In June of this year, Brian Chesky, CEO and Founder of Airbnb, ignited spirited debates across Twitter, Reddit, and #product-team Slack channels everywhere. Speaking at Figma’s Config Conference in front of an audience consisting primarily of designers, Chesky announced to the world that he was eliminating the Product Management function at Airbnb. Immediately, the room erupted with applause.
“Well, let’s be careful. Hold on,” Chesky warned the crowd. “We have product marketers. We just combined product management with product marketing, and we said that you can’t develop products unless you know how to talk about the products.”
Despite his caveats, the idea sparked charged conversations across the internet around the role of product management, and whether a company as successful as Airbnb, or Apple before it, could succeed without PMs.
Four months later, and I have swung back to revisit the question. No, not whether I believe Product Managers should exist (I do), but whether we need to fundamentally reconsider what a Product Manager does. Based on a room full of Product Designers cheering at the thought of removing PMs from their lives, the answer seems obvious (we do).
Why, then, were these people who are supposed to be our partners, our most trusted confidantes, so excited at the prospect of getting rid of us?
Clearly, we are witnessing a growing division between the two disciplines, one caused by the notion that a Product Manager should be the “mini-CEO” of a product, and Product Designers are simply a service organization, there to receive requirements and paint pretty pictures with just enough time to ensure a hover state and adequate error messaging before the product goes out the door.
But that is certainly not the case with all PMs. If my personal experiences with previous design partners are any indication, the relationship does not have to work this way. What, then, is the difference between great Product Managers, the ones Designers love working with, and the ones Designers are so eager to usher toward the exit sign?
This is the question I am focused on as I look ahead to the next chapter in my evolution as a product leader. How can I be a better partner? What kind of Product Manager do I want to be?
As I think back over the last decade, I realize that I have been so many different types of PM. I’ve been the PM who simply takes orders from loud customers, and louder executives. On the flip side, I’ve also been the PM who builds a full product strategy from the ground up. I’ve been the Wireframer PM, the Requirements PM, the Narrative PM. I’ve done it all, from Product Intern to Director of Product, with varying shapes and sizes along the way.
Ian McCallister, a PM who has spent time at Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb, touched on this combination of skills in his 2012 viral response to a question on Quora asking, “what separates the top 1% of Product Managers from the top 10%?” Generally speaking, I agree with all his bullet points, but much like George Carlin’s take on the 10 Commandments, I think McCallister’s checklist can be boiled down to two.
When I think about what kind of PM I want to be and what kind of Product organizations I want to be a part of, about where I want to focus my attention in this next chapter of my career and what Chesky was really asking for, the answer is much simpler than McCallister’s checklist.
- Executor PM: A top 1% PM needs to be able to execute, to do whatever is necessary to ship. If perfect is the enemy of good, an inability to ship is the enemy of a successful Product team.
- Communicator PM: Outside of being able to execute, the best PMs in the world must be able to communicate, to tell a story.
If someone can execute and communicate, they will inherently check the other boxes on McCallister’s Top 1% characteristics.
Yes, PMs need to think big, but a grand vision doesn’t mean anything if no one understands the story. Yes, simplification is key, especially when it follows a grand vision, but the ability to simplify and distill is really just a core skill implicit in the ability to communicate and execute. Without understanding technical trade-offs and good design, a PM will not be able to execute. Without understanding data and forecasts, a PM will not be able to tell the complete story.
Moreover, the communication skills go beyond just crafting a narrative about a product vision, market opportunity, or metric impact. These skills extend to communicating opportunities within the team. A top 1% PM should be a lighthouse, facilitating conversation and collaboration between people and teams, shining a light on opportunities for mutual benefit that others don’t even know exist.
These are the skills Chesky was referring to when he talked about “eliminating the Product Management function.” Product Managers need to be executors and communicators.
To drive a product, you need to do more than just listen to loud customers or executives, more than just wireframe or build requirement docs. You need to collect all the inputs – loud customers and quiet ones, powerful executives and soft spoken Support agents – and identify themes. You need to combine those themes with what the data is telling you. You need to find the intersection between a solution that will delight customers and one that will have a meaningful impact on the business.
But above all else, you need tell a story, to craft an inspiring vision around the trends you are seeing, and distill all of it into a memorable, realistic plan that your team can put into action. No longer can we think of ourselves as mini-CEOs, only here to run sprint plans or lob requirements over a fence. Designers, engineers, product marketers – these are not service organizations. They are partners who need to be included at every step along the way. They are experts who need to be trusted. The Product Manager just needs to be there to bring them all together, to ensure everyone knows why a particularly product matters and for whom it matters.
Ironically, Chesky probably could have used a PM up on stage with him at Config, as the story behind his message has clearly been lost in translation. His point was a sound one – when Product Managers operate as mini-CEOs or lob requirements over a fence, no one wins, least of all the customer. But how he communicated that point, by saying, “We got rid of the classic product management function. Apple didn’t have it either,” could have used some improvement.
As I look ahead to the next chapter in my career, I know that I still have a lot to learn. But hopefully, with these two core tenets in mind, I’ll keep myself firmly in the Top 1%. And just maybe, convince a room full of designers that Product Managers aren’t so bad after all.
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