Jiaona Zhang
Jiaona Zhang (JZ) is a product leader with a strong background in consumer products and extensive hiring and management experience. She is currently SVP of Product at Webflow as well as a lecturer at Stanford, where she teaches a graduate-level course on product management. Before Webflow, JZ was Head of Product for the Homes Platform at Airbnb and has also led product teams at Airbnb, WeWork, and Dropbox.
Career Skills
Accelerate your career by developing a 'superpower' or reputation for a specific type of excellence, which naturally attracts more responsibility and trust from leadership.
"I think it's really important to become really good at and also known for something. You could be known for shepherding like the most complex launches because you're just so good at quarterbacking. Wo..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Use behavioral questions to evaluate how candidates navigate ambiguity and whether they can impose structure on complex problems.
"I do like to do behavioral questions... Good answers are people who put structure and a way forward through the ambiguity. That's what you look for. You want your PM to not just be like, 'Oh no, we're..."
Leadership Skills
To effectively push back on a founder's idea, align on the underlying goal and present alternative, more scalable solutions backed by data.
"it's understanding the spirit of what they're trying to achieve. Being able to go back with, 'Hey, I understand the spirit. The spirit is that we're trying to get people who previously didn't consider..."
Manage high-risk projects by explicitly defining 'learning phases' where unscalable prototyping is used to validate assumptions before full investment.
"how do to be clear about the phase that you're in? ... we are explicitly going to go learn these types of things... you just have to be very, very clear with your team on what phase you're in. 'Hey, w..."
Improve execution by involving engineering early via tech spikes and ensuring all stakeholders are aligned during a formal kickoff.
"One of the biggest things we've been tweaking is like how do we do more of a tech spike at the beginning to be like, 'Do we have a good sense of how difficult this is going to be? The unknowns? ... an..."
Product Management Skills
A strong product strategy requires identifying the core reason users love the product and ensuring all new investments reinforce that primary advantage.
"understand why people love you, double down on that and then whatever else you build around it... go back to, again, what's the core of our advantage and how can that be something we leverage in deliv..."
A roadmap should be a narrative driven by strategic themes rather than just a spreadsheet of projects with impact scores.
"You're telling a story. So what I want from you is I want themes, I want a story. Why are these things the biggest things to invest in these levers, the biggest ones to pull? And what I really don't w..."
Avoid the common mistake of jumping to solutions by prioritizing deep user research and problem validation before defining the product.
"we're going to be focused on users and people in the real world and their problems. And the first step is to understand their problems and then understand if there's an opportunity here as opposed to,..."