Did Airbnb kill the PM role?(exponentially.substack.com) |
Did Airbnb kill the PM role?(exponentially.substack.com) |
It's a shame how large organizations always form a layer of "product owners" who fight amongst each other for ownership and control.
“Mortgage: late Middle English: from Old French, literally ‘dead pledge’, from mort (from Latin mortuus ‘dead’) + gage ‘pledge’”
"AirBnB has increased the median long term rent in New York City by 1.4% in the last three years, resulting in a $380 rent increase for the median New York tenant" [https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/files/newsroom/channels/attac...]
"When demand is inelastic, even relatively small changes in housing supply can cause significant changes in the cost of housing.10 This intuition is clearly validated in a number of careful empirical studies looking precisely at the effect of Airbnb introduction and expansion on housing costs." [https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benef...]
"At the median owner-occupancy rate zipcode, we find that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.018% increase in rents and a 0.026% increase in house prices. Considering the median annual Airbnb growth in each zipcode, these results translate to an annual increase of $9 in monthly rent and $1,800 in house prices for the median zipcode in our data, which accounts for about one fifth of actual rent growth and about one seventh of actual price growth" [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3006832]
What's so wrong with houses and apartments being for locals and long-term stay, and tourists just staying in hotels?
Basic functions are not there, while the app already seems to be bloated.
I'm wondering if any of the product manager there ever used their product.
The hosting app is terribl. To the point that there's an ecosystem of apps for managing properties, and most of the functions are just basic features that either exist or should on the Airbnb app.
The app is so bad, that I can't trust it with showing me who arrives today in the summary page, instead I go to the calendar.
And yes, I feel like they should make their PMs or designers use the hosting side of the app.
If your designers are doing the latter two, that means they're not spending nearly enough time talking to customers
Please don't come at me with "but... requirements", good design requires you to understand your user. People are bad at articulating what they actually want and if your PM is not a designer (in a sense of comprehension and problem solving, not Figma proficiency) the "requirements" are going to be some uninspired platitudes.
What you refer to as "doing designs" is actually just pixel pushing, which has absolutely no place unless and until you figure out the functionality
They're critical !
The issue is, their salary and their "political position" in a company is a concern. How can that "boring" role compare to a Senior Developer, or a Designer overall ?
Someone still has to own the "why" and the "what" of the product you're building—if it's not the PM, then it is engineering manager or design leader taking on this role.
meh. lots of companies are wildly successful with crappy products built by 9-5 teams. or startups with founders that are embarrassed by v0.1 or even v1.0.
A post-scale consumer company should only ship something they are highly proud of.
Program, Project, or Product? which one?
The people who don’t love it are the neighbours and anyone in the market for long term rentals.
Hotels might not be great, but they're way less of a gamble.
It only takes a vacation being completely ruined once or twice before you swear of AirBNB completely.
In the meantime I had a condo next to the beach with a kitchen and beach toys in both locations for less than the hotel next door cost (which would not have a kitchen, meaning that I'd have to eat out every meal, which gets pricy with two kids).
But the chores are a bit much sometimes
Jeez how much are you socializing with the employees that you find it exhausting?
2. Having lived near Ashville, NC for two years, it's a particularly beautiful region and attractive vacation spot, so I especially believe it would attract corporate buyers looking to build an Airbnb vacation portfolio. Also not far from Atlanta, where Invitation Homes (a corporate buyer of residential housing) is active.
So not quite there yet. :)
Inflation is a fact. Globalization is a fact. Money is flowing from the entire planet into the US to find stable places to store it.
and I strip the bed mainly in case one of my phones/chargers/earring is accidentally inside (beds make excellent auxiliary desks...)
as a surprising aside, during off-season housekeeping sometimes hate guests that are overly considerate, because they need the hours!
I don't want to like AirBnb and similar, but every time we've tried to go back to hotel or traditional B&B the experience has been poor and expensive. I guess the alternative is to not travel at all... we don't very often and we're only visiting a city in the same (small) country and also seeing friends so it's not like I feel we're massively touristy people paying to travel half way around the world then skimping on the accommodation.
What? I've stayed 6 deep in a single room with two beds. Mom, dad, and us four siblings. And there's more than a decade between the kids. Three hotel rooms would have been an unimaginable luxury.
I'm firmly in the camp of piling the family into one room. There's no better way to bond.
I'll preface this by saying that I don't have kids. But, from my experience travelling with my parents when I was a kid... you really don't "need" three rooms.
That maybe the expectations you have now, but using AirBnb is pushing the externalities of those expectations onto the community you are visiting.
It's a pretty simple arrangement that one gets into when they purchase an apartment.
The difference between having dozens of neighbors with families, children, and strong ties to the community and not having those neighbors and community connections is in no way artificial.
Some reasons I care: schools that decline with population loss, the lack of available/affordable rental homes for local residents, the effects on local retail and service businesses, the tendency for hurried visitors to drive at unsafe speeds while staring at their phone for directions.
Problems that you do not experience remain real problems.
A never ending cycle of tourists staying for 2-10 days as your neighbours? That's definitely a nuisance over time, very improbable that churning through 50-100 groups of different people per year won't create issues to neighbours.
If you don't see how it could be an issue I think only if you lived in a touristic place, neighbour to AirBnBs, to actually understand. I say that not to provoke you but because I feel it's hard to empathise when it's not your day-to-day life. Just this year I experienced that when staying at a friend's place in Lisbon, I shared it on another HN thread:
> As an anecdote: a month ago I stayed a few days (5-7) at a friend's place I was visiting who lives in Lisbon, just on his floor there are 4 AirBnBs (owned by the same person). Not only it was a nuisance with noise for most of the days I was there it was also a nuisance to have drunk British girls banging on your door at 02.00 in the night when they don't remember the fucking apartment they are supposedly going to. My friend mentioned it's not uncommon for that to happen, or to have a gag of people show up to a party in one of the apartments. Other people living in the building have complained to AirBnB, to the police, to the housing association, nothing really happens.
Are you being obtuse on purpose to not give up on a flawed argument?