Jiaona Zhang, Chief Product Officer at Linktree, reflects on her early career in mobile gaming and how fast iteration cycles shape product management skills.
Insight
Zhang: Webflow struggles with expansion revenue after initial website creation
“Cause I think what with Webflow what was Trump was hard was that we would land very easily, but you wouldn't be able to expand. Cause they're like, oh, okay. Like I build the website. And then they're like, what else? And so you gotta get into the expansion mo…”
Prediction Held up
Zhang: OpenAI will aggressively compete with Google in web search
“They just hired the search leader from Google. Like, they are gonna go after that space, which is, like, the most lucrative space, and also a space that, you know, should be innovated on.”
Insight
Zhang: Startups must trade scope for speed to survive
“I am most willing to trade off scope, and that's because I believe that it is very, very important to get speed. Speed for any company, any product is what gets you your learnings, and if your speed at learning is slow, you are going to die or you're going to …”
Insight
Zhang: Product owners must own business metrics, not just product metrics
“I think that there's this artificial separation sometimes of, like, product and business, and there are times where, like, the product owner doesn't own the business metrics, and I actually think that's very harmful, because at the end of the day, your product…”
Insight
Zhang: Growth teams should pursue product step-functions, not micro-optimizations
“Growth teams have numbers, but they should not be micro optimizing those numbers. They should be really much changing the product in meaningful ways to get to that next. Like step function level of what we can, what can drive growth.”
Insight
Zhang: Detecting project risks relies on leader judgment, not data analysis
“No, I mean, honestly, I think that's actually, it's less about data and more about judgment. Like, you should be able to, at any given point in time, you should be able to ask a product leader of the team, a design leader of that team, and also an engineering …”