Kassen Qian

Somebody can go deep, like all the way down, and then distill it back out to everybody else. So you don’t have to do all of that work yourself. It does require a lot of reading for sure, but the benefit is great clarity of thought on complex topics. Engineers, partnerships, PMs, everybody is producing documents.

The Walt Disney Company inspired Airbnb’s founders, especially the storyboarding technique used by animators. Airbnb, the product, isn't our app. The product is staying at a guest’s home.

There is just the feeling that it should all be exceptional. We should push for an extreme quality bar on all of the fronts.

The typical time horizon for a product team’s north star, or long-term vision, is three to four years out.

Six concrete tactics product leaders can use to not just build remarkable products, but talented product managers:

Features don’t work, in the sense that they can be easily gamed. Behaviour has an advantage over features in that you can describe any feature in terms of behaviour, but you can’t describe behaviour in terms of features.

Problem 2: The need for a central source of truth - A change in plans (whether it was a priority or a launch date) was impossible to coordinate across all of these documents.