Jesse James Garrett

Many of you probably remember Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky’s sweeping declaration at last year’s Config that he had eliminated the traditional product management function in favor of giving more authority to designers. But if you were busy over the holidays, you might have missed his followup conversation on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast. I found what he said there very revealing.

First of all, Chesky is right to point out that a room full of designers cheering for the elimination of their product partners is a symptom of a deep dysfunction in the culture of our industry that’s worth talking about. The moment struck me a bit like a room full of quarterbacks cheering for the elimination of offensive linemen—it’s not going to end well for you.

But I was particularly fascinated by the third way through this cultural divide that Chesky decided to take. Throughout the interview, when he finds fault with Airbnb’s previous product managers, it’s not because they lacked a design sensibility—in fact, a sensitivity to design issues never comes up.

What does come up, over and over, is the legacy PM group’s failure to connect with genuine customer needs. It sounds like, with an army of product managers all striving to demonstrate value by shipping features, PMs stopped seeking product-market fit in favor of product-politics fit—that is, prioritizing what they could get internal stakeholders to agree to rather than what actually resonated with customers.

In other words, the missing voice in the mix was not design but marketing. And that’s the actual shift Chesky instituted at Airbnb: requiring his product and design leaders to show up with as much customer savvy as they do internal political and operational savvy.

Chesky, as a career designer and clear believer in design as a holistic function, saw this customer savvy as falling naturally within the domain of design. But I wonder how true that actually is out there. Sure, if you went to a traditional design school like Chesky did, you were likely exposed to a lot of core marketing concepts and the marketing sensibility as part of becoming a designer.

But the traditionally-trained designers leading digital product design out there are the exception. For other design leaders, it’s far more likely that you’ve spent your career piecing together your approach over time in response to your environment. And if you’ve never worked in an organization where marketing had a voice in product development, you might never have worked with a marketer, never mind learned how to think like one.

If Brian Chesky is right, though, and the breakdown at Airbnb is a sign of a deeper schism across the industry, the opportunity for design leaders is to shake off whatever prejudices you may have about the word “marketing”, step into the capability gap, and bring a broader sensibility to your engagement with executive stakeholders.