AMA: Airbnb Head of Product, China Platform, Adrianne Wang Martinson on Establishing Product Management

There is no doubt that retaining top talent is critical to any organization not only because of the value top talent brings, but also because it takes time to find and ramp up a new hire. While establishing a new team, hiring the right person who is a good fit for the team and the company contributes greatly to talent retention. What I offer to my talented people to retain them are: understanding, recognition and growth opportunities, which are all built on a trusted foundation. I strongly belie ...Read More

Resource constraints are a very common challenge for any team and company that I’ve worked for. I tend to focus on business priorities and how the identified product area can make an impact on those priorities in my framework rather than letting resource constraints limit my thought process. Once everyone, including leadership, stakeholders andt the team, are all agreed on the business priorities, I will then look into several solutions and how these solutions can move the needle. Another import ...Read More

The first product manager of a startup plays a crucial role as one of the foundational members. S/he not only needs to quickly lay the product strategy, create short and long term roadmaps, and build development processes, but also potentially extend responsibilities wherever help is needed, including user research, marketing or even as a QA engineer. Here are initial 30/60/90 day goals to achieve this as the first product manager: 30 days: Be open minded to listen, observe and learn Understand ...Read More

A product management role varies from company to company, and size of the company is subjective. I will share my point of view, assuming a small company has less than 50 employees and a large company has more than 500 employees, in several dimensions. Ownership and Scope In large companies, product managers often own established areas, like a feature or feature sets. Large collaborations are required with other product managers for alignment and dependencies. It is unlikely to have opportunities ...Read More

One challenge I encountered as the product lead for a platform team was to identify the product management needs for some of the relatively technical product areas, such as Machine Learning and APIs. I had to justify these needs as many leaders and stakeholders felt that an eng manager or technical program manager were more suitable given their technical knowledge and depth. Realizing the fact that many platform areas are abstract and complicated to understand compared to some user facing featur ...Read More

My China Platform team owns the China Airbnb product for community services/customer support, trust, compliance and application infrastructure, including ML and mobile. I have 1-2 product managers overseeing each product area. I also have dedicated engineering, data science, design, content and operation teams, if it applies, to work closely with the product manager for each area. I prefer to have each product manager own a well defined product area to not only have true ownership but also to co ...Read More