Jiaona Zhang: prediction

Transcript context

…That's tough. So what was that like being a PM leader at a company in that craziness? And is there a takeaway from that experience that helps you be a better product manager, a leader, person? Yeah, I learned a lot from my time there. I think the most important lesson I learned was really around... I think there's like a people leader management lesson, and then there's also just like a how do you build an org period. The people lesson I learned was just really around empathy. In fact, essentially what I was doing was I built a team. I spent the first six months of my time there actually growing my team a lot, and not just in the US but in Asia and in Europe. And then the second half of my time there was actually being like, "What do we do? If this is what's happening with WeWork, what are we actually going to do with all of these people who have come to WeWork to work?" And there was so many lessons there around leadership, around how do you think about people? How do you think about giving them the right transition plans? It was a lot of learning. And I think probably a lot of people, even right now through the macroeconomic downturn, they're learning that lesson in a really hard way. And so it was definitely something that I got a crash course on, I think early. And the second lesson really was around not over-hiring. And so I think that was huge, and I think I personally learned that lesson through my time there. And it's something that I'm very conscious of at any company that I go to. Just because laying off half your team is a terrible feeling. Literally having hired people and then having to let them go, it's not something you want to do. And so being really thoughtful around how do we not over-hire? How are we really clear about, again, these milestones of we got to get through these gates, we got to be able to show these types of results, and then we unlock hiring in X, Y, Z ways? That hygiene is really, really important. Feels like this connects back to the Airbnb Plus story of "Let's just be really ambitious. We don't have any idea how we're going to get there, but we're just going to go for it, hire like crazy, scale, put a lot of investment in this thing and hopefully we'll figure it out."…

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