New year. I want to talk about the most contentious debate I saw in tech this past year — and somehow it had nothing to do with AI.

At Figma’s Config 2023 conference back in June, Brian Chesky told the audience that Airbnb “got rid of the classic product management function.” The internet went nuts. PMs panicked. Founders cheered. Twitter threads stretched for days. Hot takes piled up like laundry nobody wanted to fold.

Here’s what most people missed: Chesky didn’t eliminate product management. He combined PM and product marketing into a single function. Airbnb still has people doing product work — they just reorganized how that work gets done, with Chesky himself taking a more hands-on role in product direction.

The nuance got lost in the noise. But the debate revealed something real about where product management is headed.

The numbers tell a complicated story #

The PM role was already under pressure before Chesky’s statement. Payscale’s 2023 data showed that Senior Product Manager had the highest planned-departure rate of any role they tracked. Job satisfaction scores were hitting new lows. The market was flooded with PM candidates after the 2022 layoff waves — which meant more competition for fewer open positions.

At the same time — and this is what makes it complicated — the function itself was elevating. Over a third of Fortune 100 companies now have a Chief Product Officer, a 41% increase over three years. Product-led growth became the dominant go-to-market strategy for SaaS. Companies weren’t getting rid of product thinking; they were promoting it to the C-suite.

So which is it? Is product management dying or ascending?

Both. Depends what you mean by “product management.”

The split #

What I think is actually happening is a bifurcation. The PM role is splitting into two distinct things.

Strategic product leadership. This is the CPO-track work: market positioning, portfolio strategy, business model design, pricing, Go-To-Market alignment. It requires deep business acumen and the ability to make bets with incomplete information. This work is gaining status and compensation.

Tactical product management. The classic PM work: writing specs, prioritizing backlogs, running standups, being the “glue” between engineering and design. This work is getting squeezed — partly by better tooling, partly by engineers who are increasingly comfortable making product decisions themselves, partly by organizations (like Airbnb) that decided this coordination layer wasn’t worth its overhead.

The debate wasn’t really about whether PMs matter. It was about which kind of PM work matters.

What I’ve learned as a CTO #

I’ve been on every side of this. I was a product manager at Itau BBA early in my career, managing an online stock trading platform. I’ve managed PMs at TaskRabbit. Now at DreamFlare, I’m the one deciding what product roles we need.

My honest take: the best PMs I’ve worked with were irreplaceable. They synthesized customer research, market context, technical constraints and business goals into coherent strategy. They made everyone around them better.

The worst PMs I’ve worked with? Project managers with a fancier title — shuffling tickets and asking engineers for status updates.

The gap between those two is enormous. And the industry flooded the market with the second type during the growth years.

At DreamFlare — we’re about 15 people — I don’t have a dedicated PM. I handle product direction myself, with engineers contributing heavily to feature scoping and prioritization. That works for our size and stage. It wouldn’t work at 100 people; the coordination cost would eat me alive.

The Chesky model isn’t universal #

Chesky’s approach works for Airbnb because of specific conditions: a founder with exceptional product taste who wants to be deeply involved, a mature product that’s optimizing more than exploring, and enough organizational muscle to handle the coordination overhead that PMs used to absorb.

Most companies don’t have those conditions. Most founders aren’t Steve Jobs-level product thinkers — sorry, but it’s true. Most products aren’t mature enough for top-down product direction. And most organizations need someone whose entire job is bridging the gap between what customers need, what engineering can build, and what the business can sustain.

The lesson from Airbnb isn’t “fire your PMs.” It’s “make sure your PMs are doing strategic work that justifies their role, not just coordination that could be handled by better processes and tools.”

What 2024 PMs should worry about #

If I were a PM right now, I’d be thinking about three things.

First: the ability to work directly with data. PMs who can’t write SQL, who can’t pull their own analytics, who rely on analysts for every question — that’s a vulnerability. The tools have gotten accessible enough that there’s no excuse.

Second: comfort with ambiguity at a strategic level. The tactical work is getting automated or absorbed. The strategic work — which market should we enter? should we build or buy? how do we price this? — requires judgment that no tool replaces.

Third: genuine technical fluency. Not writing code, but understanding architectural tradeoffs, knowing what’s hard versus what’s tedious, being able to evaluate whether an engineering estimate is reasonable. The PMs who survive will be the ones engineers actually want in the room.

The takeaway #

The PM debate of 2023 wasn’t really about product managers. It was about the broader question of which roles justify their existence when organizations get serious about efficiency. PMs were just the most visible example.

Every role — engineering management included (I’m not immune to this) — should be asking: “If this role disappeared tomorrow, what specific work wouldn’t get done?” If the answer is “coordination and status updates,” that’s a problem.

If the answer is “nobody would be synthesizing the customer, market, and technical picture into a coherent strategy,” then the role is safe. More than safe — it’s essential.

Happy new year. Go make sure you’re in the second category.