice questions is real intelligence, and living a good, full life is just some down-home, gee-whiz, cutesy thing that little old ladies do.

Hometown’s Finest →

I’ve always been interested in “sense of place”—finding the reasons why a town or a place exists, and why people are drawn to certain places. Anne Helen Petersen writes beautifully about this concept in an essay about her hometown:

Optimization and remodel culture robs spaces of that heart. I’m sure MOD Pizza, the latest upstart in the pizza world, makes a lot more money. It’s slicker, faster, easier. But it’s not a place, it’s a product—a profit center. You can always tell, can’t you, when a restaurant’s primary purpose is to make a bunch of people who’d probably never eat there a whole bunch of money.

The Reader in Mind Is Me →

John Warner writes about the passing of Cormac McCarthy as well as Elizabeth Gilbert’s decision to indefinitely postpone the publication of her novel following the appearance of over 500 negative reviews of the book on Goodreads (also see How Goodreads Reviews Can Tank a Book Before It’s Published). He makes some interesting observations about “parasocial relationships”:

My first reaction was that we were in the realm of the parasocial, the invention or a relationship with a celebrity who doesn’t know you exist. My most parasocial relationships are with my favorite Peloton instructors who are clearly encouraged to stoke this feeling in platform participants as a way to keep us invested and involved.

Another example is Taylor Swift’s recent relationship with some other recording artist with bad politics and questionable hygiene, something her fans could apparently not countenance, and perhaps drove her to break up with the dude.