Spotify organizes their employees through squads and tribes. Squads work as a small team of 6-12 individuals that focus on a specific feature of a product, while multiple squads working in related areas are grouped together into a larger tribe. The decisions on what gets built is made by the collective squad and their mission, with the PM focusing on product outcomes and goals. The PM works directly with the engineers and designers and has the most authority over which problems should be prioritized.
Airbnb’s organization of the company anchors itself on strong design leadership at the top. The CEO, Brian Chesky, noted the PM role would be merging into product marketing. PMs still work closely with design and engineering, but major product decisions are more closely tied to senior leadership.
Zappos organization and structure takes on the most unconventional approach, where they eliminated traditional managers and titles and grouped work into circles through holacracy. This means each person within the organization has a flexible role and distributed authority. Thus, there is no traditional PM and product management responsibilities can be distributed amongst various roles in circles.
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I would want to work as a PM at a place with Spotify’s organizational structure. I appreciate the clarity that a smaller squad brings in terms of product mission, as well as having more ownership over a product’s priorities. Airbnb would be a close second, as I’m interested in its strong design culture and the influence design has on product development. However, I think the centralized structure means PMs have less opportunities to make impactful decisions on a product. Zappos would be my third choice as though I find the concept of holacracy interesting, the lack of definition and a traditional PM role makes it harder to establish clear ownership over product decisions.
