Social Media Gossip in Product & Reality
No, AirBnB is not cancelling product management and other hallucinations
Twitter, Reddit and LinkedIn went completely bananas when it was “announced” that Airbnb got rid of product managers. No, that’s not what’s happening.
And all of it is indicative of what’s constantly going on in our feeds. Oversimplifications of complex issues - because only those work.
Platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter are delivering posts based on the efficiency it has with its audience on a small sample, if the message is “efficient” enough it gets delivered to more people, rinse repeat.
This means that nuanced well thought out content obviously has it harder because it appeals to fewer people.
Read also my article on my AI-Tea sister blog about the AI-Gossip side of it:
Slack
When I recorded my first episode on my podcast with John Cutler in September 2022 there was a message going viral that Slack was overtaken by Microsoft Teams and part of it was a graph that floated around “proving” the point.
The narrative itself started in 2019 when the first usage charts actually showed that Microsoft Teams was overtaking Slack in daily active users.
Just like everything in Product, the question is, what did people “do” with this message?
“Slack is dead!”
“Teams is better than Slack!”
They take the message hostage and every content creator starts to post about it. (Including me and others with rebuttals)
Without going into the actual problem with the Slack chart too much, I worked at Microsoft and if I saw something in action then it’s massive enterprise distribution power.
If Microsoft wants to have shares of your market it will get shares of your market. The question is just how much money. From my limited experience, this is the major driver, not the product being worse or better.
Microsoft’s business strategy has been for a long time to push something into the market through its existing distribution power. Like any other sane company with that standing would mind you.
It’s a fascinating case of how dangerous it is to get the attention of someone with a better distribution than you, rather than just a better product.
A successful business motion of any kind, whether you look at Slack coming from the bottom up or Microsoft from the top down is about efficiency. And you cannot infer that efficiency from a graph that only looks at the daily active users.
This is actual learning in business and market dynamics that helps you create and defend a better business.
A good way of asking yourself whether something is really having meat to it is if it would stand up in an investor meeting. You would be kicked out of the room if you start to evaluate business performances based on daily active users.
Airbnb
Almost 2 months ago Brian Chesky (AirBnB’s CEO) said it how it is on Jason Calacanis's podcast. It’s a directive company through and through. The CEO has his fingers in every release. The entire organization is built to do his bidding of him. And this has been going on for a long time.
Don’t believe me? See for yourself in the clip and check the comments for more nuance
Jason like other content producers have a tendency to fall over each other with well-dressed-up controversial statements that sounds like the second coming of product management.
Because it has traction in the content market. Or he actually believes it, I don’t know.
What I can tell you is that your mileage may vary if you work in organizations like this. I’m a firm believer in highly collaborative companies with a fine balance between hands-off work and unified strategy.
Not because I’m a nice person - because I believe in it from an economic standpoint to work really well on top of being just a great place to work.
And just because a company is doing well doesn’t mean that everything they do is great or even good to be copied.
“It depends” doesn’t sell
But that’s already a nuanced take on the situation. It’s also ironic that he’s being compared to bringing Apple’s style of management back on the table.
The company that coined the phrase “It just works” among its fans. And that’s a great analogy, because frankly in life, almost never anything just works. But that’s our job, to conflate things into simple one-liners.
We want it to be simple.
One reason, one result.
It’s our eternal thirst for simple, life-changing swooping statements.
Frankly, it’s not any different than my mom picking up a lifestyle magazine with the latest celebrity gossip when she gets her hair dried.
All we do by perpetuating this watered-down stuff is a wrong perception of what it means to work in good companies that are worth sticking up for.
And the damage is especially done if an executive picks these messages up and starts to seed them in their all hands.
And I’ve seen this happen more times than I’m comfortable when they quote simple statements like this and dress them up as guiding visions.
I don’t post often pieces like this because of the unavoidable backlash but it’s good to occasionally scream into the void.
My only practical advice to you is to maintain your feed and keep those up that talk about “it depends” and in-depth analysis.
I’m totally aware that I’m fighting against windmills here :D
Thanks for screaming, Leah. ;) Much needed to bring this up.
“It depends” doesn’t sell. Absolutely.
We are fighting short-attention spans and people looking for quick magic solutions.
Fewer people like to pause, think and analyze. Because that’s uncomfortable and time-consuming.