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 (separate track) Skills
New product leaders must prioritize building influence and understanding organizational context over asserting authority.
"One of the first things I teach is you're not a CEO, you're, you're not here... You actually have very little true authority because you don't actually manage anyone. A lot of it is all through influe..."
Accelerating your career depends on developing a recognizable 'superpower' that makes you the go-to person for specific, high-impact challenges.
"Find something that you can be really, really good at. And the reason I give that advice is because when you do that, you can crush the projects that you get because you're making a name for yourself,..."
Discovery & Research Skills
Effective product management requires suppressing the urge to build specific features in favor of deeply understanding the underlying user needs and opportunities.
"The first step is to understand their problems and then understand if there's an opportunity here as opposed to, 'Hey, you want to build X thing for Y person.' So that's the biggest mistake that you r..."
Planning & Prioritization Skills
The role of a product manager in roadmapping is to act as an editor, synthesizing various possibilities into a coherent set of opportunities.
"Your job is to understand here are the opportunities, and then you're kind of pulling together all the different possibilities and you're really editing."
Define success in clear, short intervals to prevent 'magical thinking' and ensure the team can pivot if progress stalls.
"You should articulate what success looks like and the milestones you want to hit in the small intervals that I talked about. So you don't get into this world where you're like, 'Hey, I've gone for two..."
Strategy & Positioning Skills
Product success relies on leveraging your company's existing strategic 'muscles' rather than trying to build entirely new operational strengths from scratch.
"What, as a company is your strategic strength and what's in your wheelhouse? So for example, Airbnb, we weren't that strong in operations. Again, we're this platform with this marketplace."