Product Marketing Fusion (Inbound + Outbound in One Function)
Merge product management with product marketing so the people who build the product also own how it's told and sold.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Airbnb dissolved the traditional product management function and rebuilt it by merging the inbound (product development) responsibilities of PMs with the outbound (product marketing) responsibilities, off-loading program-management tasks to actual program managers. The resulting group is smaller, more senior, manages by influence not control, and treats marketing as customer education about new things being shipped.
Origin
Brian Chesky's reorganization of product management at Airbnb, drawing on Apple's model (via Hiroki Asai) where marketing communications governed and made every brand and product touchpoint, and where 'everything flowed through marketing.'
Core principles
- 01You can't build a product unless you know how to talk about it; you can't master making a product without mastering its market.
- 02A great product no one knows about isn't really a product — distribution and story are part of building it.
- 03Product marketing is education about new things you ship, distinct from brand marketing (ads about the app) and performance marketing (conversion).
- 04The merged function manages by influence, not control — it does not drive design or engineering.
- 05Keep the group small and senior; off-board coordination work to real program managers.
How to run it
- 1
Merge inbound and outbound
Combine the product-development responsibilities of the product manager with the product-marketing responsibilities of product marketing into a single role that owns both building and telling.
Pro tip Expand the PM's remit to include distribution, understanding the customer, and teaching others how to tell the story.
Watch out Don't keep purely technical PMs in roles that require working with non-technical functions; the role now needs a combination of art and science.
- 2
Off-board program management
Move the coordination and program-management tasks that PMs often absorb to dedicated program managers, and make program management a high-status launch-owning job rather than a coordination job.
- 3
Shrink and seniorize the group
Make the group much smaller and more senior — few junior product marketers. Everyone, regardless of title, must know how to talk about the product.
- 4
Lead launches with the story
When starting a launch, first figure out the story — the story often dictates the product because you ultimately have to tell it to people, and a story is a powerful way to develop a cohesive product.
Pro tip Aim for the outcome where a thousand people work on it but it looks like ten people did it — one coherent voice.
In the wild
Chesky argues that when a company says 'we tried that, it didn't work,' the real question is whether it was a bad product, bad strategy, or bad execution — often it was a well-made product with no distribution plan and no way to talk about it.
→ By fusing making and marketing, Airbnb ties every shipped feature to how customers will learn about and adopt it.
Airbnb eliminated a separate UX-writing function and merged it with marketing writing under one 'writing' function, reasoning that emails, app copy, and ads should all speak in one voice from the best writers.
→ One writing voice across all customer touchpoints instead of siloed copy.
Common mistakes
Shipping without a distribution plan
Teams build features but never educate customers about them, so nothing gets adopted; this kills the incentive to ship anything ambitious and pushes teams toward safe, incremental work.
Treating design/marketing as a service org
When design or marketing only catches things 'before they go out the door' rather than being part of development, you get technical debt, politics, and a company that ships thousands of things no customer can name.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product and marketing leaders at product-led companies who ship real, differentiated features and need adoption, not just conversion optimization.
Not ideal for
Arbitrage-style businesses with very high performance-marketing ROI (e.g. Booking.com), or teams that genuinely run independent orgs with no shared dependencies.
From the transcript
“combined what one might call the inbound product development responsibilities of product manager with the outbound or marketing responsibilities of product marketing.”
“You can't build a product unless you know how to talk about the product. You can't be an expert in making the product unless you're…”
“If you build a great product and no one knows about it, did you even build a product?”
“we think of marketing as education, that we're educating people on the unique benefits.”
“one of the first things we'll do is start figuring out what the story is. And the story will often dictate the product”
From the episode
Brian Chesky’s new playbook