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Did Airbnb kill the PM role?
- manishsharan 3y agoWhy is AirBnb still a thing ? Do people like doing chores while on a vacation ?
- jamiegreen 3y agoI think it is nice to have a kitchen if it’s more than a few days. But the chores are a bit much sometimes
- CSMastermind 3y agoI highly recommend Hilton's Airbnb competitor Home2.
- jedberg 3y agoI just checked out the Home2 offerings near where I just stayed in an AirBnB. The prices are significantly higher and there are only three options (AirBnB had 25+). So not quite there yet. :)
- goostavos 3y agoI really dislike AirBnB, but I don't think they've got anything to worry about with Hotel2. Even calling them a competitor seems like a massive stretch. Just poking around their site to see what's available in my area: $240/night gets you what is, well... a hotel room. Except that it has a couch and a microwave in it. Calling such a thing a "suite" makes me feel like Hilton is gaslighting me.
- jedberg 3y agoI just stayed at two AirBnBs. I'm not sure what "doing chores" means. Sure I had to tidy up a bit when I left, but I would do that regardless because I'm a decent human being. Even when I stay at a hotel I wipe down the sink and strip the bed before I leave. In the meantime I had a condo next to the beach with a kitchen and beach toys in both locations for less than the hotel next door cost (which would not have a kitchen, meaning that I'd have to eat out every meal, which gets pricy with two kids).
- bamfly 3y ago"I don't understand why anyone ever uses AirBnB" is definitely a "tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids" kind of thing.
- lmm 3y ago> Even when I stay at a hotel I wipe down the sink and strip the bed before I leave. That's not normal.
- jedberg 3y agoOk I guess I'm special then. It takes all of 20 seconds to wipe down the sink after I've picked up all my stuff, and maybe 10 seconds to strip the sheets. I mostly strip the sheets to make sure the next person gets a fresh set.
- Xorakios 3y agoI've exclusively lived in hotels/corporate rentals for over 20 years and wipe the sinks/counters every day because I like clean sinks and counters. and I strip the bed mainly in case one of my phones/chargers/earring is accidentally inside (beds make excellent auxiliary desks...) as a surprising aside, during off-season housekeeping sometimes hate guests that are overly considerate, because they need the hours!
- harry8 3y agoBecause hotels really are as bad for purpose as they are expensive?
- chongli 3y agoAirbnb is a thing because landlords pulled their long term rental units off the market and converted them into short terms at X times the old rate. Landlords love it because they make way more profit. Business travellers love it because they can stay in a nice trendy house or apartment instead of a hotel and they expense the trip anyway. The people who don’t love it are the neighbours and anyone in the market for long term rentals.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoAnd anyone in the market for a vacation that doesn't want to gamble on a terrible host. Hotels might not be great, but they're way less of a gamble. It only takes a vacation being completely ruined once or twice before you swear of AirBNB completely.
- moffkalast 3y agoBecause hotels charge 100x the rate per night, all else being equal?
- padjo 3y agoPersonally I find social interactions with hotel employees far more exhausting than straightening up a bit.
- ecshafer 3y agoI love hotels. I am not sure why Airbnb ever took off, other than price for large groups. Hotels you show up, you know you have a room because you booked with Hilton or whatever. They clean up the room after you leave for the day. They bring you stuff, carry luggage it’s great.
- CamperBob2 3y agoSo far, I've found that using superhosts is a reliable way to get good results from AirBnB. I think a lot of the horror stories come from the original business model of crashing in Joe Sixpack's basement.
- xyzelement 3y ago// social interactions with hotel employees far more exhausting Jeez how much are you socializing with the employees that you find it exhausting?
- alfalfasprout 3y agoHaving traveled for years on Airbnb it's extremely rare I actually have to do any sort of "chores". At most throw some dishes in the dishwasher or strip the bed (but even then that's not the norm).
- mrfumier 3y agoAs a superhost who use the Airbnb mobile app and website everyday, the experience is quite awful. Basic functions are not there, while the app already seems to be bloated. I'm wondering if any of the product manager there ever used their product.
- huevosabio 3y agoSame here. The hosting app is terribl. To the point that there's an ecosystem of apps for managing properties, and most of the functions are just basic features that either exist or should on the Airbnb app. The app is so bad, that I can't trust it with showing me who arrives today in the summary page, instead I go to the calendar. And yes, I feel like they should make their PMs or designers use the hosting side of the app.
- tkjef 3y agoEver use the VRBO hosting app? Almost unusable. Sooo delayed on every button push. Horrible onboarding experience with no messages of what to expect. Can’t edit the property description from the app, have to use the website. The effing property description!!
- talideon 3y agoThey did kill a whole bunch of things... like the ability to rent at a reasonable rate and the ability to get a mortgage that doesn't lean heavily on the 'mort' part.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y agoIf you really believe Airbnb is to blame for this, I have a bridge to sell you.
- _just7_ 3y agoYeah I don't really think a meaningfully larger amount people are traveling because Airbnb is an app that exist, so demand from tourism should stay flat, no?
- anamexis 3y agoThat doesn't follow. Even if tourism stays flat, demand can shift from hotels to Airbnbs.
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoApartments in residential buildings are well.. apartments, not hotels. If you're a tourist, go to a hotel, I don't want a new set of loud obnoxius neighbors partying every few days next door to my apartment (and a shared wall in between). The apartment that should be rented out at cheaper monthly rate is now getitng rented out to lud tourists per daily rates, and that is a bad thing for locals living in that city. Some areas are already destroyed by airbnbs, so banning airbnbs (and all the other short-term rentals of residential apartments) should be banned.
- cycrutchfield 3y agoWhy should you get a say about what your neighbor does with their property or what guests they have stay over?
- subpixel 3y ago
- the_mar 3y agoTo be fair good product designers do like 85% of PM's job. Design is not what it looks like, it's how it works.
- ativzzz 3y agoIt just depends if you hire more designers or PMs. Doing designs is a lot of work, but so is talking to customers and developing high level product strategy - talking internally about what needs to be done. If your designers are doing the latter two, that means they're not spending nearly enough time talking to customers
- the_mar 3y agohow are designers making designs without talking to customers? Who are they designing it for then? Please don't come at me with "but... requirements", good design requires you to understand your user. People are bad at articulating what they actually want and if your PM is not a designer (in a sense of comprehension and problem solving, not Figma proficiency) the "requirements" are going to be some uninspired platitudes. What you refer to as "doing designs" is actually just pixel pushing, which has absolutely no place unless and until you figure out the functionality
- yawnxyz 3y agoAt Microsoft many years ago, they used to put a lot of product design work on PMs (who didn't have the training or time / bandwidth to do that well). I think this was the Ballmer era...
- the_mar 3y agoPersonally, I think a PM that doesn't have training / skills to do product design work is a glorified note-taker. I don't necessarily mean the implementation skills of "making screens", but arguably that skill is the easiest to obtain. Otherwise you end up with a weird division of labor, where the PM actually does all the creative design work and the designer is an implementation monkey, which I don't know any designers that are good that would want that job
- alexzhues 3y agoNone of this sounds revolutionary to me. This article implies PMs at AirBnB should handle the role of Product Marketing, have talent for design, and handle user flows. I think most companies already seek out those skills, but generally struggle to find that talent so they settle by finding specialists who can do each function well.
- jamiegreen 3y agoI don't think it's revolutionary. They simply seem to have focused the role on what's important for them.
- revskill 3y agoSure. Product manager, product analysis,... they're bunch of "configurator" whose jobs is learn by heart how to config a system. They're critical ! The issue is, their salary and their "political position" in a company is a concern. How can that "boring" role compare to a Senior Developer, or a Designer overall ?
- carimura 3y ago> Only ship something you are proud of. meh. lots of companies are wildly successful with crappy products built by 9-5 teams. or startups with founders that are embarrassed by v0.1 or even v1.0.
- seizethecheese 3y agoDepends on scale and industry, right? A post-scale consumer company should only ship something they are highly proud of.
- carimura 3y agonot really. it's just one way to look at it and the way I would expect a "designer CEO" does. there are plenty of apps/sites built inside of billion-dollar companies by teams that aren't highly proud. your bank app, maybe?
- asadotzler 3y agoI doubt Amazon's web team are proud of Amazon ads and in-house product placement making their long-scaled product far less usable but they know it pays the bills so they keep turning the crank. The guy 20 years ago with the one click checkout clean flow feature and patent, yeah, he probably had some pride. But the guy injecting ads into your brain to try to break that flow, probably not so much. Pride is no longer a thing for most people. They work to get money to do the things they are or will be proud of in the meaningful parts of their lives. Work is shit for most people and everyone is waking up to that except some of his highly privileged silicon valley workers.
- report-to-trees 3y agoThe best products and features I've ever worked on were run by engineering and design working very closely together, while the PM role was pretty much exclusively stakeholder / client communication. It's a shame how large organizations always form a layer of "product owners" who fight amongst each other for ownership and control.
- DragonStrength 3y agoSounds like Apple, right? You focus on product marketing, keep the decision-making close knit, and say "no" a lot. You can go a long time as an engineer there without ever talking to a product person.
- belugacat 3y agoThere’s a reason why Airbnb is paying for as many LoveFrom billable hours as they can.
- Medh_Suk 3y agoGetting rid of a job title doesn't mean getting rid of the work that needs doing. Someone still has to own the "why" and the "what" of the product you're building—if it's not the PM, then it is engineering manager or design leader taking on this role.
- kbos87 3y ago…quite likely at the cost of other important work that designers and engineers would otherwise spend their time doing. You can move chess pieces around all you want - and sometimes there are reasons to do that - but every org structure change comes with unintended consequences.
- jvans 3y agoThe incentive structure of the PM role is to pump out new features when a lot of the time making something more reliable or easier to use has more user value. Design and Engineering should jointly take on this role
- randyrand 3y agoWhat is a PM? Program, Project, or Product? which one?