Jiaona Zhang on Product Scorecards, Strategy and Faster Learning

Linktree chief product officer Jiaona “JZ” Zhang tells Harry Stebbings how she entered product management. After studying economics, she worked in consulting but wanted to build the solutions she was advising clients to pursue. Without a computer science degree, she used her analytics background to enter mobile gaming as a product manager.

Gaming gave Zhang rapid cycles of building, measuring and iterating as players joined and eventually left games. She advises aspiring product managers to find a product they care about and a place where they can get frequent learning repetitions. In her early role, she says, she shipped a new app every week.

Zhang frames product work as a trade-off among speed, quality and scope: it is difficult to maximize all three at once. She is most willing to reduce scope, because speed produces learning and insufficient quality can make an otherwise sound idea fail in the market. What customers consider quality may include both polish and how completely a product solves their job.

When business results take months to appear, Zhang encourages teams to seek faster leading signals. At Webflow, a sales cycle might be long, but a team with an alpha feature could put it in front of interested customers and hear reactions within an hour. Qualitative feedback, input measures and eventual business outcomes are all forms of data, though they answer different questions.

To connect work across teams, Zhang uses a KPI tree. At the top are shared business outcomes, such as revenue or nights booked at Airbnb. Below them are inputs such as subscriptions and churn, then product measures such as adoption and customer sentiment. Changes in activation, conversion and retention can ultimately flow into revenue.

She recommends that even an early company sketch the skeleton of its tree: which levers does it believe drive the desired outcomes? Growth can conceal a lack of understanding until it stops. The tree need not be a perfect model, but it should prompt leaders to investigate how the business actually works.

Zhang warns against treating metrics as the whole job. Leaders should understand the connections in the tree, while giving teams a qualitative headline for success and an accompanying measure. A clear company strategy—vision, mission, investment areas and explicit choices about what not to do—aligns sales, product, support and finance.

Teams may need different measures to advance that shared strategy. Sales may have a quota, but must also care about customer success. Growth teams need numbers for signup, activation or conversion; Zhang cautions against hitting them through small local optimizations when a deeper product change could produce a larger improvement.

She wants growth teams to state their strongest hypotheses in words. At Linktree, one example might be creating a page quickly based on who a customer is and what they want, so a restaurant’s page differs from a podcaster’s. Teams can test such ideas incrementally: show a prototype to a restaurant or see whether people choose templates on a landing page before building the complete flow.

Zhang calls product management a chameleon role. A product leader may need to lean into sales to learn from large customers, or support to understand problems before a sales motion exists. The job is to spot gaps and help fill them, whether personally, through a hire or by pushing the executive team to act.

Product teams can lose touch with users when daily execution takes over. Zhang recommends speaking to users and drawing on sales and support colleagues, who hear recurring requests and see workarounds. Those cross-functional conversations provide a scalable source of customer information.

When feedback comes from very different users, Zhang first defines which customers are in scope and then looks for overlapping needs. At Linktree she sees creators and small businesses both wanting a unified digital presence and easier ways to manage content across platforms. Her view reflects Linktree’s strategy: creators run businesses, while small businesses increasingly need creator skills.

Asked why she says planning should not exist, Zhang distinguishes a rigid planning exercise from strategy. She would spend most of the time on strategy and team rituals. A strategy describes the future the company believes in, why it can win, where it will invest and what it will not do; detailed plans can become obsolete when work takes longer or new information arrives.

She recommends expressing strategy in a concise two-page document, with one person holding the pen, ideally the CEO working with the product leader. The important work is debating the company’s advantage and investment choices. That discussion retains the valuable part of planning without treating a detailed annual schedule as certainty.

A ritual, for Zhang, is a repeated practice that builds organizational muscle. Her first is a scorecard for transparency. At a distributed company like Linktree, she says, people need to know what is happening on the handful of most important cross-functional projects, rather than receive a list of every task.

Teams mark projects weekly as green for on track, yellow for at risk or red for off track. A string of green reports followed by a sudden unsalvageable red at quarter end signals a failure to see risks. A good report names the risk and required help; a great one shows that the team already took steps to address it.

Risk detection relies on judgment as well as data. The product, design and engineering leads must first share a clear picture of success; each can then say whether the work is on track. If one sees green, another red and a third is unsure, that disagreement itself exposes an alignment problem.

The second ritual is a product jam, intended to bring people together to create and move quickly. Participants need a qualitative and quantitative definition of success and an understanding of risks and assumptions. Unlike a sequence of handoffs through separate reviews, a jam brings relevant thinking together so decisions and learning happen faster.

For a zero-to-one product, Zhang favors near-daily collaboration, ideally in person or as close to it as a distributed team can manage. Teams learn rapidly and small misalignments compound. For a more mature product, jams can be targeted at important moments, such as defining the user problem or considering several possible solutions.

The participants depend on the problem: founders may join one jam and sales colleagues another. Remote jams require more preparation but can work with shared whiteboarding tools such as FigJam or Miro. Zhang still prefers a physical whiteboard, particularly for early-stage creation.

Her third ritual is a demo power hour, designed to build ownership and accountability. People show work in progress, including prototypes or code that might break, instead of waiting for a polished presentation. A room full of demonstrations across stages makes progress visible and gives engineers and designers pride in what they are building.

To create urgency, Zhang suggests making the human impact of work visible. Linktree brings a user to nearly every biweekly all-hands meeting to show how they use the product, what works and what frustrates them. She believes that understanding who benefits motivates teams to move faster and do better work.

Leaders must also model the pace they ask of others. A leadership team that demands urgency but delays decisions while seeking perfection sends the opposite signal. Zhang encourages leaders to demonstrate even more urgency than they expect from their teams, because their behavior spreads through the organization.

A common hiring mistake is bringing in a product leader too early and delegating away the founder’s responsibility. Founders can first seek leverage from internal people close to users, such as a customer-support colleague. When the company has product-market fit, is scaling and the founder cannot cover every need, hiring a product leader may make sense.

The product leader and CEO must complement each other. Zhang warns that a visionary founder may be drawn to another visionary and end up with competing visions. A founder who sees the destination but struggles with sequencing might instead seek a leader strong at prioritization; someone building a product portfolio may need industry experience. Start by identifying the actual problem the hire must solve.

Domain expertise matters when it fills a critical gap, but Zhang also values generalists. Entering a new domain without assumptions encourages learning and allows mental models to travel across contexts. She points to marketplace ideas at Webflow and Linktree as examples of applying prior experience, while acknowledging that the right mix depends on the team.

Rapid technological change makes product leadership exciting to Zhang because teams can prototype and learn quickly. It also punishes rigidity. She favors an explicit strategy that can change with new evidence, supported by rituals flexible enough to provide structure without turning the roadmap into an inflexible set of instructions.

Stebbings worries that website, commerce and creator products may converge as AI makes building easier. Zhang responds that crowded markets can indicate real demand. She believes demand for a digital presence will grow, but says companies must articulate what they believe about the future and how fast it will arrive.

Zhang expects companies to seek highly controlled, polished marketing sites without devoting expensive engineering teams to every page. She sees Webflow, her former employer, serving that need, while Linktree serves creators and small businesses seeking a simpler presence. Stebbings questions whether Webflow sits in an awkward middle between simplicity and advanced tools; both acknowledge the tension between power and ease of use.

Zhang says Webflow’s opportunity includes expanding beyond initial website creation into more of the website-development stack, such as testing. She reports that Linktree chose Webflow after considering engineering costs and other tools, describing a roughly $50,000 spend in her example. These are her company-specific account and commercial perspective, not an independent comparison.

Asked whether Linktree could be a $100 billion company, Zhang says it has a shot but is far from the consumer-first destination she associates with that outcome. Her proposed sequence is to make the service more useful and reduce intermediate steps, then build creator and brand connections, and only later pursue broader discovery. This is an ambition and scenario, not a valuation forecast.

In the quick-fire round, Zhang says founders often miss product-market fit by jumping to solutions before understanding user problems. Product managers seeking promotion should focus on useful, high-impact work and develop a recognizable strength. She cites recent ChatGPT and Quest experiences as products that impressed her.

Every function should have productive tension with product, Zhang says; sales and engineering often push on priorities. A product manager’s role is to turn that tension into useful decisions. She also wants companies to give younger people more chances to enter product and design, rather than requiring prior product experience for every good role.

For product strategy examples, Zhang points to OpenAI’s execution and potential in search, Meta’s long-term bets on VR and messaging, and Disney’s control of valuable content for streaming. These are her interpretations and expectations, not verified results or endorsements. Stebbings adds that he is a buyer of Meta stock.