A pandemic obliterated prior assumptions about office space, the market crashed, and we are on the precipice of a new platform shift with AI. All. At. Once.
Market crashes, platform shifts, and AI converging at once. How tech leaders are adapting their product orgs with GM roles, AirBNB-style efficiency, and faster decision-making.
My Cornell colleague Josh Hartmann and I recently spoke at a Cornell keynote about the rapid changes reshaping the tech industry — and what CEOs, CPOs, and CTOs are doing about it. This post breaks down the models they're adopting and the principles that hold regardless of which path you choose.
We've weathered market crashes before — 2001, 2008. We've navigated platform shifts before — PCs, the internet, cloud, mobile. But what's happening right now is different in kind, not just degree.
A pandemic obliterated prior assumptions about the office. The market crashed, with SVB as a particularly sharp exclamation point. And we are standing at the threshold of an AI platform shift that could dwarf everything before it.
All. At. Once.
There will be major winners. And there will be losers — not the unlucky ones, but the ones too slow to adapt. Product management as a discipline is not immune. The role that flourished during a decade of abundance was optimized for a world that no longer exists.
One of the most significant trends I'm watching is the revival of the General Manager role in tech companies.
The GM concept isn't new — it means owning a P&L end-to-end: product, engineering, design, marketing, sales, and operations. All the costs that go into building and selling something, and all the revenue that comes out. For the past ten years, most tech companies moved away from this model in favor of functional org designs: product, engineering, and design each reporting up through their own executive chains, with no single arbiter controlling resources cross-functionally.
In times of abundance, the functional model works well. It optimizes for craft — product decisions, engineering tradeoffs, strong discipline-specific cultures. The cost is friction: pricing changes, headcount decisions, reorgs, and strategic pivots all require intense cross-functional negotiation. When money is flowing freely and time pressure is low, that friction is merely annoying.
In times of scarcity, it's fatal.
We've had over a decade of abundance, fueled by the extraordinary business models at companies like Meta and Google and what felt like an endless supply of venture capital. That era is over. The GM revival — either creating new GM roles or expanding existing ones — is one of the most effective responses I'm seeing. When someone owns the full P&L, hard tradeoffs get made quickly rather than negotiated endlessly.
Not everyone is solving this with GMs. AirBnb went a different direction, and the results are worth studying carefully.
There's been a lot of commentary about AirBnb adopting an Apple-style product marketing manager role that blends product and marketing. But if you listen closely to Brian Chesky's interviews, you see something more fundamental than a job title change:
The results are hard to argue with. In 2022, AirBnb generated approximately $1.5M in revenue and $642K in free cash flow per employee — numbers that put most of Big Tech to shame despite AirBnb having a fraction of the headcount. Marketplace economics provide natural tailwinds, but this level of efficiency doesn't happen by accident. It's the product of fewer bets (only as many projects as Chesky himself can track), a streamlined org, and a CEO functioning as GM in the style of Steve Jobs.
The tradeoff is obvious: extreme key-person risk. But as a model for what's possible when a company ruthlessly focuses, it's a case study every product leader should understand.
Many org models are available to you — GM structures, the AirBnb approach, hybrid variations. But a few principles cut across all of them.
The most common thing slowing down tech orgs right now isn't bad strategy — it's decision-making that swirls.
"Leading with influence" has become a euphemism for not having clear authority. When no one owns a decision, everyone has a veto, and the result is an org that moves slowly even when urgency is high. This is a fixable organizational flaw, not an immutable law.
The solution isn't autocracy. Consensus is valuable — it builds alignment and catches blind spots. But at the end of every consequential decision, a single person should be responsible and decisive. Advisors inform; deciders decide.
When decision authority is unclear, you have two options: pull it up to the CEO, or push it down to a GM. Either can work. What doesn't work is letting it swirl. In times of abundance, swirl causes frustration. In times of scarcity, it causes failure.
Most orgs have too much fuzzy overlap between product and adjacent functions — design, marketing, operations. Everyone is nominally responsible for the outcome, which means no one is truly accountable for any specific piece.
An hour spent mapping who owns what artifacts, decisions, and activities is one of the highest-leverage hours a leadership team can spend. Start with the outputs: what must be created (a roadmap, a positioning statement, a pricing page), what decisions must be made, and what activities must happen. Then assign clear ownership — one function per item.
Two other principles follow from this: you don't need many people doing strategy, just great ones. And you should fund operations generously so the machine runs smoothly and your strategic talent isn't getting pulled into execution work. Look for leverage everywhere — the goal is to make results grow faster than headcount.
Decision-makers need to understand both the product and the business. This sounds obvious, but it's violated constantly.
When people on the ground make product decisions without understanding the company's strategic priorities and financial constraints, they optimize locally and sub-optimize globally. When executives in ivory towers make decisions about problems they don't intimately understand, the decisions are wrong and the culture rots.
The solution is fast, high-quality information flow in both directions. Knowledge moves up quickly — Brian Chesky understanding the nuts and bolts of what his teams are building. Strategic and financial context moves down constantly — GMs and PMs understanding where the company is investing and why. Effective communication is the WD-40 of good decisions. When it dries up, everything grinds.
Figure out which model fits your company's DNA. The right answer depends on your founding team's strengths, your current stage, and the competitive pressure you're facing.
But whichever model you choose, apply the three principles: make clear who decides and give them the authority to act; eliminate the fuzzy overlap that creates diffusion of accountability; and build information flow that ensures decision-makers understand both the product and the business.
In today's environment, the velocity advantage goes to the company that can make hard decisions quickly with incomplete information — and that's an organizational design problem before it's anything else.
If you're taking a different approach, or have questions about how to apply any of this to your team, reach out. I'd genuinely like to hear what you're seeing.
One email a week. No fluff, just lessons from the field.
