Jiaona Zhang
SVP of Product at Webflow
SVP of product at Webflow and lecturer at Stanford teaching product management, previously senior director of PM at WeWork and longtime product leader at Airbnb and Dropbox, known for teaching new PMs to stop jumping to solutions and for her candid lessons from the Airbnb Plus failure.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
JZ (Jiaona Zhang) shares lessons from teaching product management at Stanford and leading product at Webflow, Airbnb, and WeWork, starting with the most common PM mistake: jumping to solutions before understanding problems. She provides a candid post-mortem of Airbnb Plus as a case study of being too solution-oriented and building outside the company's strategic strengths, and advises PMs to become known for something specific because reputation attracts responsibility.
Leadership Principles
- → The biggest PM mistake is jumping to solutions — go out, don't think about the thing you want to build, focus on users and their problems first
- → Become really good at and known for something specific — when you do, you crush projects, build reputation, and people flock to give you more responsibility
- → You're not a CEO — you have very little true authority because you don't manage anyone, so your job is influence and editing, not calling the shots
Notable Quotes
"The biggest thing I see is you jump to solutions. You get really attached to a solution, a way of implementing something that you can see in your head that you want to build."
— On the most common mistake new PMs make
"Become really good at and known for something. When you do that, you can crush the projects you get because you're making a name for yourself, and people tend to flock and give responsibility to people known for being excellent at something."
— On career advice for PMs
"We went really hard down the solution space with Airbnb Plus. What we should have done is taken a step back. The real problem is people want to know what they're getting into. We need to represent the homes better."
— On the Airbnb Plus failure and being too solution-oriented
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