Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork & Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang

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, like, the projects that you get because you're, 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.

(intro music plays) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is JZ. JZ is Senior Vice President of Product at Webflow. She's also a lecturer at Stanford, teaching a course on product management. Before this, she was Senior Director of Product Management at WeWork, a longtime product leader at Airbnb, where I got to work with JZ for a number of years, and she was also PM at Dropbox and at a gaming company called Pocket Gems. In our conversation, we dig into the most common mistakes early product managers make in their career, plus JZ's biggest product mistake. We cover the concept of minimal lovable products versus minimal viable products. We talk about JZ's unique frameworks for road mapping and prioritization and OKRs, and her take on how to structure your first 90 days as a product leader at a new company, plus what she's learned from her wild year at WeWork. Also, the best advice she's ever gotten around product and leadership, and the story of Airbnb Plus and where it went wrong. I've been hoping to get JZ on the podcast for a while, and I'm really happy that we finally made this happen. With that, I bring you JZ after a short word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Brave Search and their newest product, the Brave Search API, an independent global search index you can use to power your search or AI apps. If your work involves AI, then you know how important new data is to train your LLMs and to power your AI applications. You might be building an incredible AI product, but if you're using the same datasets as your competitors to train your models, you don't have much of an advantage. Brave Search is the fastest growing search engine since Bing, and it's 100% independent from the big tech companies. Its index features billions of pages of high-quality data from real humans, and it's constantly updated thanks to being the default search engine in the Brave browser. If you're building products with search capabilities, you're probably experiencing soaring API costs or a lack of viable global alternatives to Bing or Google. It's only gonna become harder to afford these challenges. The Brave Search API gives you access to its novel web-scale data with competitive features, intuitive structuring, and affordable costs. AI devs will particularly benefit from data containing thorough coverage of recent events. Lenny's Podcast listeners can get started testing the API for free at brave.com/lenny. That's brave.com/lenny. Today's episode is brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours. The best way to see what Miro's all about and how it can help your team collaborate better is not to listen to me talk about it, but to go check it out for yourself. Go to miro.com/lenny. With the help of the Miro team, I created a super cool Miro board with two of my own favorite templates, my one-pager template and my managing up template, that you can plug in play and start using immediately with your team. I've also embedded a handful of my favorite templates that other people have published in the Miroverse. When you get to the board, you can also leave suggestions for the podcast, answer a question that I have for you, and generally just play around to get a sense of how it all works. Miro is a killer tool for brainstorming with your team, laying out your strategy, sharing user research findings, capturing ideas, giving feedback on wireframes, and generally just collaborating with your colleagues. I actually used Miro to collaborate with the Miro team on creating my own board, and it was super fun and super easy. Go check it out at miro.com/lenny. That's M-I-R-o.com/lenny. JZ, welcome to the podcast.