Airbnb Transitions to Market-driven Product Management
The online marketplace for homestays is restructuring its product management department
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…
