YouSaid · the spoken record

Jiaona Zhang

lines on the record: 76
first: 2023-07-02
most recent: 2023-07-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Responsibility, right? Like, hey, you just launched this really complex thing and to work across, like, this was a project that had to work across a lot of different platforms. We're using Brittle APIs. And it was a very, very small team. I had a very, very tight deadline. So when you're like,”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say early on in my career, it was actually the fact that I had a strong analytics background. And so when I joined gaming, right, I came from consulting. I didn't have any CS background. And so, or design background. And so it was really like creating a reputation around being very analytical, around being able to analyze the data sets of my game and then like make decisions. I also learned as I was doing that, I was actually really good at execution. And so, you know, being able to keep a lot of plates kind of spinning and working on kind of like the largest studio and managing all the complex pieces of that, that was what I discovered. I didn't know this, but I discovered as I started like working in the role. And so that was something I brought to Dropbox, you know, my joint Dropbox. It was like, I knew that I could work with a lot of different teams and make sure that we hit a launch deadline. And so I would find myself trying to lean into that superpower and then when delivering upon that, getting more respect.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's so many parts to it, but I'll pick one. And there are many firmworks even beyond the one, but I'll just pick one for your question, which is, I think it's really important to become really good at and also known for something. And what I mean by that is when you're known in your company for a particular thing, I'll give you a couple examples. You could be known for shepherding like the most complex launches because you're just so good at quarterbacking working with, you know, go to market teams and cross-functional stakeholders. Like that could be like your thing. You could be known for working on the most like technically complex problems. You can be known for working on things that are really regulatorily complex. Like 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 like the projects that you get, right? Like because you're making a name for yourself, a reputation. And then you're giving more responsibility. Like people tend to flock and give responsibility to the people.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give a plug for a new thing coming out of ReForge, which is this concept of artifacts. And so we do have a lot of artifacts out there. So what's our general product development process? What are our templates for our specs? What are our templates for some of these things that we're talking about? A roadmap, like a broader roadmap instead of just like a future spec. So yes, we have a ton of those artifacts are always evolving. I think every team kind of takes it and like tweaks it a little bit. But I do, I'm a big believer of like bringing those artifacts back and then sharing them across the team. So product operations is also a function that we've invested in because it just really greases the wheels, gets all of our teams kind of speaking the same language.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often docs get out of or like spreadsheets get out of date, right? Because they're like a snapshot of whatever it is that you needed at that point in time. But if instead you link out to the actual things that your teams are working out of, you can always be like, these are the themes. I will edit these if I find major, you know, learn major things that would change my themes. And then let's go link out to the JIRA where you can just see the snapshot of the roadmap at any given point in time.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm a big kind of docks. And decks are obviously helpful if you're talking live, but I do think in a remote first culture or like lots of us are in hybrid remote cultures, it's hard because, you know, decks typically require a voiceover. And so we have been doing a big push even on my teams where I'm like, write it down and document. Forced yourself to write the pros because when you write the pros, you can actually add that level of granularity. So very much so like the same way I'm like a roadmap is a story you're telling themes. Like you write a story in a notebook, right? You write a snowbook, you write a story on pages. And so a doc is definitely preferred. And even in the doc, just being like, here's what we're trying to achieve. Here are the, you know, the big areas I want to invest in. Here are my big themes. And then going into each of those themes and being like, these are the big projects. And then linking out again, not even to a spreadsheet, but linking out to the artifacts and the systems that your team actually uses. So if your team uses Jira, go ahead and link out to Jira because, you know, so often.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roadmapping prioritization, or kind of one bucket for me, and then OKR is another. So I'll maybe give you my biggest tip in each one of these buckets. So for roadmapping, 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 thing like things”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right and the scope of your project, and like something has to give. And so, you know, at the end of the day, you can't just keep investing, keep investing because it's going to push out your launch timeline. But can you pick a few different areas where you're like, I'm going to scatter that pixie dust? I'm going to do a little bit more than what users are expecting. And that creates that lovability.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's definitely this idea of like the thing is just good. It has all, it is high quality. It's not janky. It doesn't feel weird. I'll give you a very small example again just from Webflow. This idea of like keyboard shortcuts, right? Like that feels small, but like that is a piece that creates a lot of love from user base who are power users. And then there's this concept of like pixie dust. Maybe I'll pull out of color like design tool space and we'll talk about some of the other things, whether it's Dropbox or Airbnb. But you can just do a little bit of that like extra Pixie does it. So an example from Airbnb, when we're doing the mobile app revamp, we're like, okay, there's like these basic table stakes. But if we actually added in templates and we, and we made it so that these templates could be maybe pre-populated in certain ways from the content they already have, that is lovable. That is that extra little bit of pixie dust. And spending the time to do that, and again, you can't, again, can't pixie dust everything that will just at the end of the day, you know, you basically have like your time, your staff.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, to me, it's like better to do five things instead of the 15 things in a really, really great way with a high degree of polish, with like a, oh, this really meets my need versus trying to do everything and just doing a little bit of everything. And so every part of the experience feels a little bit clunky. It's not quite there. People, I think, would actually respect this idea of like, you've given me minimal lovable in five areas as opposed to minimal viable in 15 areas.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are we at minimal lovable? Where in between are we, right? And so having that point of view and then being able to say, are we going to be able to meet as a company? Are we going to rely on our ecosystem to help us meet it? What are we actually going to do? And even within the future set, it's very much how do we do some things well as opposed to do a little bit of everything. I think that is a big piece of minimal lovable, which is”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it's very hard. I think every product team, every product person struggles with this idea of what is the minimal viable, even that concept in itself is difficult, not to mention like minimal lovable. I'll give a WebFlow example. Very recently, so we have been investing in a couple of new features, you know, memberships and logic, new functionality for our users. And what we realized at the end of the day after investing in these areas, we were like, hey, we can get to minimal viable, but we don't know if we can actually get to minimal in a way that our users really, really want. And so does it make sense for us to continue to go down this path of like continues to ship away to get to minimal levable when we are maybe hitting diminishing returns for user base? Or does it actually make sense to release what we have, but then encourage our ecosystem to contribute the lovable piece? And again, it's not just like you put it out there and you hope, but you have to have a very strong point of view of like, are we at minimal?”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terrible way. So, you want to get your product to market as quickly as possible, right? So it doesn't make sense for you to be like, I'm going to build these like 15 additional features because compared to what people are doing right now, your product without those 15 additional features is perfectly fine, perfectly usable, and perfectly, quite honestly, like lovable. So it requires a lot of understanding of like, again, your users and the space that you play in and the tolerance of your given user. So for example, a designer might have a lot higher of a bar of like, this is the kind of workflow I want. This is the kind of like bar for my product. But, you know, again, someone sitting on the finance team or the IT team, right? Like their bar might be like, oh, I'm used to doing these like 15 things. And so your thing is just a lot better.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 understanding for the thing that you're working on, what is a lovable experience, what is the quality bar that resonates with your users? And again, especially in a world where there might be a lot of different options, like minimal level product is the new MVP, right? The new minimal viable product. So I think that's the real point. But at the end of the day, it does come back to what are the options that a user has and what are they trying to do. So there's a world where, you know, your quality bar, your quote unquote quality bar or your, let's call it your polish bar can be a little bit lower because the reality is the thing that you're quote unquote competing against or like you're replacing is literally like a manual workflow. It's like spreadsheets, it's doing something in a super”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think first it comes down to your conviction. Like, do you actually have conviction that this is a bad idea, or are you personally still learning, right? I think if you're at the point, if you're like, I have total conviction, then your job is to say no. You really, like if you do not, like you're not doing your job. And then the question is like, what are the tips in how to convince someone who's very bought into an idea that that's not the right idea? And there, what I would say is it's understanding the spirit of what they're trying to achieve, right? Being able to go back with, hey, I understand the spirit. The spirit is that we're trying to get people, you know, who previously didn't consider Airbnb before to like come and like use Airbnb. But the right way to do it is not this very time intensive, cost-intensive way to inspect all these homes. The way to do it is to be much more granular in what we ask people when”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You should articulate what success looks like and the milestones you want to hit in the small intervals that I talked about, right? So you don't get into this world where you're like, hey, I've gone for two years investing in this thing. Now we got to cut it. It's like, what is the quarter long milestone? Okay, what's the next quarter long milestone? And every single point, what is a go and no go. And I think that really can help a team and a company say, it's okay. I invested a quarter in it, but I didn't invest two years.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that early phase to go learn those lessons. But you just have to be very, very clear with your team on what phase you're in. Hey, we're in the learning phase and we explicitly are trying to learn these things versus, hey, we have this really big vision and we're just going to kind of go at it. Like that is not recommended in my mind. It's like breaking it down into these smaller chunks. That I think gets you the balance of thinking really, really big, but also being able to be like, okay, we are still going to be able to say, okay, this path is not going to work out. We ran at it for a short period of time. We got these learnings. Now let's go down this other path.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's really important for every company to be dreaming big. Like if you don't have a big vision, it's really hard for you to innovate. But you got to couple that really big vision with thoughtfulness around your execution, right? And so I think one of the biggest tips I have is how do you just be very, how do you be clear about the phase that you're in? So I think it's totally fine to be like, hey, we are going to try X for six months, three months, you know, whatever it is. And we're explicitly going to go learn these types of things. We're going to learn why are people like, like, are there signals that we would get that would indicate that, again, the communication with the host isn't great? Or, you know, this type of listing, if you, if it's hosted by a person with multiple property, like I think there are factors and be like, hey, we can learn this very explicit thing in a given period of time. And you can do what I call like unscalable things in that prototyping.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would have really worked out. I think we should have known that, or we should have dug into that more at the very beginning and then to get very tailored instead of like one blunt instrument to solve it all. Hey, we're going to go inspect. It's like, what is the problem for this listing and what's the best solution to fix that problem?”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for a platform like Airbnb, the right way to go about doing it is through reviews, right? Through our guest reviews, which are essentially free as opposed to literally sending out inspectors. And I think the other things are if you can get signal on what are the things that are on quality that people care about, is it cleaner? Is it the, hey, I'm locked out. And I think that there are other solutions besides inspection that then get at that. So for example, it is actually cheaper to go send everyone a lockbox than to deploy an inspector and go look at your property, right? It is actually cheaper to maybe do a partnership with a bunch of cleaners in different local areas and then get that as part of the feat. Like as opposed to doing the inspection. So again, it's really about what are you really trying to achieve? What is the user problem in each of these areas? And can you target that problem with the particular listing that is, that you're looking at? And so, yeah, I personally don't believe the unit economics ever.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there wasn't really a clear path. I think it was less about execution. Exactly. And it was more just like if you understood, again, this is my point around unit economics. There are things where I think you have like magical thinking around unit economics. You're like, well, when we get to the scale of X, it's all going to work out. We can make these things happen. I think you actually need to really make sure the unit economics work quite at the beginning. So that is definitely one lesson. And I think the other thing is, and going back to the spirit of what are you trying to achieve, if you're trying to achieve this idea of like really knowing the quality of the place.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other piece here that's really important is what as a company is their strategic strength and like what's in your wheelhouse. So for example, Airbnb, we weren't that strong in operations. Again, we're this platform or this marketplace, right? And so if you don't have that muscle and then you're asking the company, the teams to essentially build it from the ground up, that's really, really difficult. Not to mention the unit economics. Are the unit economics actually going to work, even as you scale?”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, that's a good one. It's so interesting. I feel like as product people, we're always making mistakes. We're always learning. Maybe I'll give an example from Airbnb since you and I were both there. And this one does stand out to me. So we're working on this concept called Airbnb. You know, if you took a step back, what we're really trying to do is to be like, hey, not everyone trusts Airbnb in terms of, you know, it's a platform. It's not like it's managed inventory. It's not a hotel. How do you go in and really make sure that all the Airbnbs are meeting the quality bar? But I do think we were very solution first. And I think we're also competitor afraid at the time, right? So it was during a time where there were managed marketplaces. There were the Saunders out there. And I think that as a company, we're very much like, oh, goodness. Like, what are we going to do in the world of managed marketplaces? And so we went really hard down the solution space. We essentially were like, let's go inspect our inventory. Let's actually try to manage our inventory more and really what we should have done is taken a step back and be like, what's the real problem? The real problem is people want to know what they're getting themselves into. We need to represent the homes a lot better.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a part of that, you know. One of the first things I teach is you're not a CEO, you're not here. You actually have very little true authority because you don't actually manage anyone. It's a lot of it is all through influence. And so that is also a piece where you have to kind of untrain that thinking. I do think a lot of people come into the product role thinking that I get to call the shots. I get to make the decisions. I get to decide what gets built. And really, your job is not that. Your job is to understand here the opportunities and then you're kind of pulling together all the different possibilities and you're really editing. So I do think it comes from desire for a lot of people thinking that's what the product role is and what it actually isn't.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think something that is really hard to untrain, but I think every human does it is you jump to solutions. And so one of the biggest things I see not just in my course, but also just as a PM and like some of the mistakes that you make as a PM, is the idea of get really attached to a solution, a way of implementing something, something that you can see in your head that you want to build. And so that's the first thing I really want to unteach in our course. And so a lot of people will literally come in. They'll be like, I want to build X startup or I want to do this thing. Or I'm in blank school and I've been doing a lot of research on this particular area. And so like untraining that and being like, hey, we're going to go out there. We are not going to think at all about the thing that you want to build. But instead, 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 to 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 really have to.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, working with go-to-market teams and cross-functional stakeholders. That could be like your thing. You could be known for working on the most technically complex problems. 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, a reputation. And then you're giving more responsibility. People tend to flock and give responsibility to the people that are known for being excellent at something.”
2023-07-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source