Seamlessly Manage Your Airbnb Invoice PDF for Product Management

Airbnb invoice pdf for Product Management

the topic for tonight is what is platformer product management my name is Sophie bear I am a PM on the payments platform team at Airbnb and before I dive into platform product management I just wanted to give you some background about my career and how I got into product management it might be useful for you if you're looking to make a move into product management I started at Airbnb in 2011 and it was kind of weird because I was living in Argentina at the time and my grandma used Airbnb for the first time to visit my cousin and then she called my mom and she was like wow this site is really cool you should look at it and my mom looked at it and she saw that they were hiring and she sent it to me because I was looking for a room at work and so I interviewed for a customer service position at Airbnb and the first interview question that they were asking at that time which is no longer on the roster but it is how would you explain Airbnb to your grandma and she actually had explained it to me so the in the interview notes apparently it was written that I was a third generation Airbnb R which was very exotic and so I got the customer service job and was working as a remote customer service agent I am also Canadian which you're probably asking yourself what that has to do with anything but in Quebec specifically there is one bank that almost everybody uses called the shell bank and that bank has a very specific signup flow that you need to use if you want to receive money into your bank account and so host we're having a lot of trouble adding those details to the area new website and I called my bank because I have an account there and I asked them how to do it and I wrote a little FAQ and one of the engineers published it onto the website and then the gossip was Oh Sophia is so good at payments which I was just being a Canadian I guess and so on the customer service team they actually founded or started a little team specifically dedicated to payments issues and I was on that team and this is sort of where I'm going with all of this as a product manager one of the key things that you can do is know your product and when I was on the customer service team I just gained a very very broad and in-depth understanding of the payments product at Airbnb and that as a tool for a product manager is really really really important another thing that I got by being kind of annoying was actually access to our data at Airbnb so one of the things that as a customer service representative you kind of notice like you'll get a call and then you'll get the same call and you'll get the same call and you're wondering like am I just unlucky or something actually happening and there's a bug in our system and something's wrong and so I told the engineer's if you give me access to this data then I will tell you you know when bugs are happening how I'll help you and they said no and then I asked again and again and with enough pestering I actually got access to our data at Airbnb and to my credit I only wrote one bad query and and I only slowed down the site for a little bit so this was kind of like a long time ago we didn't have the data platform that we have today I was querying directly into the master DB it was kind of crazy but it definitely gave me a lot of data skills and those data skills allowed me to transition into a product specialist role where I was analyzing the ticket trends and feeding that into product management to say like if you do this you know we'll see a decrease in tickets here and that's kind of the second skill that I think for any product manager is going to be really really helpful you need to be able to prioritize the things that you do and having data skills not just worrying but also thinking about what the data that the queries are giving you and how that translates back into their product is gonna be a really really helpful skill so that was my fresh new job to Airbnb and there was a payments product manager who approached me and he like said do you want to be where the sausages are made or just kind of weird because a vegetarian but I was interested and I joined the product team in 2014 I moved to San Francisco and I've been on the payments product team since then and mostly working on our payments and payouts so if you think part of belonging anywhere at Airbnb is being paid or getting paid like a local in your local currency so most of what I did from 2014 to 2017 was integrating to local processors and helped expand our currency Briggs that's my first kid so I went on a little bit of a break in 2017 and when I came back we had really undertaken a lot of our platform ization efforts in earnest and what I've been working on for the past year and a half is an order management platform so when you think of order management you can think of what I want to book something on Airbnb and that could be anything you know it could be a home it could be an experience it could be like a corgi rental who knows where where we're going it's teeing up the Corgi rental thing yeah and also on our payout side so for hosts if you're a host on Airbnb you should be able to get paid and have access to a suite of features around that payout regardless of what you're doing on the platform so it shouldn't be like if you're an experienced host you have access to some features and if you're a home post you have access to others so those are the two platforms that I've been working on for the past year and a half so to make this more fun I thought we could do like a little drinking game or something where every time I say platform product management you take a drink totally optional and up to you this is the road map though we'll talk about what platform product management is when you need it how is it different and how to deliver from day one about how to deliver from day one part seemed a little bit ambitious of me to say so it is also just how to not make the same mistakes that I made in a platform product imagine what is platform product management I guess before I dive into this there's a lot of payments references sprinkled through this presentation so in addition to platform product management you'll also get some useful payments tidbit and Braintree is a payments gateway this is from their blog platforms exist to make it easier to solve a problem that's coming from multiple businesses or products I also have a definition platform is a product solution that is extensible scalable and allows you to leverage the same solution more than once so what does this look like in practice this is Airbnb his first foray into everybody payments I should say into pipe motivation so this diagram that I drew it's pretty sweet and it's Airbnb circa 2010 so as a guest you pay in and as a host you get paid we don't have any options for you in just one way you can pay and there's one way you can get paid this is very classic start up early adopters are gonna be totally fine with this they're not going to ask to be paid in their local currency they're not gonna ask for fancy things you know however like I said we really wanted to double down on our local payment strategy I think in payments our slogan is more human less transactional and if you're thinking about how you have to pay if it like is something that is not totally intuitive then you're gonna think a lot about the transaction and you're really gonna move away from the human aspect of Airbnb so from 2010 onwards we really doubled down on adding more processors and adding more and more local currencies local payment capabilities and same thing for hosts if you're getting your money and it's not your local currency you have to deal with some FX conversions we have to do as long delays that's terrible so our code base so just just called monorail basically it's all one code base at this time starts to look like a rainy day here like this is crazy and for each of these processes that we're integrating we're basically going from A to B you know we want to charge the guests but every time we're kind of taking a different route so it became really confusing for us to think about how we landed on that particular route for that particular processor and so our first platform ization effort is called Gibraltar the reason we chose the cute little name Gibraltar is because that's actually a gateway into the Mediterranean I've never been there but apparently it's beautiful and so with this payments gateway we actually standardize all of the api's into charge refund pay out to a host and this allows us anytime we want to go from A to B and add a new processor we're always following the same path so that's the extensible solution to any payment processor it's scalable because we can do it over and over again and it provides a huge amount of leverage to our team because anytime we want to do this we know how to go we know how to do it so this is all under the hood this isn't something you're gonna see if you go to Airbnb today if you do see it this however is our checkout page so if you are booking a house on Airbnb this is what you would see and I mentioned earlier every and B we used to be all about finding a unique space but we are also all about unique experiences now that are hosted by locals so when we first started thinking about that concept we realized we didn't want there to be one way for you to pay for a home and another way for you to pay for an experience that would actually end up in the payment scheme having to do twice the amount of work when you're collecting credit card numbers and stuff there's a lot of compliance and regulatory things that you have to do and if we had to have that on two sets of checkout pages wonderful experiences and one for homes that would put a huge burden on our team we would lose a lot of leverage so this is actually also a platform under the hood and what's really special about this is we've actually divided it up into things that are tailored to the businesses so I mentioned earlier like maybe there's a corgi rental thing that's going to happen at every Indy and if they were to do that if we weren't in it you could customize you know you maybe won't instead of saying this is a rare find you want to say don't forget to bring a leash something like that totally customizable payments doesn't as a team lets you do that other parts of this page though are configurable so you can't actually change them but you can toggle some options on and off there and then lastly you've got these customizable parts where you can customize your cancellation policy but it's always going to appear in the same place on the page so this is an example of a platform that's much more user facing but it's still standardized across all of the verticals cool so that is what is platform product management when do you need platform product manager yeah I don't have the magic timing answer here uh not too early not too late so if you pull out for my too early you probably over in in your product and you'll end up with something that's very extensible that is being used for one use case that's going to delay your go-to-market and it just it's too much for or what you need if you platform rise too late then you'll lose the economies of scale and you'll increase your migration cost so if you pop from rise too late then you're gonna end up having to migrate a lot of the existing use cases on so if you think about the example that I showed earlier where we had lots of processors going into monorail we definitely had a migration cost when we moved over to our platform because we didn't want to just turn off all of the payment methods that we had made available to guests we wanted to migrate them on tarpaulin so how do you get the timing right this shouldn't be that surprising but it's tricky to do you need to understand the long term vision and strategy of your company and this is where a really good platform product manager is going to excel they're going to know the direction of the company and they're going to be able to anticipate and build the right platform ahead of time so this is a lot of there's a lot of ways to do this but I think getting plugged into the right Road mapping sessions having coffee chats with other product managers understanding where they're going this is where your ability to network and to understand where your company is going is going to really help you excel as a platform product manager how is platform product management different so there's three things that I'll call out here your main stakeholders as a platform product management or going to be other product managers other people in product engineers data scientists you're going to be one step removed from end-users I actually think this is one of the most fun things about platform product management I just really enjoy working with other product managers I enjoy working with newse I think this is a really fun space not the guests and hosts aren't great it's just this is the the kind of thing that I enjoy doing the type of problems that you're gonna solve as a platform product manager are gonna be slightly different you're going to be thinking a lot about computer science problems if systems architecture is interesting to you upgrade strategies things like that in addition you're gonna have a lot of complex prioritization problems because you're gonna be thinking horizontally and all of your customers are thinking vertically about what they want and you're going to have to prioritize those so if you're like if you wake up in the morning you're like oh my god I can't wait to prioritize my to-do list then you know platform product manager it might be for you if you're like oh I hate prioritizing things and you know I guess you can compare this maybe with rapid-fire experimentation a lot of growth pans they're gonna think of an idea they're gonna go and they're an experiment on it it's gonna work it's not going to work they'll move to the next thing those are the kind of that's the difference really the platform partner manager if you really like experimentation and you also want to do platform product management there is a huge space in experimentation platforms so you can combine the two lastly your product view is just gonna be much more around long-term sustainability so one of the things that I learned as a product manager is you should always go for the quick wins you know like get get those quick wins out the door and as a platform product manager you don't necessarily want to focus on quick wins if it will be detrimental to your long-term strategy so there might be something really small that you can do today that would make somebody very vocal or very important very happy however it could actually compromise your long-term strategy because that small thing will not be sustainable so in terms of product management this is a pretty big shift at least it was for me when I started going into this area you don't want to do the easiest quickest win you really want to think about things long-term what skills do you need to succeed well I think these skills should actually be in any PM toolbox and I don't think the assume that you should be asking yourself is like what skills do I need to succeed it should be do I enjoy doing these things and I think that's really gonna show a lot of people I get frustrated with platform product manager because they're kind of squeezed in the middle nobody's really happy with you but you have a very hard job so you should really ask yourself like are these things that I enjoy doing and then if they are you'll be really excited about platform product management I don't think anyone's playing the drinking game which is probably good yes quite a lot so firstly a skill that you need is the ability to understand and weigh in on typical engineering problems you'll see this one a lot on like the internet and blogs about platform product management you need to be technical I get a little annoyed about it I actually don't come from a technical background I've learned all these things I checked on product school before I came here they offer coding and data analysis classes these are skills that you can learn the question you should be asking yourself is do I enjoy talking about these problems like are you excited when you're talking about systems architecture like whoo is that cool like I really enjoy that so I'm very happy where I am but if you're not excited about these types of problems then you're gonna learn a skill that you you won't be able to really bring any joy to yeah consistency in distributed systems you're gonna have to have like a lots of different systems how do they talk to each other how do they stay in sync some people's eyes are glowing other people maybe not so much there's something you want to think about your key customers who are gonna be engineers and if you're excited about solving the problems that they think are important then then that's really going to show and how you do your job alignment superpowers so any product manager is gonna have to get leadership to align around the goals that they're driving and their roadmap a platform product manager is gonna have to do that multiple times because again you're serving many customers across your roadmap so and you're not gonna satisfy everything that they want if you can let's talk after because that would be impressive so you really need to have alignment superpowers and this is something that you have to doing it's just going in there and making sure that everyone is aligned on what you're delivering for them ruthless prioritization any p.m. should probably have this skill is even more important for platform product managers because of the stickiness of a platform anything that you introduce into your platform people will start using that feature and they will love it and it will never go away and you'll always have to maintain it being a little dramatic there but it is definitely if you like saying no and if you're good at ruthless prioritization that is this excellent skill to have as a platform product manager plan for the long term on Airbnb did you know you can book five years out yeah did if that's you then you might like platform product management as well because you definitely need to be the kind of person that is looking three or four steps down the line you want to have a very long term roadmap because you or your products will take longer to ship and so you're gonna have to be a couple steps ahead cool like I mentioned I came back from a maternity leave in 2018 and I started working on Airbnb order management platform so that's if you're booking a home or an experience or or anything on Airbnb how do we keep that booking and I made a lot of mistakes so these are just my learnings from the project that I've been working on the past year and a half hopefully it's helpful to you goal-setting is hard it's worthwhile to spend a lot of time making sure you get it right so because our the project that I was working on was actually a migration you know we had existing homes reservations and experience reservations and we were just migrating them to a common platform I thought oh my goal will just be a hundred percent of homes and experience reservations are going through the new platform goal achieved and that actually didn't necessarily drive platform goals so these are typical platform goals you want to have availability of your service you're gonna have usage of your API is gonna have things like latency and performance in addition the thing I didn't realize was that I needed to understand how platform goals were driving or unlocking key company metrics so Airbnb you can think naturally we can go out about nights booked and so these platform goals I wasn't thinking about them directly and how in terms of how they drove the company's goals once you understand the link between what your platform is unlocking and the company's goals you're gonna have a really powerful narrative that is going to get you a lot of buy-in when you're talking to all of your customers so one concrete example here is we've noticed that performance actually directly leads to more nights booked and that it is that's the case of anything that you're buying you know if you're just sitting there watching a spinning wheel you might drop off of the transaction same thing we noticed availability has a direct link to customer service contacts so if our site goes down people will pick up the phone like hey what's going on so if we have higher availability we're also able to drive these growth goals and understanding that link is really powerful and it wasn't immediately apparent to me when I was thinking about polymerization I don't want to scare you but you will have a long term roadmap and it's good to just be very paranoid about your roadmap some people say p.m. should always be recruiting I think you should always be paranoid and this is I made this up sorry I don't know I was like kind of in a corgi mood when I was thinking through this deck so in h1 I'm still excited about your platform it solves all of my payments problems as well in h2 you come back you've got the platform solution what are you doing Oh payments but we're not doing that anywhere we're bartering Cordys that's I think so you've got your platform built your customer no longer wants it this is a bummer you can avoid this by applying to always be paranoid mindset and you can do these things for any type of product manager but again understanding that link between your platform metrics and your business metrics is really key if you can go to a business or customer of your popcorn would say I'm going to drive this growth metric for you they're going to want to get onto your platform and they're not going to pivot to something else or find another solution while they're waiting for you to come back with your solution and then the second piece here is continuously deliver value via small milestones so when I first started working on the order management project I was kind of like cool we've got this giant hamburger team swarm eat it and a couple of months in I realized like we hadn't really delivered on anything yet and it's because everybody was just working through parts with the end goal in mind and we weren't bringing anything to market so I'm sorry if this hamburgers a thing is a little weird but if you focus on sliders then you're gonna have a lot more success so one way to do that is to have like a beta launch where it's internal employees only you can show how your platform is driving the key metrics that you want to unlock but you don't necessarily have the risk of doing a public launch you can focus on a market you can focus on one feature there's a lot of ways that you can split up a platform so that you're continuously delivering value to your customers without making them wait kind of for that giant hamburger that would be so perfect and so delicious if somebody's hungry they'll eat the slider it doesn't matter okay and that's the last time we got metaphor for the night - and lastly over explain what you're doing the more people understand what's going on the more you're in touch with all of your customers then the better off you're going to be the less likely that you're going to be in this situation where people just don't need what you're delivering so if you look back at this the problem isn't actually in h2 with the bartering with corgis the problem here is in h1 you can see what this person is saying they're like I'm so excited about your platform that solves all my payments problems like that's not what I was building good is so big and so general that it's pretty clear that that person didn't have a clear understanding of what the platform solution was being delivered so if you're over-explaining and you're really digging in and your customers understand exactly what they're getting it's much less likely that you'll be out of sync let them think first build second this one is just the fact that it's really hard to take away a feature and so everything you incorporate into your platform will become sticky an invariable people will latch onto that one thing and they will want it forever so before you build anything into your platform you need to ask yourself is this extensible is this scalable if not say no gracefully a good example for this at Airbnb is actually we spent a lot of time building out features for our customer service agents to make sure that they could satisfy almost any request and now is we're thinking about a platform it's becoming very hard to support some of those features one of them is adding a coupon after you've booked a reservation so if you read our FAQ that says this is not allowed and it's not allowed however due to some loophole there's a handful of customer service agents who actually have the ability to do this it doesn't apply to all types of products that are being me and it's not all types of agents so it's really weird that said that handful of people is very very passionate about their ability to help people and making sure that they can still do this and when we're thinking about if we bring this on to our platform it's really difficult because it's not something that scales easily it's not something that we want to maintain it doesn't drive any of our key metrics that we talked about earlier but we have this very very vocal group who wants to keep it around as a feature if we bring this onto our platform then we have to support it it's gonna be very sticky and it'll be just something that we have to maintain and this is the last one that I'll mention but it over explain and don't oversell so when I first started on this project I was running around Airbnb I was just like I'm building a platform it's really cool everyone was like great and that was that I liked and everybody was kind of coming back to me hey you know like I'm pretty sure your platform is gonna solve XYZ and what I was building was not solving any of those problems and that was when I realized I had just gone and oversold what I was and not explained it so this slide is a little tech-heavy but a little text-heavy but because platforms can be more technical and they're one step removed from users platform management platform product management can be harder to understand in addition you have to think every one of your customers is trying to drive their goals like the key to being a good PM is to create a vision and then execute on that vision so if I'm going to a p.m. and I'm saying like oh yeah I'll have this ready in a couple of months they're like no I need to execute on my vision now and it's not going to be immediately apparent to them why you are prioritizing things the way you are they're thinking of their immediate needs they're not thinking of another team or another business's immediate needs so that's where you know it's gonna be hard for you to communicate your strategy and for you to create that empathy in other people and that's where the again the alignment piece comes in so you're really just walking a tightrope between explaining how your platform strategy fits into someone else's vision and roadmap but I've noticed at least for me once I understand their vision and roadmap then I really want to kind of sell and you want to make sure you're not over selling that you're actually clearly stating how it ties in without going over the other side of the tightrope and over selling yourself cool so to recap on their roadmap platform product management is when you're building and extensible and scalable solution that provides leverage to solve the same problem multiple time you need platform product management not too early but not too late right in that sweet spot platform product management is different for three reasons your end customers are going to be product managers engineers and data scientists as opposed to the end users the problems that you're going to be solving are usually going to be more technical and your roadmap is gonna be a lot longer term and then how to deliver from day one there is over explained don't oversell think first build second always be paranoid and make sure that you're setting your goals in a way that drives not only your platform goals but your also your company you