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Airbnb recently ended the Tech focused Product Management role and transformed into more of a Product GTM (Go to Market) role. A lot of people are upset about this. But this is where the role started and we are going back to where the historical roots are. The history of Product Management actually was always with Marketing side. The main job of a Product Manager was always brand creation. https://www.mindtheproduct.com/history-evolution-product-management/ But a bunch of idiots in earlier 2000s created a process called Agile which required Product Managers to be present in the Sprint meeting to clarify requirements. This was also the decade where Tech companies C-suite was still MBA heavy and top level positions are often occupied by people from Finance, Sales, or Marketing background. Product Managers during this decade heavily influenced the role to be changed from Marketing to Tech once they saw the Tech job more chilling. They kept the best of both - Inflated titles (entry level starts with Sr. Product manager) and calling themselves in the Tech side. Some of them even transformed the title of Product Managers to Product Developers with no development or engineering background. The biggest tech company of this decade (Microsoft) did something way worse. They have these huge monolith code bases like Windows, Office without any modern Web Service abstraction. They decided to create an army of PMs and put them in Dev teams whose sole job is communication, alignment, and creating interfaces with cross teams. The PMs became so much inward focus that they forget their roots of brand creation and customer obsession. It's glad that Airbnb is moving in the right direction. Hopefully other companies follow this and put back the Product Management back to Marketing role. This will make both Customer and Developers happy.
I tend to agree. While PMs are crucial to tech, I think they genuinely serve a better role in marketing. Also I don’t understand the uproar, since they still define the long term strategy even with this “role” change. This just explicitly calls out the core responsibilities
Posts like this scream, "I want to be a PM, nut I can't! *pout*. Cope.
You know that in Big Tech. PM is considered as downgrade in comparison to SWE.
Agree that the PM role is a glorified project manager in *some* companies. I’ve avoided those companies like the plague my entire career. At every company I’ve worked at (even on multiple teams at Amazon) the PM is legitimately expected to be able to lead technical strategy, hold their own with engineering and data science, and also keep business and customer needs in mind. Knowing which direction Airbnb is headed has just added them to my blacklist of companies I’ll never apply to.
For what it’s worth people from Airbnb have posted on blind that nothing actually changed and that pms are still doing the same thing as always there
TLDR
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