Product Management is evolving for good

Brian Chesky, CEO and co-founder of Airbnb said in an interview with Dylan Field that during the pandemic they got rid of “the classic product management function”. This statement caused a lot of concern among people in product management positions.

“The designers are equal to the product managers, actually we got rid of the classic product management function. Apple didn’t have it either.”

-Brian Chesky, Figma Config23

This is a very healthy development regarding the evolution of the product management function to support the business. It helps close the gap between the customer advocate ( product manager) and the buyer.

The issue we all witnessed was the increasing distance of product managers from the buyer/customers. This was not deliberate or planned but an outcome of the structure and role expectations. A few factors were driving this —

• Most of the PMs, especially in tech SaaS come from tech backgrounds as a result it is easier for them to get closer to the “how” as it feels more natural.
• There is a lack of data/metric attribution which leads to a considerable lag time in reporting the impact of certain features on the customer behavior so we all lean on outputs. We incentivize PMs for outputs, Outputs are owned by engineering to PMs start to optimize for that relationship.
• Especially for B2B SaaS that has a healthy SnM spend, and heavily relies on SnM to drive revenue creates distance…