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.

The Lean Startup model has pretty much become the orthodoxy for launching a new product or company today: build an extremely rough version one, launch it, find some users, and then iterate on the product as quickly as you can (pivoting).

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

Most PR/FAQs are rejected, and the ones that pass often generate further questions that need to be answered. This is a feature, not a bug. Spending time up front to think through all the details of a product preserves your company's resources to build products that will yield the highest impact for customers and the business.

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.

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.

The flow: Think It = figure out what type of product we are building and why. Build It = create a minimum viable product that is ready for real users. Ship It = gradually roll out to 100% of all users, while measuring and improving. Tweak It = Continuously improve the product. This isn't really an end state; the product stays in Tweak It until it... See more