Spotify organized its product teams into autonomous squads (teams that own and work on a specific feature end-to-end) and tribes (collections of related squads). A PM, sometimes called “product owner,” sits within a squad to guide product direction, and the small size and agility means the whole squad has influence on what gets shipped.
Airbnb’s structure introduces more top-down leadership, as the “keeper” of their product roadmap is their founder with a design background. There, the role of product management has merged with product marketing, so PMs own the story and framing for how products are launched.
Zappos used a more radical, decentralized approach of holacracy that organizes work into circles, self-governing teams where work is assigned not by title, but roles/tasks. Rather than having managers, circles self-organize, so authority can change dynamically and people are free to take on new roles.
Out of these 3 models, I’d want to work in an organization like Airbnb, where there is a clear and confident overarching direction for the product, even if the process for setting that roadmap isn’t very democratic. While Spotify provides more decision-making power to individual contributors, this can easily result in having many disconnected features rather than a powerful, unified product because perfect alignment is a massive feat to take on across many small teams. I’ve seen the common critique that companies keep shipping their org chart; if this really is unavoidable, I’d feel more confident that good decisions are being made if the decision-makers are thinking from a big picture and long-term perspective, which is hard to do from the vantage point of working on a small feature.
