"I think of myself as a designer, but not the kind most of you are thinking of. I designed our business model, I designed our cost structure, I designed our org chart. I designed our business, how we work, and our story. Design isn't just what something looks like — it's fundamentally how something works. And I think that's one of the most important skills of the 21st century."

These words, spoken by Brian Chesky at the Figma Config conference on June 22, 2023, capture both his philosophy and the direction in which Airbnb has been moving. He made the decision to eliminate the traditional Product Manager (PM) role and fold it into marketing. This change is not merely an organizational restructuring — it stems from an intent to embed a design-centered mindset throughout the entire company.

The Background to Airbnb's Change

1. Solving Airbnb's Own Problems

Brian Chesky drove this change to address specific problems Airbnb was facing.

• Context of the problem: As Airbnb attracted multidisciplinary talent from diverse backgrounds, the organization became fragmented by function and department. Each team ran its own roadmap managed by PMs, but decisions were overly reliant on A/B testing and were often made without qualitative data. As a result, there were few meaningful changes to the core product while costs kept rising. For example, Airbnb had grown to over 150 screens and more than 70 user-facing policies, all of which added complexity to the user experience.

• The triggering event: The pandemic caused Airbnb to lose 80% of its revenue overnight. This crisis pushed Brian to simplify the organization and cut costs. He reviewed every roadmap, eliminated 80% of it, and began managing roadmaps and decisions directly from the center. At the same time, he redesigned the org structure and moved toward integrating PM and marketing into a single function.

2. A Design-Centered Organization

Brian has long held the intention of making Airbnb a design-centered company. His vision of design goes beyond the visual appearance of products — he values holistic design that encompasses the organization, its processes, and its business model.

Design Centralization and the PM–Marketing Merger

1. Combining Two Ideas

Brian's change combines two distinct ideas:

1. Design centralization: Placing designers at the center of the organization.
2. Merging PM and marketing: Collapsing the PM role into marketing as a single unified function.

These two ideas do not necessarily have to go together, however. Amazon, for example, has achieved success through product- and customer-centric processes, while Google and Facebook operate with engineering-led cultures. In other words, there is no single success formula that applies to every company.

2. The Changing Role of the PM

With PM and marketing merged, the responsibilities that PMs previously owned are likely to be distributed across other teams. This risks creating role ambiguity. For instance, the following tasks that PMs typically owned could fall through the cracks:

• Regular communication with users
• Data analysis and competitive analysis
• Market research and exploration of emerging technologies
• Maintaining product requirements documents (PRDs)
• Bug management and release testing
• Cross-team communication and decision-making coordination

When these responsibilities are scattered without a clear owner, product quality can suffer.

Centralized Decision-Making

To support design centralization, Airbnb adopted a centralized decision-making model. Brian designed a structure in which a core team of roughly 30–40 people manages the entire Airbnb experience in an integrated way and holds decision-making authority.

However, a centralized model risks reducing team autonomy and creating a bottleneck where too many decisions flow to the center. It also requires a clear definition of who will handle the data gathering, documentation, and cross-functional collaboration that decision-making depends on. This may ultimately require hiring additional program managers, data scientists, and operations managers.

The Importance of Holistic Design Capability

What Brian emphasizes is not simply UX/UI design, but holistic design capability that encompasses the organization, the business, and its processes. He believes this capability should be expected not only of designers but of PMs, engineers, and every other discipline.

"A design-centered mindset is not the exclusive domain of designers. Engineers, PMs, and designers alike must all adopt and grow into this way of thinking."

However, people with this kind of capability are rare, and developing it takes time. The industry as a whole will need new processes and structures to cultivate it at scale.

Conclusion: Airbnb's Experiment and Its Significance

Brian Chesky's change is a specific experiment designed to solve problems unique to Airbnb. It is not a universal model that every company can simply adopt, but it does underscore the importance of a design-centered mindset and a holistic approach to building an organization.

If this change takes hold successfully, Airbnb will stand not only as a home-sharing platform, but as an example of an innovative, design-centered organizational model for the industry to study.