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Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

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Re: Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

#51

Post by kbos87 »

revenga99 wrote: post #40
talideon wrote: post #4

They 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.

not looking at actual hard cold data but it's easy for someone to come to this annedonatal conclusion. In Asheville NC my entire neighborhood is being bought up by a corporation that is doing airbnb/VRBO. Also very hard to get ahold of anyone in case of a noise complaint.

Are you sure that the corporation is doing the buying? There are only a few of these and they are relatively small. There are some large property management firms (Vacasa, Evolve) who only work on behalf of individual property owners but appear as the owner of a property on Airbnb & Vrbo.

Re: Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

#52

Post by kbos87 »

Medh_Suk wrote: post #42

Getting 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.

…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.

Re: Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

#53

Post by carimura »

seizethecheese wrote: post #31
carimura wrote: post #20

> 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.

Depends on scale and industry, right? A post-scale consumer company should only ship something they are highly proud of.

not 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?

Re: Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

#54

Post by jemmyw »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #41
brigadier132 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone loves a boogieman. The reason rents are high are not because of short term rentals. They are high because of inflation and globalization.

In high touristy areas you cannot buy a house at all at normal...ish prices, because buyers are overpaying a lot, becase they intend to rent it out via airbnb, so locals are getting pushed out of those areas. What's so wrong with houses and apartments being for locals and long-term stay, and tourists just staying in hotels?

If you are travelling as a single person or a couple hotels sure. As a family the hotel experience is really bad or out of reach price wise. I'm just about to go on a vacation and we looked into hotels vs airbnb quite extensively. We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms. For the same as OK looking motel we can stay in a nice house with parking and a good size kitchen.

I don't want to like AirBnb and similar, but every time we've tried to go back to hotel or traditional B&B the experience has been poor and expensive. I guess the alternative is to not travel at all... we don't very often and we're only visiting a city in the same (small) country and also seeing friends so it's not like I feel we're massively touristy people paying to travel half way around the world then skimping on the accommodation.

Re: Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

#55

Post by jedberg »

lmm wrote: post #32
jedberg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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 ki…

> Even when I stay at a hotel I wipe down the sink and strip the bed before I leave. That's not normal.

Ok 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.

Re: Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

#56

Post by the_mar »

ativzzz wrote: post #14
the_mar wrote: post #6

To be fair good product designers do like 85% of PM's job. Design is not what it looks like, it's how it works.

It 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

how 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

Re: Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

#57

Post by loganfrederick »

kbos87 wrote: post #51
revenga99 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not looking at actual hard cold data but it's easy for someone to come to this annedonatal conclusion. In Asheville NC my entire neighborhood is being bought up by a corporation that is doing airbnb/VRBO. Also very hard to get ahold of anyone in case of a noise complaint.

Are you sure that the corporation is doing the buying? There are only a few of these and they are relatively small. There are some large property management firms (Vacasa, Evolve) who only work on behalf of individual property owners but appear as the owner of a property on Airbnb & Vrbo.

1. When the grandparent post said "corporations", they probably mean something like the Blackstones & Blackstones of the world, who are not small and both mentioned in this article about their residential housing activity: https://slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-hous...

2. Having lived near Ashville, NC for two years, it's a particularly beautiful region and attractive vacation spot, so I especially believe it would attract corporate buyers looking to build an Airbnb vacation portfolio. Also not far from Atlanta, where Invitation Homes (a corporate buyer of residential housing) is active.

Re: Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

#58

Post by anamexis »

dnissley wrote: post #48
sithadmin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AirBnB isn't the only factor in rising rent costs, but it's pretty evident that it's a contributing factor: "AirBnB has increased the median long term rent in New York City by 1.4% in the last three years, resulting in a $380 rent increase for the median New York tenant" [ https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/files/newsroom/channels/attac... ] "When demand is inelastic, even relatively small changes in housing supply can c…

Sure, but a minor contributing factor -- not a major one. And therefore a distraction from the root cause.

A median $380 increase is not minor, nor is accounting for one fifth of rent growth.

Re: Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

#59

Post by piva00 »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #47
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apartments 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. So…

Why should you get a say about what your neighbor does with their property or what guests they have stay over?

An apartment building is owned collectively and with that comes a set of rules. In most places you aren't allowed to be a nuisance, even though you own a share of the house you don't get to dictate or do whatever you want just because you own something. Your property is just a part of a larger property, respect others or get the fuck out.

It's a pretty simple arrangement that one gets into when they purchase an apartment.

Re: Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

#60

Post by the_mar »

yawnxyz wrote: post #22
the_mar wrote: post #6

To be fair good product designers do like 85% of PM's job. Design is not what it looks like, it's how it works.

At 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...

Personally, 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
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