Jiaona Zhang: recommendation

Transcript context

…What were signs maybe looking back that you didn't necessarily have the trust that you thought you did or you should have had? I think something, a product like Webflow is a very complex product and there are so many pieces to it. It's very difficult to learn the product in the first 90 days, especially if I was also prioritizing all these conversations with the team. And so I think that again, without the time constraint, what I would recommend is to be like, "Hey, every product leader has to take the time to really go deep on the product. " Given the complexity of Webflow and given the time-bound nature of when I had to go out, and given the fact I really also wanted to build that social context around what is working and not working from a function working together? Not just what the product is. What I wasn't able to do was spend enough time with the product to be able to have all of that in my back pocket to be able to be like, "Oh, I know how this, this and this works because I've literally used it a bunch." So you had to choose. And in my head I was like, "I would much rather understand how the team is functioning together." And the reality is the team was comprised of a lot of people with a lot of deep product context. So ultimately as all things in product, you know this Lenny, everything's a trade off. And so it's a trade off. And so you had to make the call of what you wanted to trade off. And the thing I traded off the most was that product context in my first 90 days. And again, it got me some things because I was able to have the time to go deep on the things I mentioned, but it didn't give me enough trust in the piggy bank around the actual product fundamentals or product, the actual thing we're building as opposed to the discipline. So at this point you've worked at four legendary companies, Dropbox, Airbnb, WeWork, Webflow. If we were to just go through each one, what's just one lesson that you take away from each of these companies in terms of how it's informed either how you build product or lead people, anything along those lines?…

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