From what I understand Airbnb did a fair bit of spamming to craigslist prior to the very slick layout you see there so the idea of marketing via craigslist was already baked into their strategy regardless of it's implementation.
The most obvious of this would be recognizing how you can programmatically hook your application with 0 users to another system with thousands to millions of users. An obvious solution that a regular marketer may recognize is simple address book integration. A less obvious solution that a hacker with API experience would recognize is how to hook into the Twitter search API, programmatically recognize hashtags and generate responses that appear legit from a real user.
Any sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content. It often takes a hacker to make the decisions that further advance field of spam to the level of content.
The way I look at what a PM does, this is exactly it: knowing the technical aspects enough to figure out what is possible and detail it for engineering to build. It doesn't have to be the same person that specs it and build it.
That being said, I'd be very happy to get a job as "growth hacker" for I believe I'm better at thinking that kind of integrations through, than at what is on the "marketing side" of product management.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use
Companies have lost their domains due to this.
Great article.
