The best products and features I've ever worked on were run by engineering and design working very closely together, while the PM role was pretty much exclusively stakeholder / client communication.
It's a shame how large organizations always form a layer of "product owners" who fight amongst each other for ownership and control.
They did kill a whole bunch of things... like the ability to rent at a reasonable rate and the ability to get a mortgage that doesn't lean heavily on the 'mort' part.
Yeah I don't really think a meaningfully larger amount people are traveling because Airbnb is an app that exist, so demand from tourism should stay flat, no?
Apartments in residential buildings are well.. apartments, not hotels. If you're a tourist, go to a hotel, I don't want a new set of loud obnoxius neighbors partying every few days next door to my apartment (and a shared wall in between). The apartment that should be rented out at cheaper monthly rate is now getitng rented out to lud tourists per daily rates, and that is a bad thing for locals living in that city. Some areas are already destroyed by airbnbs, so banning airbnbs (and all the other short-term rentals of residential apartments) should be banned.
An apartment building is owned collectively and with that comes a set of rules. In most places you aren't allowed to be a nuisance, even though you own a share of the house you don't get to dictate or do whatever you want just because you own something. Your property is just a part of a larger property, respect others or get the fuck out.
It's a pretty simple arrangement that one gets into when they purchase an apartment.
Because it's an apartment building with shared space, shared resources and shared investments. If your neighbors plot is a residential plot, he cannot build a pig farm there or a nuclear power plant. If your neighbors apartment is an apartment, he cannot have a shooting range, a bar, a strip club or a hotel there. There's a difference between occasional guests and airBnB, the same as there is a difference between a friend who helps you fix your car vs someone who regulary fixes cars for money.
As long as the property owner registers their short term rental with the local government and pays their taxes, and as long as their guests are respectful and don’t cause any trouble, why do you even care?
not looking at actual hard cold data but it's easy for someone to come to this annedonatal conclusion. In Asheville NC my entire neighborhood is being bought up by a corporation that is doing airbnb/VRBO. Also very hard to get ahold of anyone in case of a noise complaint.
Are you sure that the corporation is doing the buying? There are only a few of these and they are relatively small. There are some large property management firms (Vacasa, Evolve) who only work on behalf of individual property owners but appear as the owner of a property on Airbnb & Vrbo.
1. When the grandparent post said "corporations", they probably mean something like the Blackstones & Blackstones of the world, who are not small and both mentioned in this article about their residential housing activity: https://slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-hous...
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.
"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]
In high touristy areas you cannot buy a house at all at normal...ish prices, because buyers are overpaying a lot, becase they intend to rent it out via airbnb, so locals are getting pushed out of those areas.
What's so wrong with houses and apartments being for locals and long-term stay, and tourists just staying in hotels?
There’s nothing wrong with what you propose but it doesn’t offer a get-rich scheme, which is what really fuels short-term rental growth. It’s the new house flipping.
If you are travelling as a single person or a couple hotels sure. As a family the hotel experience is really bad or out of reach price wise. I'm just about to go on a vacation and we looked into hotels vs airbnb quite extensively. We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms. For the same as OK looking motel we can stay in a nice house with parking and a good size kitchen.
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.
But tourism is a luxury, and people renting out apartments on airbnb is making that apartment unafordable for long-term rental for locals, who actually have to live there. Sure, you might like the cheaper option of an unregulated hotel, but the locals would prefer you to just go to a normal hotel, since that's what the hotels were built for. At some point, even the local governments will have to bend over for the will off the 'masses' (compared to a few individuals profiteering from this), because people who have nowhere to live are in the group of people who have "nothing to lose anymore", and as a politician, you don't want a critical mass of those.
> We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms.
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.
>We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms.
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.
Bluntly put, access to affordable housing trumps affordable vacationing. If your problem is where to take your family for holidays, you are already out of touch with people struggling to find homes.
If money is flowing to the US to buy real estate, I say good. That’s more money being pumped into our economy, more money going to local communities via property taxes. Let’s build more real estate meet this demand.
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.
Ever use the VRBO hosting app? Almost unusable. Sooo delayed on every button push. Horrible onboarding experience with no messages of what to expect. Can’t edit the property description from the app, have to use the website. The effing property description!!
At Microsoft many years ago, they used to put a lot of product design work on PMs (who didn't have the training or time / bandwidth to do that well). I think this was the Ballmer era...
Personally, I think a PM that doesn't have training / skills to do product design work is a glorified note-taker.
I don't necessarily mean the implementation skills of "making screens", but arguably that skill is the easiest to obtain. Otherwise you end up with a weird division of labor, where the PM actually does all the creative design work and the designer is an implementation monkey, which I don't know any designers that are good that would want that job
Yep exactly what happened at Microsoft, hence Vista and all the other products that spilled out of Ballmer's tenure like trash out of an overturned dump truck
It just depends if you hire more designers or PMs. Doing designs is a lot of work, but so is talking to customers and developing high level product strategy - talking internally about what needs to be done.
If your designers are doing the latter two, that means they're not spending nearly enough time talking to customers
how are designers making designs without talking to customers? Who are they designing it for then?
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
Sounds like Apple, right? You focus on product marketing, keep the decision-making close knit, and say "no" a lot. You can go a long time as an engineer there without ever talking to a product person.
None of this sounds revolutionary to me. This article implies PMs at AirBnB should handle the role of Product Marketing, have talent for design, and handle user flows. I think most companies already seek out those skills, but generally struggle to find that talent so they settle by finding specialists who can do each function well.
Sure. Product manager, product analysis,... they're bunch of "configurator" whose jobs is learn by heart how to config a system.
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 ?
The incentive structure of the PM role is to pump out new features when a lot of the time making something more reliable or easier to use has more user value. Design and Engineering should jointly take on this role
Getting rid of a job title doesn't mean getting rid of the work that needs doing.
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.
…quite likely at the cost of other important work that designers and engineers would otherwise spend their time doing. You can move chess pieces around all you want - and sometimes there are reasons to do that - but every org structure change comes with unintended consequences.
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.
I doubt Amazon's web team are proud of Amazon ads and in-house product placement making their long-scaled product far less usable but they know it pays the bills so they keep turning the crank. The guy 20 years ago with the one click checkout clean flow feature and patent, yeah, he probably had some pride. But the guy injecting ads into your brain to try to break that flow, probably not so much. Pride is no longer a thing for most people. They work to get money to do the things they are or will be proud of in the meaningful parts of their lives. Work is shit for most people and everyone is waking up to that except some of his highly privileged silicon valley workers.
not really. it's just one way to look at it and the way I would expect a "designer CEO" does. there are plenty of apps/sites built inside of billion-dollar companies by teams that aren't highly proud. your bank app, maybe?
Airbnb is a thing because landlords pulled their long term rental units off the market and converted them into short terms at X times the old rate. Landlords love it because they make way more profit. Business travellers love it because they can stay in a nice trendy house or apartment instead of a hotel and they expense the trip anyway.
The people who don’t love it are the neighbours and anyone in the market for long term rentals.
I just stayed at two AirBnBs. I'm not sure what "doing chores" means. Sure I had to tidy up a bit when I left, but I would do that regardless because I'm a decent human being. Even when I stay at a hotel I wipe down the sink and strip the bed before I leave.
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).
Ok I guess I'm special then. It takes all of 20 seconds to wipe down the sink after I've picked up all my stuff, and maybe 10 seconds to strip the sheets. I mostly strip the sheets to make sure the next person gets a fresh set.
I really dislike AirBnB, but I don't think they've got anything to worry about with Hotel2. Even calling them a competitor seems like a massive stretch. Just poking around their site to see what's available in my area: $240/night gets you what is, well... a hotel room. Except that it has a couch and a microwave in it. Calling such a thing a "suite" makes me feel like Hilton is gaslighting me.
I just checked out the Home2 offerings near where I just stayed in an AirBnB. The prices are significantly higher and there are only three options (AirBnB had 25+).
I love hotels. I am not sure why Airbnb ever took off, other than price for large groups. Hotels you show up, you know you have a room because you booked with Hilton or whatever. They clean up the room after you leave for the day. They bring you stuff, carry luggage it’s great.
So far, I've found that using superhosts is a reliable way to get good results from AirBnB. I think a lot of the horror stories come from the original business model of crashing in Joe Sixpack's basement.
Having traveled for years on Airbnb it's extremely rare I actually have to do any sort of "chores". At most throw some dishes in the dishwasher or strip the bed (but even then that's not the norm).
It's a shame how large organizations always form a layer of "product owners" who fight amongst each other for ownership and control.