Jiaona Zhang, Chief Product Officer at Linktree, shares her core philosophy on product leadership and cross-functional responsibilities during an interview on 20VC.
“It actually encapsulates everything I believe about product, which is the product role is the most chameleon role out of all of the functions, which means at some point you're like, I need to lean into sales because Like that's actually how I can build the best product by getting that information from my large customers or my, you know, sometimes you're like, I need to lean into support because I'm not even at the sales point yet. I just need to understand what's happening, right? So you're always wearing all of these different hats because that is the job of the product leader to be able to be that chameleon, to be that glue with that exact team and to be able to spot like what needs more work and go like fill that hole, not necessarily yourself, either with a higher Or, you know, pushing the exec team or the founders to get there.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jiaona Zhang
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…”
Jiaona ZhangMay 17, 2024▶ 51:06Jiaona Zhang: Why All Product Teams Should Have a Scorecard & How to Use It | E1154 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
PredictionHeld 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.”
Jiaona ZhangMay 17, 2024▶ 56:28Jiaona Zhang: Why All Product Teams Should Have a Scorecard & How to Use It | E1154 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Zhang: The best product managers have spent time in gaming
“I think the best PMs actually have done some stint in gaming, right?”
Jiaona ZhangMay 17, 2024▶ 2:22Jiaona Zhang: Why All Product Teams Should Have a Scorecard & How to Use It | E1154 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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 …”
Jiaona ZhangMay 17, 2024▶ 4:17Jiaona Zhang: Why All Product Teams Should Have a Scorecard & How to Use It | E1154 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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…”
Jiaona ZhangMay 17, 2024▶ 8:58Jiaona Zhang: Why All Product Teams Should Have a Scorecard & How to Use It | E1154 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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.”
Jiaona ZhangMay 17, 2024▶ 15:29Jiaona Zhang: Why All Product Teams Should Have a Scorecard & How to Use It | E1154 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.