The Why Of The Product – Have We Witnessed An Historical Event?

Eva Skoglund

(This article was first published on LinkedIn on Aug 3, 2023.)

Is the merge of Product Management and Product Marketing an historical milestone?

If you don’t know how to talk about the product, don’t build it.

In June 2023 Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, said when being interviewed at the Config 2023 conference that one of the big changes the company had done as an effect of the crisis Airbnb lived through after the complete stop of travelling during the pandemic, was that they had merged Product Marketing and Product Management. His exacts words were: "We combined product managers with product marketing and we said that you can’t develop products unless you know how to talk about the products”.

His talk got a lot of attention because Chesky happened to introduce this change with some hasty words of “we got rid of the classic product management function”, which caused the designer audience to spontaneously applaud. Chesky then immediately corrected himself, and that’s when he gave the full explanation of the merge of Product Management and Product Marketing the company had done. But the statement that got viral was “Airbnb just got rid of product management”, which was not actually the full truth. The important point he was making was that he wanted the function responsible for the product to also take full ownership of how to talk about the product.

What events will mark historical milestones?

When you are in the middle of the course of events, you don’t know which of those events will mark historical milestones. That will only present itself later in the years to come. I wonder if the Brian Chesky organizational change of merging Product Management and Product Marketing will prove to be such a historic event in the evolution of Product as a company discipline.

Will this merge of Product Management and Product Marketing become a historical milestone? The milestone that put us on the track towards building out Product as a company discipline that is made up of several different roles, and that put the commercial business aspects back in focus.

The broad spectrum of Product Management

The product management job is of a very special kind because it covers such a broad spectrum, you have to be able to paint with all the colors in the box. Not only do you need to be close to technology (if you’re working in high tech), you also need to have a business sense, understand pricing and licensing, you need to be close to your customers and their business situation including their market, you need to know your way around the legal side so that you can articulate terms for your product’s business model, and you need to be oriented in Marketing and their world of communication. You often need to touch more or less every other function in the company and be able to understand what they do and require. On top of this, you also need to speak the language of your Executive Management team, because before you know it, you will be called upon to justify the latest product investment or prepare something for an upcoming board meeting. This breadth that spans from technical details to board room discussions is one of a kind in job roles.

Superheros vs building a Product Discipline

In my mind, the thought of having a single individual (or a few people) that masters all of this is, sorry to be blunt, close to ridiculous. What type of superhero person would that be? Or do you plan to only hire senior people with 25 years of experience?

It is time we start to acknowledge that Product needs to be a discipline of a company, like other disciplines, where we put a team together with different specialties. Look at Sales for example – it’s well known that it needs to be comprised of both account managers, technical pre-sales people, inside sales staff, sales enablement persons, as well other types of specialists depending on type and size of company. Or take HR, where we’ll find recruitment staff, compensation & benefits specialists, and people handling introductions and exits. In Marketing we have copy writers, digital marketing people, graphic designers, PR specialists, web front-end developers and SEO experts, just to name a few. But in Product, we usually only have a handful of people that are supposed to cover all aspects of the job. If the company is medium or large sized, there might be hierarchical structures (titles with seniors, directors, product line managers, etc) and separation made upon different product categories or markets being addressed. But rarely do we have separation in different competencies. And rarely is the product management team put together to actually work as a team. Instead, everyone is set up to operate by themselves, and at best we work in pairs – one person being more technical and one being more commercial.

Merging Product Management and Product Marketing emphasizes the strategic importance of The Why of the product

Merging Product Management and Product Marketing is not only a great move (and frankly a logical one) from the aspect of creating a Product discipline in the company. It also brings a large strategic advantage, and I believe this is what Brian Chesky wanted to achieve: It emphasizes the importance of being able to identify and articulate The Why of our product.

The Why of the product

Why does it exist, what problem does it solve, who should use it and what should the product accomplish for our customer?

Go back to his words “you can’t develop products unless you know how to talk about the products” and take a moment to reflect upon what happens if you start to embrace this. I believe that words help us develop our thoughts. It’s when we start to articulate our thoughts, when we say them out loud or when we write them down, that we also begin to refine our thinking. We find the caveats, we see the patterns, we reach the next level. When we are forced to define how to talk about the product already before we build it, we will begin to think about the reason of existence of the product, what it should solve and for whom. When we know how to talk about our product, we will find The Why of our product.

Gravitating towards Go-To-Market will bring back the commercial business aspects in the Product Discipline and create balance with the Delivery side

Another benefit of making this merge is that it will in a natural way make Product Management gravitate a little more towards the Go-To-Market side of the house. The last 10 or 15 years, I find that Product Management slowly has drifted closer and closer to the Delivery side (spending a lot of time with Engineering). This is not necessarily bad, but it seems to have happened at the expense of the business and commercial aspects that ultimately need to be part of the Product Management job. When Product Marketing works together and side-by-side with Product Management, it will become natural to think about how the Product fits into the customer’s world from the very beginning, which is a core aspect of Go-To-Market. Again - If you don’t know how to talk about it, why build it?

Reversely, when Product Marketing works closely together with Product Management, the key characteristics of the product - what makes it a perfect fit for certain kinds of customers with certain kinds of problems - will be at heart of the positioning of the product. And good positioning is the fundamental building block of successful Sales and Marketing. The product strategy and way ahead will be known from start, which makes it easier to find best-customer-fits that are on the same trajectory as we are with our product.

Who's next to make the same move?

If the Brian Chesky decision of merging Product Management with Product Marketing will constitute a major milestone in the history of the Product Discipline is yet to be seen. In the meantime – it’s still a brilliant move. Who will be next?!