Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox)

July 2, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Jiaona Zhang, SVP of product at Webflow and former leader at WeWork, Airbnb, and Dropbox, discusses pitfalls for new product managers, her Airbnb Plus misstep, the case for minimal lovable products over minimal viable ones, roadmapping as storytelling, OKR ambition, career building, WeWork's chaos, and first-90-days plans. Drawing from teaching at Stanford and her experiences, she emphasizes user problems over solutions, phased execution for big ideas, and doubling down on company strengths.

New PM Traps and the Airbnb Plus Lesson

New product managers often jump to preconceived solutions rather than starting with user problems, assuming the role grants directive authority when it actually relies on influence and editing options. Zhang unteaches this by focusing students on real-world problems first. Her own major error was Airbnb Plus, a solution-first push to inspect listings for quality amid competitor fears, ignoring the core problem (trust via poor representation) and Airbnb's strengths (peer reviews as a scalable, low-cost signal). Better paths involved granular fixes like lockboxes or cleaning partnerships, checked early against unit economics. This highlights when to pair big visions with explicit learning phases: short, unscalable experiments with clear milestones and go/no-go criteria to avoid sunk-cost traps, versus unchecked ambition.

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What you'll learn

1 `* (04:24) **Common Mistakes of New PMs**`
2 `* (06:53) **Biggest Product Mistake: Airbnb Plus**`
3 `* (11:42) **Balancing Big Vision with Execution**`
4 `* (17:10) **Minimal Lovable Product (MLP) vs. MVP**`
5 `* (22:40) **Roadmapping: Tell a Story with Themes**`
6 `* (28:18) **Thriving as a PM: Be Known for Something**`
7 `* (31:47) **OKRs: Define Qualitative "Crushing It"**`

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

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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. In today’s episode, we discuss:

• Building a “minimum lovable product” rather than a minimum viable product

• How to create better roadmaps through storytelling

• Top lessons from Dropbox, Airbnb, WeWork, and Webflow

• The importance of setting ambitious OKRs

• JZ’s first 90 days playbook: how to succeed in a new role

• Advice for early-career PMs

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-minimum-lovable-products

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Where to find Jiaona Zhang:

• Reforge: https://www.reforge.com/managing-your-pm-career

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jiaona/