(2023-12-24) Gilad Who Should Rule The Product

Itamar Gilad: Who Should Rule the Product? Recently the product sphere boiled-over over Airbnb’s controversial move to remove product managers from product teams and convert them to product marketing managers. The Airbnb transformation may be a one-of/One-off. (2023-09-09) Itamar Gilad On Linkedin Why Did Airbnb Kill Product Management

but the story and the discussion that followed surfaced an age-old debate: who should rule the product?

In a classic case of Miles’ law, where you stand seems to depend on where you sit:

Many managers simply assume it’s their job to decide what to build and when

Some business stakeholders feel that they are the voice of the market, hence they should decide which products and features to build.

Some designers believe that product development is all about “solving user problems” hence Design should drive the decisions.

What’s common to these drastically divergent worldviews is that they disregard key insights of modern product development:

if there’s one thing we learned it’s that successful products reflect the strategic and the tactical, the business and the technical. Handing over control to one discipline or one group (including product managers) invariably creates an unhealthy bias.

In modern product development we face a lot of uncertainty and complexity. Therefore we have to guide our decisions by evidence rather than by the opinions of any one person or group.

Still, if the deciders are neither managers, business stakeholders, designers, or PMs (alone), what’s the alternative? There’s no one right answer to this question, but we do have a few tried-and-tested models.

The Trio model

three leads: PM + Dev lead + UX designer... leading by consensus

While each team member has a disciplinary direct manager — engineering, PM, UX — the product team as a whole “reports” to a trio of director-level managers, who in turn reporte to a VP-level trio that runs the product org. (His diagram hides the complexity of each discipline's separate hierarchy, and the nightmare of matrix management.)

Trios at all levels stay informed by keeping close connections with peers in other parts of the org: Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, PR, as well as with other product teams/groups/orgs.

success heavily depends on the attitude of mid-level and top-level managers

Leading with Context

The tendency is to create feature factories that deliver on the ideas of managers or stakeholder committees

While this may work in early-stage startups or some other isolated cases, it’s generally a very unreliable way to create high-impact tech products

Companies like Netflix take a different approach. They teach their managers to lead with context. Context is the information people and teams need to do their jobs properly and to make good decisions. At Netflix when an individual or a team make a bad decision, the manager may ask herself “what context were they missing?”

Company or business unit leaders should define and communicate down strategic context, which includes the vision, mission, top metrics, and strategy (which isn’t a plan of action).

Product teams communicate up tactical context, which includes the situation on the ground in their area of responsibility — state of the product, what was learned in the market, new technologies, challenges, and opportunities

The teams should also communicate concrete work progress. I suggest structuring reports around the GIST model (Goals, Ideas, Steps, Tasks — covered in my book):

How To Transition

The nice thing about both the Trio Model and Leading with Context, is that they can be implemented in the product organization first, without necessarily forcing the entire company to transform. The leaders of the product org — CPO, CTO, and Head of Product — should take an active role here.

Abolish separate Eng, UX, and PM OKRs (if exist). Instead leadership trios should create combined OKRs

Reverting to a centrist mode of management may work for Airbnb, but for most companies will be a step in the wrong direction.