Did Airbnb kill the PM role? | Hacker News Reader

Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

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49 pointsjamiegreen89 comments

The best products and features I've ever worked on were run by engineering and design working very closely together, while the PM role was pretty much exclusively stakeholder / client communication.

It's a shame how large organizations always form a layer of "product owners" who fight amongst each other for ownership and control.

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.

If you really believe Airbnb is to blame for this, I have a bridge to sell you.

Yeah I don't really think a meaningfully larger amount people are traveling because Airbnb is an app that exist, so demand from tourism should stay flat, no?

That doesn't follow. Even if tourism stays flat, demand can shift from hotels to Airbnbs.

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. Some areas are already destroyed by airbnbs, so banning airbnbs (and all the other short-term rentals of residential apartments) should be banned.

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

For the same reason I have a say about zoning and ordinances and just about every other thing that affects my property and my enjoyment of it.

My question is why should you have much of a say about those things as well. Smells like a NIMBY

If it's a residential property, it's a residential property, not (what is effectively a) hotel.

Again: it’s not your property, so why do you care about their guests staying for 1 night or 1 month? Seems like a rather artificial distinction.

I live within walking distance dozens of short-term rentals in a very small town.

The difference between having dozens of neighbors with families, children, and strong ties to the community and not having those neighbors and community connections is in no way artificial.

Some reasons I care: schools that decline with population loss, the lack of available/affordable rental homes for local residents, the effects on local retail and service businesses, the tendency for hurried visitors to drive at unsafe speeds while staring at their phone for directions.

Problems that you do not experience remain real problems.

So basically instead of thinking about how you can better accommodate visitor demand and respect property owners’ rights, you would prefer to regulate your “small town feel” back into existence.

It seems your passion for this topic is such that you are attributing to me things others may have said in this thread (or elsewhere).

I’m just drawing some reasonable inferences from your list of complaints. If you feel I’ve misrepresented your position, feel free to correct me.

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.

Why do you assume that guests that stay over are a nuisance?

If you host a few guests a year, for a few days, and they are your friends or people who you might trust, no issue whatsoever.

A never ending cycle of tourists staying for 2-10 days as your neighbours? That's definitely a nuisance over time, very improbable that churning through 50-100 groups of different people per year won't create issues to neighbours.

If you don't see how it could be an issue I think only if you lived in a touristic place, neighbour to AirBnBs, to actually understand. I say that not to provoke you but because I feel it's hard to empathise when it's not your day-to-day life. Just this year I experienced that when staying at a friend's place in Lisbon, I shared it on another HN thread:

> As an anecdote: a month ago I stayed a few days (5-7) at a friend's place I was visiting who lives in Lisbon, just on his floor there are 4 AirBnBs (owned by the same person). Not only it was a nuisance with noise for most of the days I was there it was also a nuisance to have drunk British girls banging on your door at 02.00 in the night when they don't remember the fucking apartment they are supposedly going to. My friend mentioned it's not uncommon for that to happen, or to have a gag of people show up to a party in one of the apartments. Other people living in the building have complained to AirBnB, to the police, to the housing association, nothing really happens.

So sounds like the bug is lax enforcement of noise ordinances? Not sure why it makes a difference whether the drunk and noisy houseguest is a short-term renter or a friend of the owner.

A friend of the owner implies the owner is a neighbour, someone who you can eventually talk about the issue in the house. It makes a difference as there's a greater degree of social bond (and consequently shame).

Are you being obtuse on purpose to not give up on a flawed argument?

Because it's an apartment building with shared space, shared resources and shared investments. If your neighbors plot is a residential plot, he cannot build a pig farm there or a nuclear power plant. If your neighbors apartment is an apartment, he cannot have a shooting range, a bar, a strip club or a hotel there. There's a difference between occasional guests and airBnB, the same as there is a difference between a friend who helps you fix your car vs someone who regulary fixes cars for money.

As long as the property owner registers their short term rental with the local government and pays their taxes, and as long as their guests are respectful and don’t cause any trouble, why do you even care?

I think I get your perspective (but also you should really understand that your arguments are just going unidirectional instead of building a healthy dialog), but it made me wonder what really went wrong (or changed, depending on your perspective) from Hegel's utopian egalitarianism to how communism was implemented in practice a century later. I guess people just tend to "adapt" legal and governance theories built with perfectly good intentions to their advantage and then things go awry.

It's a limited resource being misused. It is in the interest of the locals for tourists to stay in hotels and apartments to be available for long(er) term rent for the locals. Barcelona was one of the first cities to ban short-term rentals (under 31 days), and hopefully not the last.

It’s only “limited” because housing has been made artificially scarce by local governments operating in the interests of property owners by restricting new builds in order to keep housing prices high. In regions and countries that have allowed enough housing to be built to actually meet demand there is much less hand-wringing about short-term rentals.

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

And a lack of supply that is pushed by owners. (Not just AirBnb owners, all owners)

Ironically, you cite some other boogeymen. They are high mostly because not enough housing is being built to meet demand.

And the one that is being built is then rented out daily on sites like AirBnB instead of monthly/yearly to locals.

> Ironically, you cite some other boogeymen

Inflation is a fact. Globalization is a fact. Money is flowing from the entire planet into the US to find stable places to store it.

If money is flowing to the US to buy real estate, I say good. That’s more money being pumped into our economy, more money going to local communities via property taxes. Let’s build more real estate meet this demand.

Some places are more affected by AirBnB than others. Seattle? Nope. Paris Bastille district? A few years ago definitely.

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?

There’s nothing wrong with what you propose but it doesn’t offer a get-rich scheme, which is what really fuels short-term rental growth. It’s the new house flipping.

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.

>We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms.

I'll preface this by saying that I don't have kids. But, from my experience travelling with my parents when I was a kid... you really don't "need" three rooms.

That maybe the expectations you have now, but using AirBnb is pushing the externalities of those expectations onto the community you are visiting.

> We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms.

What? I've stayed 6 deep in a single room with two beds. Mom, dad, and us four siblings. And there's more than a decade between the kids. Three hotel rooms would have been an unimaginable luxury.

I'm firmly in the camp of piling the family into one room. There's no better way to bond.

Cool. You travel your way and the other poster can do it his way. Everyone has their own level of comfort that they would like to accept on vacation.

But tourism is a luxury, and people renting out apartments on airbnb is making that apartment unafordable for long-term rental for locals, who actually have to live there. Sure, you might like the cheaper option of an unregulated hotel, but the locals would prefer you to just go to a normal hotel, since that's what the hotels were built for. At some point, even the local governments will have to bend over for the will off the 'masses' (compared to a few individuals profiteering from this), because people who have nowhere to live are in the group of people who have "nothing to lose anymore", and as a politician, you don't want a critical mass of those.

Bluntly put, access to affordable housing trumps affordable vacationing. If your problem is where to take your family for holidays, you are already out of touch with people struggling to find homes.

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 cause significant changes in the cost of housing.10 This intuition is clearly validated in a number of careful empirical studies looking precisely at the effect of Airbnb introduction and expansion on housing costs." [https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benef...]

"At the median owner-occupancy rate zipcode, we find that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.018% increase in rents and a 0.026% increase in house prices. Considering the median annual Airbnb growth in each zipcode, these results translate to an annual increase of $9 in monthly rent and $1,800 in house prices for the median zipcode in our data, which accounts for about one fifth of actual rent growth and about one seventh of actual price growth" [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3006832]

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.

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.

For anyone else wondering:

“Mortgage: late Middle English: from Old French, literally ‘dead pledge’, from mort (from Latin mortuus ‘dead’) + gage ‘pledge’”

As a superhost who use the Airbnb mobile app and website everyday, the experience is quite awful.

Basic functions are not there, while the app already seems to be bloated.

I'm wondering if any of the product manager there ever used their product.

Same here.

The hosting app is terribl. To the point that there's an ecosystem of apps for managing properties, and most of the functions are just basic features that either exist or should on the Airbnb app.

The app is so bad, that I can't trust it with showing me who arrives today in the summary page, instead I go to the calendar.

And yes, I feel like they should make their PMs or designers use the hosting side of the app.

Ever use the VRBO hosting app? Almost unusable. Sooo delayed on every button push. Horrible onboarding experience with no messages of what to expect. Can’t edit the property description from the app, have to use the website. The effing property description!!

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

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

Yep exactly what happened at Microsoft, hence Vista and all the other products that spilled out of Ballmer's tenure like trash out of an overturned dump truck

Been saying that for a while. "A PM is a glorified secretary"

Sounds like Apple, right? You focus on product marketing, keep the decision-making close knit, and say "no" a lot. You can go a long time as an engineer there without ever talking to a product person.

There’s a reason why Airbnb is paying for as many LoveFrom billable hours as they can.

None of this sounds revolutionary to me. This article implies PMs at AirBnB should handle the role of Product Marketing, have talent for design, and handle user flows. I think most companies already seek out those skills, but generally struggle to find that talent so they settle by finding specialists who can do each function well.

I don't think it's revolutionary. They simply seem to have focused the role on what's important for them.

Sure. Product manager, product analysis,... they're bunch of "configurator" whose jobs is learn by heart how to config a system.

They're critical !

The issue is, their salary and their "political position" in a company is a concern. How can that "boring" role compare to a Senior Developer, or a Designer overall ?

The incentive structure of the PM role is to pump out new features when a lot of the time making something more reliable or easier to use has more user value. Design and Engineering should jointly take on this role

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.

> 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?

I doubt Amazon's web team are proud of Amazon ads and in-house product placement making their long-scaled product far less usable but they know it pays the bills so they keep turning the crank. The guy 20 years ago with the one click checkout clean flow feature and patent, yeah, he probably had some pride. But the guy injecting ads into your brain to try to break that flow, probably not so much. Pride is no longer a thing for most people. They work to get money to do the things they are or will be proud of in the meaningful parts of their lives. Work is shit for most people and everyone is waking up to that except some of his highly privileged silicon valley workers.

What is a PM?

Program, Project, or Product? which one?

Why is AirBnb still a thing ? Do people like doing chores while on a vacation ?

I think it is nice to have a kitchen if it’s more than a few days.

But the chores are a bit much sometimes

I highly recommend Hilton's Airbnb competitor Home2.

I just checked out the Home2 offerings near where I just stayed in an AirBnB. The prices are significantly higher and there are only three options (AirBnB had 25+).

So not quite there yet. :)

I really dislike AirBnB, but I don't think they've got anything to worry about with Hotel2. Even calling them a competitor seems like a massive stretch. Just poking around their site to see what's available in my area: $240/night gets you what is, well... a hotel room. Except that it has a couch and a microwave in it. Calling such a thing a "suite" makes me feel like Hilton is gaslighting me.

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 kitchen, meaning that I'd have to eat out every meal, which gets pricy with two kids).

"I don't understand why anyone ever uses AirBnB" is definitely a "tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids" kind of thing.

> 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.

I've exclusively lived in hotels/corporate rentals for over 20 years and wipe the sinks/counters every day because I like clean sinks and counters.

and I strip the bed mainly in case one of my phones/chargers/earring is accidentally inside (beds make excellent auxiliary desks...)

as a surprising aside, during off-season housekeeping sometimes hate guests that are overly considerate, because they need the hours!

Because hotels really are as bad for purpose as they are expensive?

Airbnb is a thing because landlords pulled their long term rental units off the market and converted them into short terms at X times the old rate. Landlords love it because they make way more profit. Business travellers love it because they can stay in a nice trendy house or apartment instead of a hotel and they expense the trip anyway.

The people who don’t love it are the neighbours and anyone in the market for long term rentals.

And anyone in the market for a vacation that doesn't want to gamble on a terrible host.

Hotels might not be great, but they're way less of a gamble.

It only takes a vacation being completely ruined once or twice before you swear of AirBNB completely.

Because hotels charge 100x the rate per night, all else being equal?

Personally I find social interactions with hotel employees far more exhausting than straightening up a bit.

I love hotels. I am not sure why Airbnb ever took off, other than price for large groups. Hotels you show up, you know you have a room because you booked with Hilton or whatever. They clean up the room after you leave for the day. They bring you stuff, carry luggage it’s great.

So far, I've found that using superhosts is a reliable way to get good results from AirBnB. I think a lot of the horror stories come from the original business model of crashing in Joe Sixpack's basement.

// social interactions with hotel employees far more exhausting

Jeez how much are you socializing with the employees that you find it exhausting?

Having traveled for years on Airbnb it's extremely rare I actually have to do any sort of "chores". At most throw some dishes in the dishwasher or strip the bed (but even then that's not the norm).

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