Kassen Qian

The King of the Hill at Airbnb has switched from designers to product managers in most parts of the org. Vision-led rather than design-led.

Defining "Product culture" : a place that lets you do the job and deliver products that solve customer problems.

6. Always Be Grooming New Leaders: Articulate the mission early in candidate interviews. Hire listeners that display intellectual curiosity. Offer high-performing PMs opportunities to onboard others.

1. Focus only on what warrants discussion

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.

You’re an engineer: companies want PMs who can roll with engineers, speak the same language, grasp the technical concepts (and problems and opportunities) quickly, and by so doing gain the respect and trust of the people actually moving bits around. The best PMs are culturally engineers