Jiaona Zhang
Chief Product Officer, Laurel. On 2 shows, 3 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Jiaona Zhang is the Chief Product Officer at Laurel and teaches product management at Stanford University. She previously served as Chief Product Officer at Linktree, SVP of Product at Webflow, and held product leadership roles at Airbnb, Dropbox, and WeWork.
2shows
3appearances
51statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Jiaona Zhang said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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…”
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.”
Airbnb Plus unit economics never would have worked out, says Jiaona Zhang
“And so I, yeah, I personally don't believe the unit economics ever would have really worked out. I think we should have known that we should have dug into that more at the very beginning”
Zhang: Airbnb Plus unit economics never would have worked out
“And so I, yeah, I personally don't believe the unit economics ever would have really worked out. I think we should have known that we should have dug into that more at the very beginning and then to get very tailored instead of like one blunt instrument to sol…”
Zhang: Airbnb should have ignored Plus and doubled down on core homes
“So I think that that same lesson would apply to Airbnb would have in my head, like change the way we invested. I think we would have gotten more returns as opposed to spreading ourselves and then like having things that like sort of work, but then didn't quite…”
Zhang: The best product managers have spent time in gaming
“I think the best PMs actually have done some stint in gaming, right?”
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 …”
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…”
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.”
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 …”
Zhang: Zero-to-one product development requires near-daily synchronous jams
“If you are doing a zero to one product, I actually feel like a product jam should be happening almost daily. Like I think when you're doing a zero to one product, you either need to be in a synchronous, like physical space, or you may approximate that as much …”
Zhang: Early-stage founders make a mistake hiring product leaders too early
“So I do think a classic mistake is that you hire a product person too quickly and you delegate the responsibility away. You're like, I'm a founder. I need to scale myself. And therefore you like bring in a product. Leader. I do not think you do that. I think t…”
Zhang: Visionary founders fail when hiring equally visionary product leaders
“I think that there's a classic failure case there too, where like founders are like, I am, I'll give an example. Like I'm super, super visionary. And so when I go interview founder or go, go interview product leaders, you know, that visionary founder gravitate…”
Zhang: Generalists excel in product roles by leveraging cross-domain mental models
“And I think that's really valuable, because you can have, like, you have a lack of bias. You have a lack of, like, pre-existing assumptions. I also think you can take like mental models from different places and apply them.”
Zhang: Domain experts in product leadership often suffer from tunnel vision
“So these, like, existing mental models for a generalist help you kind of, like, spot Opportunities. I think, like, sometimes, like, a domain expert get really tunnel vision on.”
Zhang: Software will replace engineering teams for company marketing websites
“When I think about marketing pages, like these, like, really important websites, your, even your main.com, I don't see a world where you need to be having your engineering teams do that anymore. I believe that that, that really will get solved by software.”
Zhang: Linktree has a shot at becoming a $100B business
“I think it has a shot to being a hundred billion dollar business.”
Zhang: Minimum lovable products must replace MVPs in crowded software markets
“The reason I care so much about minimal level product is because I do think in a world where there are so many different options, it's hard to just be like, Hey, use this thing. It barely meets a quality bar. And so I think this idea of like actually deeply un…”
Zhang: Roadmaps should tell strategic stories instead of filling out RICE spreadsheets
“So for road mapping, my biggest thing that I tell my teams is you're telling a story. So what I want from you is I want themes. I want a story like, why are these things like things, the biggest things to invest in these levers, the biggest ones to pull. And w…”
Zhang: WeWork overhired on tech because customers primarily cared about booking
“We, again, we hired beyond our skis on the tech side. It's like, we don't need a team of this size to go do the things that are needed for the product to feel really great. At the end of the day, it's about booking. And yes, there are definitely technology, th…”
Zhang: Product teams can gather actionable user feedback within an hour
“The thing that you can learn and literally An hour is, hey, I have all these customers out there who've been wanting this very specific feature, and now, now I have an alpha version of it. I'm gonna go out to these people, these clients, these customers, and s…”
Zhang: Startups should build a skeleton KPI tree from day one
“I think a company should always have The skeleton of the tree, and the reason for that is this is basically how your product works and how things flow through the business, right?”
Zhang: Crisp strategy explicitly defines what a company will not do
“When you're trying to get your company to march in one direction, the thing I believe in the most is having a really crisp strategy, and that is an articulation of your vision, your mission, what you're doing, your investment areas, like, these are the things …”
The other half of the tape: Jiaona Zhang's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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2023 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jiaona's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Laurel | 1 | 34 | 100% 1/1 | full record on 20VC → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Laurel | 2 +1 | 17 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |