The Design Office of Nick Sloggett
Back
NoteJul ’232 min read

Design-led is about who decides

The argument over Airbnb dropping classic product management is about titles. What matters is who makes the call.

Last month, on stage at Figma’s Config, Brian Chesky said Airbnb had “got rid of the classic product management function” and put designers on equal footing with product managers. A day later he clarified that the role had been merged into something closer to Apple’s product marketing. Since then design and product leaders have argued about it, mostly about titles: did Airbnb fire its PMs, and should designers run product?

The titles are the least interesting part of that argument.

A company is design-led when design makes the calls that shape the product, and answers for them. You can have a head of design on the exec team and still be engineering-led, because the roadmap is whatever is cheapest to build. You can have no design title above director and be design-led, because the CEO reviews the work in the details and the details win.

Read generously, Chesky described the second kind: a CEO who reviews the product himself, and an org where the person closest to the craft has the authority to say no. The title change made that visible.

If design gets the call, design also gets the blame. That’s the part of this debate I’ve heard least. A designer who wants the decision has to own its business consequence: the launch date, the metric, the support load. You don’t get to hand the trade-off back to a PM when it gets hard.

I’ve worked without that safety net. On Uber’s experimentation platform there was no product manager. What to build first, and what to cut so it could ship in about three months, was decided between me and the engineers building it. Owning those calls meant owning what the first release left out.

For design leaders, the useful question isn’t whether to copy Airbnb. It’s where product decisions get made in your company, and whether design has a vote in that room. If it doesn’t, a new title won’t fix it. Work that wins arguments will, one decision at a time, until the room expects design to be there.