Jiaona Zhang: Why All Product Teams Should Have a Scorecard & How to Use It | E1154

I think it's the most exciting time to be a product leader. The product role is the most chameleon role out of all of the functions. I do think between speed, quality, and scope, something has to give. I am most willing to trade off scope. It's very difficult to get all three at once.

Ready to go? Jay-Z, I have heard so many good things from Alex for a while now. So first, thank you so much for joining me today.

It's so great to be here.

Now, I am very excited for this. We're gonna take this in a couple of different twists and turns. We always need, like, a good starting point. I think it's good to understand where the love of product first comes from. So when and where did you first realize that product was really where you wanted to commit your life and time towards?

When I was an undergrad, I had no idea that this was even a thing. I was an econ major, I graduated, did what's expected, you know, consulting. Then after a few years of doing that, I was just like, "I'm always just advising." Like, I'm spending all this time getting all this knowledge and getting so passionate and worked up about what a company should be doing, and then I just hand it off, and I'm like, "Here's a deck. Good luck." Um, and so I was kind of like, "What can I do? What kind of job would actually let me build?" Like, take the things that I've researched and understood and go make them true. And so this is when I was like, "Oh, there's this thing called product." Uh, so I was living in Boston. You know, thing called product, a lot of them happened to be in San Francisco, and then as I did more research, I was like, "Well, the best places to do this thing called product is at a place like Google, and they only take people with a CS degree," which I did not have, right? Or they only took people from Stanford, MIT, (laughs) which I did not go to. And so I basically got in by being like, "Well, what could I offer that people would actually value?" And from my analytics work, my economics work, I was like, "I can bring you analytics." And so that's how I basically became a mobile gaming PM. How did you find your love for product there? And for me, it's like, well, at the end of the day, like, the, the cycles in which you learn and build and then iterate and learn and build and iterate in gaming is wild. Like, you are constantly just changing the game, because at the end of the day, like, people are coming in, and then they're kind of, like, declining out of the game. So just constantly figuring out, like, how do I engage them? I think the best PMs actually have done some stint in gaming, right? And so that's where I, like, found, like, my love for product.