Carlin is a GitHub Product Manager focused on GitHub Advanced Security and Dependabot. Her experience in software engineering and data science supports a data-driven approach to product management.
### Professional Background
- Works on GitHub Advanced Security.
- Focuses specifically on Dependabot.
- Brings experience in software engineering and data science.
### Personal Interests
- Lives in Washington with her partner and dog, Cookie.
- Enjoys cycling and competitive board games.
No technical blog post content was provided beyond this author biography.
Product teams are using Figma Make to turn abstract product ideas into interactive prototypes earlier in the process. By making concepts tangible, PMs can align designers and engineers, test assumptions, collect feedback, and build conviction before significant development begins. The article highlights examples from ServiceNow, Ticketmaster, and Affirm.
## Prototyping Instead of Relying Only on PRDs
- Product managers traditionally translate customer needs, design goals, and engineering constraints into shared decisions.
- Figma Make lets them create prototypes that demonstrate both a product’s appearance and behavior.
- Interactive prototypes provide more useful early feedback than static mockups or abstract explanations.
- Teams can identify problems, test ideas with users, and adjust direction before implementation progresses too far.
- Earlier visibility helps teams make better-informed decisions and build products that more closely meet user needs.
## Bringing Complex Product Thinking Into Shared Focus
- At ServiceNow, Product Director Ram Devanathan works with a design team serving multiple product groups, making dedicated design support difficult to obtain.
- He needed to redesign a configuration page containing 15–20 settings, including technical options affecting incident prioritization and system load.
- The initial mockup was functional but did not fully communicate the desired hierarchy, guidance, or tone.
- Ram used Figma Make to transform the mockup into a clearer prototype:
- Settings were grouped logically.
- Simpler options appeared first.
- Tooltips explained individual settings.
- A warning clarified that changes required restarting the service.
- The prototype gave Ram and the designer a shared, concrete representation of the intended experience.
- Figma Make templates can also embed design systems and UX patterns, allowing PMs to iterate consistently without requiring designers for every early exploration.
- Ram found that showing the idea directly was much more effective than describing it abstractly, helping the team reach agreement faster.
## Validating Features Before Building
- The article next introduces Ticketmaster’s use of Figma Make for validating new features before development.
- Ticketmaster applies prototypes to situations involving high-demand concert ticket purchases and internal dashboards for monitoring sales and troubleshooting issues.
- The provided excerpt ends before explaining the specific feature-validation process or the third approach involving Affirm.
Figma Make is presented less as a replacement for design or engineering and more as an early collaboration and validation tool. Product teams can use it to communicate complex behavior, explore alternatives, and secure alignment before committing substantial resources.
To provide a seamless user experience, Baedal Minjok (Baemin) successfully integrated KakaoTalk brand vouchers directly into its ordering system, overcoming significant technical and organizational barriers between platforms. This project was driven by a mission to resolve long-standing customer friction and strategically capture external purchase demand within the Baemin ecosystem. By bridging the gap between Kakao’s gifting infrastructure and Baemin’s delivery network, the team successfully transformed a fragmented journey into a unified, user-centric service.
### Bridging User Friction and Business Growth
- Addressed persistent Voice of Customer (VOC) complaints from users who found it inconvenient to use KakaoTalk vouchers through separate brand apps or physical store visits.
- Aimed to capture untapped external traffic and convert it into active order volume within the Baemin platform, enhancing customer retention and "lock-in" effects.
- Defined the project’s core essence as "connection," which served as a North Star for decision-making when technical constraints or business interests conflicted.
### Navigating Multi-Party Stakeholder Complexity
- Coordinated a massive ecosystem involving Kakao (the platform), F&B brands, third-party voucher issuers, and internal Baemin backend teams.
- Managed conflicting KPIs across organizations, balancing Kakao’s requirement for platform stability with voucher issuers' needs for settlement clarity.
- Employed "context-aware communication" to bridge terminology gaps, such as reconciling Baemin’s "register and use" logic with the voucher companies' "inquiry and approval" workflows.
### Standardizing External Voucher Integration
- Developed a standardized technical framework to accommodate diverse external voucher issuers while maintaining a consistent and simple interface for the end-user.
- Resolved technical trade-offs regarding API response speeds, error-handling policies, and real-time validation across disparate systems.
- Empowered Product Managers to act as "technical translators" and "captains," proactively managing complex dependency chains and prioritizing core features over secondary improvements to meet delivery timelines.
The successful integration of KakaoTalk vouchers demonstrates that overcoming platform silos requires more than just technical API mapping; it requires a fundamental shift toward user-centric thinking. By prioritizing the "seamlessness" of the connection over individual platform boundaries, organizations can unlock significant new growth opportunities and deliver a superior digital experience.
The POPM (Product Owner/Product Manager) training course at Kakao focuses on restructuring existing professional knowledge into a cohesive framework for solving real-world business problems. Rather than simply delivering new information, the program emphasizes aligning strategy with execution, transforming "strategy" from a vague concept into a practical set of decision-making criteria. The ultimate goal is to move teams away from a "release-only" mindset toward a cycle of continuous hypothesis verification and learning.
### Strategic Thinking and Metric Modeling
* **Strategic Decision Criteria**: Strategy is redefined as the standard for team judgment, utilizing frameworks like MECE, MVP, and priority-setting models to align daily tasks with long-term goals.
* **Metrics as Problem-Solving Language**: Key indicators such as Funnel, Retention, Cohort, and LTV are treated not just as data points, but as a language used to define and reveal underlying product issues.
* **Context-Based Design**: UX design is approached through "context-based logic" rather than intuition, encouraging teams to ask which specific design fits the current user journey.
### Systematic Experimentation and A/B Testing
* **The MASS Framework**: Experiments are designed and evaluated based on being Measurable, Attributable, Sensitive, and having a Short-term cycle.
* **Failure Analysis Routines**: The curriculum emphasizes the importance of establishing a routine for interpreting failed experiments, ensuring that every test contributes to the team's institutional knowledge.
* **Incremental Testing**: Encourages a culture of "starting small," giving teams the confidence to run experiments without requiring massive resource allocation.
### Building Repeatable Execution Loops
* **Metric-Based Retrospectives**: Teams transition from simply finishing a release to a structured loop of "Problem Definition → Hypothesis → Metric → Verification → Retrospective."
* **Formalizing Problem Definitions**: Using templates to 명문화 (formally document) the problem, expected behavior, and success metrics ensures that the entire team—not just the PO—understands the "why" behind every task.
* **Operational Rhythms**: Teams are adopting fixed weekly or bi-weekly cycles for sharing insights and adjusting priorities, turning data-driven execution into a natural habit.
The most critical takeaway for product teams is to constantly ask: "Is the work we are doing right now actually a solution to a defined problem, or are we just busy releasing features?" Success lies in moving beyond the sense of accomplishment from a launch and establishing a repeatable rhythm that validates whether those efforts truly move the needle.
Kakao developed its internal POPM (Product Owner/Product Manager) training program by treating the curriculum itself as an evolving product rather than a static lecture series. By applying agile methodologies such as data-driven prioritization and iterative versioning, the program successfully moved from a generic pilot to a structured framework that aligns teams through a shared language of problem-solving. This approach demonstrates that internal capability building is most effective when managed with the same rigor and experimentation used in software development.
## Strategic Motivation for POPM Training
* Addressed the inherent ambiguity of the PO/PM role, where non-visible tasks often make it difficult for practitioners to define their own growth or impact.
* Sought to resolve the disconnect between strategic problem definition (PO) and tactical execution (PM) within Kakao’s teams.
* Prioritized the creation of a "common language" to allow cross-functional team members to define problems, analyze metrics, and design experiments under a unified structure.
## Iterative Design and Versioning
* The program transitioned through multiple "versions," starting with an 8-session pilot that covered the entire lifecycle from bottleneck exploration to execution review.
* Based on participant feedback regarding high fatigue and low efficiency in long presentations, the curriculum was condensed into 5 core modules: Strategy, Metrics, Experiment, Design, and Execution.
* The instructional design shifted from "delivering information" to "designing a rhythm," utilizing a "one slide, one question, one example" rule to maintain engagement.
## Data-Driven Program Refinement
* Applied a "Product Metaphor" to education by calculating "Opportunity Scores" using a matrix of Importance vs. Satisfaction for each session.
* Identified "Data/Metrics" as the highest priority for redesign because it scored high in importance but low in satisfaction, indicating a structural gap in the teaching method.
* Refined the "features" of the training by redesigning worksheets to focus on execution routines and converting mandatory practice tasks into selective, flexible modules.
## Structural Insights for Organizational Growth
* Focused on accumulating "structure" rather than just training individuals, ensuring that even as participants change, the framework for defining problems remains consistent within the organization.
* Designed practice sessions to function as "thinking structures" rather than "answer-seeking" exercises, encouraging teams to bring their training insights directly into actual team meetings.
* Prioritized scalability and simplicity in the curriculum to ensure the structure can be adopted across different departments with varying product needs.
To build effective internal capabilities, organizations should treat training as a product that requires constant maintenance and versioning. Instead of focusing on one-off lectures, leaders should design structural "rhythms" and feedback loops that allow the curriculum to evolve based on the actual pain points of the practitioners.
Design education often teaches craft and user experience but not how design affects revenue, costs, growth, or product strategy. The authors argue that business fluency and product sense make designers more effective collaborators and decision-makers. Early-career designers should build these skills beyond the classroom through business courses, conversations with professionals, industry media, and hands-on product work.
## Why Business Matters in Design
- Design choices influence user engagement, retention, growth, and profitability.
- Poor experiences can frustrate users and cause them to abandon a product.
- Designers need to balance user needs with business goals and stakeholder priorities.
- Business knowledge helps designers:
- Understand how decisions affect revenue and costs
- Prioritize features in response to market competition
- Contribute to product roadmaps
- Communicate more effectively with product, research, marketing, and business teams
- Leaders from Figma, Microsoft, and Netflix describe business acumen as a major distinction between good and exceptional design organizations.
## The Gap in Design Education
- Many design programs focus heavily on design fundamentals and craft.
- Early-career designers often receive little instruction on connecting their work to measurable business outcomes.
- The authors discovered this gap through their experiences as Figma Campus Leaders and early-career product designers.
- They argue that creative quality and business impact should not be treated as opposing priorities; combining them can be a designer’s “superpower.”
## Take Business and Marketing Courses
- Students should supplement design coursework with classes in fields such as marketing and business.
- Case-study-based courses can show how companies approach market, customer, and product problems.
- Even courses without a direct UX focus can help designers understand how products are positioned, launched, and evaluated.
## Learn from Industry Professionals
- Coffee chats provide practical insight into how products are actually developed and how companies succeed.
- Designers should speak with more than product designers, including:
- Content designers
- UX researchers
- Business researchers
- Product and marketing professionals
- These conversations reveal how different stakeholders contribute to product decisions and understand industry economics.
## Follow Product and Business Discussions
- Newsletters and podcasts can help designers connect design decisions with broader business trends.
- Recommended resources include:
- **Lenny’s Newsletter**, focused on product building, growth, and careers
- **Masters of Scale**, featuring advice from business leaders
- **Dive Club**, which interviews design executives about product experience and organizational strategy
## Build and Ship Real Products
- Hands-on work is presented as one of the most effective ways to develop product sense.
- Student startups, industry roles, and other practical projects expose designers to constraints that classroom exercises often miss.
- Building and shipping products teaches designers how ideas perform in the real world and how design interacts with product and business decisions.
Designers should treat business understanding as a core part of their professional education, even when their formal programs do not. Combining design craft with product sense enables them to create work that is both valuable to users and meaningful to the organizations building it.
The article argues that storytelling and writing are not specialized talents reserved for professional writers; they are skills anyone can develop. Clear communication helps turn technical ideas, product plans, and design decisions into shared understanding and action. The difference between “good” and “bad” writers is largely practice, feedback, and willingness to revise—not innate ability.
## Why Storytelling Matters at Work
- Strong products, designs, and ideas depend on people who can explain:
- Why something should exist
- Who it serves
- How it improves people’s lives
- Writing helps teams bridge the gap between imagination and execution.
- At Figma, engineers write technical proposals, designers explain their decisions, and product managers create PRDs to align teams.
- Companies such as Microsoft and Slack also use writing to encourage deep thinking, clear communication, and buy-in.
## Challenging the “Bad Writer” Myth
- Many people mistake their rough first drafts for the polished writing they read elsewhere.
- Every writer begins with imperfect work; improvement comes through:
- Feedback
- Editing
- Deliberate practice
- Writing is described as organized thinking: putting ideas on paper can clarify problems and lead to better decisions.
- The ability to think clearly is a foundation for becoming a better writer.
## Overcoming the Blank Page
- Speaking an idea aloud or explaining it to someone else can reveal a clearer, more natural structure.
- Reading widely—including books, magazines, product packaging, and online discussions—helps develop writing ability.
- Leslie Lamport’s observation captures the central lesson: without writing, people may only think they are thinking.
The practical recommendation is to treat writing as a learnable muscle: read often, write imperfect drafts, seek feedback, and use storytelling to make ideas understandable and actionable.
Software features are becoming easier to copy as the number of applications rapidly expands. The post argues that emotional resonance—how an app makes users feel—will become the stronger competitive moat. Product teams should therefore design deliberately for wonder, connection, reassurance, and delight, not just functionality.
## Emotional Resonance in Everyday Technology
- The author’s experience as a parent shifted his view from limiting screen time to valuing technology that encourages creativity, curiosity, and connection.
- Children’s products such as Pok Pok and Yoto create emotional impact through small details:
- Playful sounds and character reactions
- Tactile buttons with satisfying resistance
- Experiences that inspire offline play
- These details make the products enjoyable and worth paying for, beyond their basic educational or functional value.
## Small Design Details Create Meaning
- Everyday apps can produce similar emotional responses:
- An Apple Watch’s buzz and completed activity ring can make exercise feel rewarding.
- Dating-app interactions, message reactions, achievement badges, and task-completion checkmarks provide encouragement.
- Clear security guidance can reduce anxiety after a data breach.
- Copywriting, animation, sound, motion, and haptics often matter more than the number of available features.
- The most meaningful product experiences address users’ underlying emotions, such as relief, pride, comfort, excitement, or reassurance.
## Why Features Are No Longer Enough
- Product teams often prioritize feature requests because they are concrete and easy to track.
- Emotional outcomes are harder to quantify and may depend on users’ deeper fears, hopes, and motivations.
- According to IDC, there could be twice as many applications in 2028 as in 2024.
- As software becomes more abundant, competitors will be able to reproduce functionality quickly and cheaply.
- A distinctive emotional experience is harder to copy because it depends on nuanced design choices and a deep understanding of users.
## Putting Resonance on the Roadmap
- Teams should make emotional responses an explicit product objective rather than an accidental byproduct.
- Research should look beyond what users request and examine how they feel and behave in real-world contexts.
- Product decisions should intentionally support emotions such as wonder, confidence, connection, and accomplishment.
The practical recommendation is to treat emotional resonance as a core product strategy. Features may attract users temporarily, but products that consistently make people feel understood, reassured, or delighted are more likely to build lasting loyalty.
The article gathers practical workplace advice from leaders at Ableton, Snapchat, Coda, and other companies. Their principles emphasize finding inspiration beyond familiar sources, automating low-value work, shortening users’ path to meaningful results, designing meetings around clear purposes, and maintaining momentum through difficult work. Together, they argue that effective work depends less on rigid formulas than on experience-based judgment.
## Look Beyond Design for Inspiration
- Pablo Sánchez of Ableton recommends drawing ideas from emotions, memories, science, nature, and other fields—not just existing design conventions.
- Designing for yourself first can produce work with genuine personal energy that resonates with users.
- Ableton’s Note app borrowed from Brutalist architecture rather than traditional music software, creating a stripped-down experience focused on immediacy.
## Automate Work That Gets in the Way
- Product managers should focus primarily on understanding customers, delivering value, and enabling sound decisions—not perfecting internal artifacts.
- When documentation, reviews, or OKRs consume as much time as product development, teams should delegate or automate them.
- Peter Yang uses AI to synthesize brainstorms, summarize customer feedback, and improve product requirement documents.
## Accelerate Users’ Time to “Magic”
- Products should help new users reach their first meaningful “aha moment” quickly instead of overwhelming them with tutorials.
- The goal is to move people from following instructions to confidently creating and sharing something of their own.
- Snapchat’s Lens Studio team mapped the user journey and reduced the path from download to first submitted project from 19 steps to four milestones.
## Cultivate Different Types of Meetings
- Coda’s Shishir Mehrotra distinguishes three meeting categories:
- **Cadence meetings:** Regular staff meetings, standups, and syncs that track progress against goals.
- **Catalyst meetings:** Decision-making forums, product reviews, and design critiques that resolve questions and drive change.
- **Context meetings:** All-hands meetings, off-sites, and orientations that share information, establish context, and build connections.
- Teams need a healthy balance, since too many catalyst meetings can cause burnout.
## Keep Moving Through Difficult Work
- Dan Mall compares difficult progress to the tedious parts of training that are usually omitted from an exciting montage.
- His advice is to build momentum to counteract the discouragement and monotony that can accompany worthwhile goals.
The broader recommendation is to focus attention on meaningful outcomes: use unconventional sources of inspiration, remove unnecessary effort, guide users quickly toward value, give meetings a clear purpose, and keep building momentum when progress feels slow.
Peter Yang argues that great product management is a craft, not an instinct or checklist. Product managers must continually develop product sense, deeply understand customers, think strategically before executing, and protect quality through difficult trade-offs. The goal is to build products customers genuinely value, even when that requires delaying milestones or abandoning a beloved project.
## Product Sense Must Be Cultivated
- Product sense is the ability to create products or changes that have the intended impact on users.
- It is not a permanent, intuitive skill; markets and customer needs constantly change.
- PMs should continually improve through:
- Empathy
- Creativity
- Attention to craft
- Humility and ongoing learning
## Use Empathy to Diagnose the Problem
- Teams often rush into solutions before clearly understanding the customer or business problem.
- Peter cites empathy as a product manager’s superpower.
- PMs can build empathy by:
- Treating customers like members of the team
- Speaking directly with them
- Personally using the product as customers do, even for just an hour
- Accurate problem diagnosis should come before defining a vision or solution.
## Start with Big Ideas Before Daily Execution
- Once the problems are understood, teams should pause before getting absorbed in execution.
- Collaboratively define:
- Mission
- Vision
- Strategy
- Brainstorm ambitious, “blue-sky” ideas and prioritize them.
- Seek simple solutions—potentially a few clear steps—that best address customer needs.
- New learning may require changing priorities and making trade-offs.
## Protect Quality and Know When to Change Course
- Quality may require missing a launch date or short-term OKR.
- In one example, Yang chose to add an important feature identified through customer conversations, even though it meant missing a quarterly deadline.
- Craft means obsessing over details, trade-offs, bugs, and the extra work required to create a worthwhile experience.
- Product managers must also recognize when a project should be canceled.
- At Reddit, Yang worked on Reddit Talk, a well-loved live audio product, but the project was ended during an economic downturn because it did not improve the company’s most important metrics.
- Good product judgment includes considering the company’s broader needs rather than becoming attached to a particular product.
The practical recommendation is to keep customer understanding and product quality at the center of decision-making, while remaining flexible enough to delay, redirect, or stop work when the evidence demands it.
Figma’s “The Handoff,” published January 22, 2024, reflects on how collaboration turns ideas into products. Using the handoff as a metaphor for the continuous exchange between teammates, the issue reviews Figma’s major 2023 work and explores the evolving relationship between people, technology, and AI. It also highlights stories intended to help readers work better and stay curious in 2024.
## Collaboration as an Ongoing Handoff
- Figma compares product design to an American football handoff: ideas repeatedly move between people as they are developed and refined.
- This concept is closely tied to Figma’s multiplayer approach to collaboration.
- The issue serves as a retrospective on the launches, lessons, and ideas Figma is carrying from 2023 into 2024.
## Best of Figma
- Figma revisits the top 10 things it shipped in 2023.
- The selection includes both small details with significant impact and major product launches.
- The “MVP” label is used playfully to mean “Most Valuable Players,” rather than “Minimum Viable Products.”
## Reconsidering Our Relationship with Technology
- “Looking 4 love” presents 36 questions about people’s relationships with technology.
- Topics include first usernames, finding community online, and innovations that inspire optimism.
- The feature acknowledges digital oversaturation and uncertainty while asking what might help people reconnect with technology.
## Building AI Features That Matter
- The issue argues that AI will remain a major force in 2024, but its potential depends on thoughtful product management.
- Leaders from Duolingo, LinkedIn, and Asana discuss how to move beyond hype.
- Their focus is on building AI features that address real user needs and earn trust.
## Designing Better Tools for Work
- Figma highlights its collaboration with Work Louder on the Figma Creator Micro mechanical keyboard.
- The device includes 12 keys and two rotary encoders, providing up to 48 shortcuts.
- The story presents the keyboard as both an efficiency tool and a celebration of the tactile, creative culture surrounding mechanical keyboards.
Overall, the issue encourages readers to view work as a collaborative exchange: ship thoughtfully, use technology intentionally, and carry the most valuable lessons from the past year into the next.
Figma’s first editorial issue argues that personal and professional growth often comes from stepping outside conventional roles, metrics, and workflows. It highlights human creativity in an AI era, alternative career paths, unconventional organizational structures, and the danger of reducing work to easily measured outcomes. The overall conclusion is that progress requires embracing ambiguity, risk, and broader definitions of success.
## Human Creativity in the Age of AI
- John Maeda argues that people remain valuable because they think in circuitous, non-linear ways.
- Unlike machines optimized for efficiency and shortcuts, humans can make unexpected creative leaps.
- This “uphill thinking” involves greater uncertainty and risk, but can produce greater rewards.
- The accompanying discussion explores how designers can work with AI without abandoning distinctly human innovation.
## UX Design as a Second Chance
- CROP, a California nonprofit, trains formerly incarcerated people for careers in UX design.
- Its program uses Figma to provide practical skills and an alternative path into the technology industry.
- Fellow Ron Scott, released after 27 years in prison, sees product design as a way to influence how people interact with technology.
- The program also reflects a broader belief that more people should have a voice in shaping products and services.
## Challenging Conventional Product Roles
- Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky’s Config talk described how he helped rescue Airbnb by emphasizing design and eliminating the traditional product management function.
- The decision sparked debate about the relationship between designers and product managers.
- Figma presents the issue less as a true rivalry than as an opportunity to question inherited workplace structures.
- Industry leaders suggest that teams may benefit from abandoning rigid titles and recognizing that everyone is working toward the same goal.
## Rethinking Productivity and Perspective
- The issue points to criticism from Gergely Orosz and Kent Beck of attempts to measure developer productivity through narrow, quantifiable outcomes.
- It asks whether an apparently unproductive colleague might instead be judged by an inadequate definition of success.
- A reference to filmmaker Wong Kar Wai reinforces the importance of framing: what is excluded from view can matter as much as what is visible.
## Making Space for Better Ideas
- The closing reflection argues that conversational interfaces such as ChatGPT can confine thinking to “chat boxes.”
- Product designer Aosheng Ran suggests that giving ideas more space could reveal possibilities missed by conventional text-based interaction.
Figma’s issue recommends looking beyond labels, efficiency metrics, and established roles. In practice, that means protecting room for creative detours, evaluating work more thoughtfully, and using technology to expand—not narrow—human possibilities.
Brian Chesky’s claim that designers can lead products—and even companies—has sparked debate about the future role of product managers. The article examines whether Airbnb’s design-led approach represents a broader shift or an overstatement of design’s independence from business and product strategy. Five leaders from design and product offer perspectives on how these disciplines should work together.
## Chesky’s Design-Led Vision
- At Config 2023, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky argued that designers are increasingly positioned to work alongside engineers rather than report to or be directed by product managers.
- He suggested that designers can help drive products and, in some cases, lead entire companies.
- The ultimate goal, in his view, is not organizational status but creating products that people genuinely love.
## Airbnb’s Near-Death Story
- Chesky framed Airbnb’s transformation as a story of crisis, recovery, and growth shaped heavily by design.
- His conversation with Figma CEO Dylan Field drew attention because it connected design decisions directly to business survival and post-IPO growth.
- The talk generated strong reactions among designers, including the impression that Airbnb had eliminated its product management function entirely.
## The Debate Over Product Management
- The article questions whether Airbnb’s example signals “the end” of the all-powerful product manager.
- It cautions that public reactions may have exaggerated or misinterpreted Chesky’s comments.
- Rather than presenting a simple design-versus-PM conflict, the discussion invites a closer examination of how responsibility, decision-making, and leadership are distributed across product organizations.
## Five Industry Perspectives
The article brings together leaders from design and product to interpret Chesky’s ideas:
- Julie Zhuo discusses the importance of deep domain knowledge.
- Steve Johnson argues that design disconnected from business becomes mere decoration.
- Sho Kuwamoto considers whether product organizations should favor creative work over layers of middle management.
- Lenny Rachitsky explains why capable product managers remain difficult to find.
- Yuhki Yamashita explores the value of embracing work in progress.
The practical lesson is not that companies should abolish product management, but that design should have a stronger voice in product direction. Effective organizations likely need designers, engineers, and product leaders to share ownership rather than operate through rigid hierarchies.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky argues that design should shape business strategy, not merely product appearance. He describes how Airbnb drifted from its design-led origins as it grew, becoming fragmented, experiment-heavy, and less innovative. By reconnecting with the principles of Apple’s design renaissance, Chesky began reconsidering how the company should be organized and led.
## Pulling Airbnb Back from the Brink of Failure
- Airbnb was founded by two designers and an engineer, challenging conventional views that designers do not start companies.
- Its original philosophy was to bring design into the boardroom and create a product that felt distinctive and meaningful.
- By late 2019, Chesky feared Airbnb had become unrecognizable:
- The company had roughly 10 divisions, each with numerous subdivisions.
- Product managers and A/B testing dominated decision-making.
- More employees and projects produced fewer visible product changes while increasing costs.
- Chesky believed he had lost the courage required for creative leadership and that conventional corporate practices had displaced Airbnb’s founding vision.
- The timing was especially difficult because Airbnb was preparing for its IPO, making major organizational changes risky.
## Rediscovering Design-Led Leadership
- During the 2019 holiday season, Chesky met Hiroki Asai, a former Apple creative director, and Jony Ive, Apple’s former design leader.
- Their perspective reminded him of the design-centered culture Steve Jobs had established at Apple.
- Chesky began exploring whether Airbnb could return to a similarly integrated model, where design and creative judgment played a central role in how the company operated.
## Design’s Place in Business
- Chesky suggests that designers are rarely elevated to CEO roles because businesses tend to favor scientific, analytical, and operational methods.
- Creative work requires conviction and risk-taking, qualities that can weaken as organizations become larger and more bureaucratic.
- His experience led him to question whether standard corporate structures are compatible with maintaining a company’s original creative vision.
The excerpt presents Chesky’s central lesson: sustained growth can dilute a company’s founding principles unless leaders deliberately preserve design, courage, and customer-centered decision-making at the heart of the business.
Great products come from clarity: teams need to understand the customer problem, the reason it matters, and what can realistically be built. Managers help create that clarity by focusing on customer value rather than internal goals, involving customers directly, filtering ideas, and keeping teams aligned. The article argues that practical, collaborative decision-making produces stronger products than pursuing organizational priorities or exciting ideas in isolation.
## Design for Customers, Not OKRs
- Avoid “shipping the org chart”—building products around company hierarchy instead of customer needs.
- Localized goals and narrowly defined OKRs can cause teams to solve the wrong problems.
- Roadmaps and planning should make the product’s value proposition visible to the wider organization.
- Prototypes help teams:
- Identify whether they are addressing the right problem.
- Build leadership support.
- Let decision-makers explore a solution before committing to it.
- Make product decisions faster and more transparently.
## Put Customers to Work
- Ironclad used a customer round table of 10–15 participants to understand how customer needs changed during the pandemic.
- Insights from these conversations shaped a major portion of the company’s 18-month product roadmap.
- Customers contributed throughout the process by reviewing concepts and beta-testing features.
- Co-creation improves product quality while also making customers more invested in the final outcome.
## Filter Ideas Through Three Questions
- Collaboration can generate too many ideas to pursue effectively; Work & Co. produced nearly 50 concepts for an IBM Research platform within weeks.
- Managers should evaluate ideas by asking:
- Why does this product or platform need to exist?
- What does it need to do?
- How will we build it?
- The goal is not to choose the most exciting idea, but the most valuable and shippable one.
- Strong product management connects creativity with feasibility.
## Keep Teams Focused
- After selecting a direction, managers must help teams remain focused on executing it.
- The article introduces the Eisenhower Matrix as a strategy for prioritizing work according to urgency and importance.
- This kind of prioritization helps teams concentrate on meaningful product work rather than being distracted by less consequential tasks.
Managers should ground product decisions in customer value, use prototypes and customer collaboration to reduce uncertainty, and apply practical prioritization to turn promising ideas into products that can actually ship.
