Spotify’s model stresses culture and networks. Squads (scrum-like teams owning a “long-term mission” from design to production) are grouped into tribes (squads in a related area), chapters (people with similar skills across squads within a tribe), and guilds (interest groups across the company). Each squad has a Product Owner (effectively a PM), responsible “for prioritizing the work to be done by the team, but is not involved with how they do their work.” Chapter leads own how people work, creating a “healthy tension” between the two roles.
Airbnb restructured in 2020, merging product management with marketing into what Chesky calls an “Apple-style product marketing function,” where “designers are equal to the product managers.” Chesky, himself a designer, wants design to drive product development. PMs help decide what to build with design and engineering and own how to market it, since “you can’t develop products unless you know how to talk about the products.” Program management moved to separate program managers, and final roadmap authority is Chesky’s alone, leaving PMs with little practical authority.
Zappos operated as a holacracy: a flat structure of role-based circles instead of departments. Roles shifted with project needs, and teams managed their own work. There were no traditional managers or PMs; “lead links” assigned people to roles but couldn’t direct their work, so authority attached to roles rather than people.
I’d most like to work in Spotify’s structure because I’m passionate about collaborating across teams and sharing role-based knowledge. My main concern is that a Spotify PM carries responsibility for outcomes without line authority over the people building them, so I’d prefer a design role there. Airbnb elevates design more, but its decisions are so centralized that I’d have less room to shape the work. For a PM, none of these structures offer real authority.
Sources:
AirBnB source: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/airbnbs-product-management-shift-the-viewpoint-of-product-leaders/
Spotify source: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf
