Spotify organizes into squads, cross-functional teams of eight people or fewer that own their work end to end, from idea through deployment. Squads don’t need approval from above to move a project forward. The PM inside a squad functions as a product owner with genuine day-to-day authority over what that team ships.
Airbnb centers design in a way most companies don’t. Brian Chesky has said publicly that PMs “shouldn’t be doing the job of a designer,” and design now sits on equal footing with product rather than under it. Airbnb also folded product management into its marketing function, so PMs there spend real time on outbound marketing and go-to-market work. Some critics have described this shift as pulling more decision power up toward leadership, though Airbnb frames it as a redefinition of the PM job rather than a loss of authority.
Zappos got rid of job titles entirely under holacracy. Circles form around functions, and whoever holds a given role inside a circle can act on decisions tied to that role without waiting on a manager to sign off. Authority lives in the role, not in a title or a person’s rank.
I’d choose Spotify. I like that the PM works inside a small team that actually ships something, instead of routing ideas up a chain or sharing the job with marketing. It also matched what the PM I interviewed told me, that her team runs like a startup and she has real ownership over one area. What I’m still unsure about is how well autonomous squads actually stay coordinated once there are dozens of them.
Sources: https://www.chameleon.io/blog/spotify-squads, https://airfocus.com/blog/airbnb-pm-shift/, https://www.adaptconsultingcompany.com/2024/07/06/how-zappos-implements-holacracy/
