20Product: How Linktree, Webflow and Airbnb Used Rituals and Product Principals to Guide Product Roadmap, Why All Product Teams Should Have a Scorecard and How to Use it & How to Run the Best "Product Jams" with JZ, CPO @ Linktree

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

Harry Stebbings
This is 20 product with me, Harry Stebbins. Now 20 product is the monthly show where we sit down with the best. Product leaders to discuss how they start. Scale and maintain both amazing products and amazing product teams. Joining me in the hot seat today is a freaking rock star of the product world, Jay Z.

Not that Jay Z, Rockstar Jay Z, but Jay Z, the CPO chief product officer at Linktree, the worlds leading Linkin bio platform empowering 45 million creators brands and SMBs. And Jay Z joined Linktree from Webflow where she served as SVP of product. And before that she spent four years at Airbnb where she built and led numerous teams on the host side. Shes also held leadership roles at the. Likes of WeWork, Dropbox and even teachers at Stanford University.

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Harry Stebbings
As one senior product leader puts it's complicated to keep everybody in the loop, and airtable really helps us stay in the loop. With airtable, you'll build the right products grounded in what customers really want, unify your entire product portfolio and workflows in one place, and ship those products to customers faster than ever. In fact, one global financial services company cut its time to market for new features by half. Maximize your team's impact too with airtable. Give it a try for free today@airtable.com.

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You have now arrived at your destination. 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 going to 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.

Jiaona Zhang
I was an econ major, graduated, did what's expected, you know, consulting. And 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.

And so I was kind of like, what can I do? What kind of job would actually let me build? 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. So I was living in Boston, thing called product.

A lot of them happen to be in San Francisco. And then as I did more research, I was like, well, the best places to do this thing, 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 take people from Stanford, MIT, 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 PI. How did you find your love for product there? And for me, it's like, well, at the end of the day, 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 PM's actually have done some stint in gaming, right? And so that's really found, like, my love for product. So number one thing I have to ask you there is like when you think about advice to young people or to people who want to enter product, that less conventional route of not having the cs or not having the Stanford, what would you advise them knowing all that you know now who want to enter product?

I think the first thing I advise is go somewhere, work on a product that you have a lot of passion for and most importantly, where you can get those learning reps in. Kind of like what I just mentioned about gaming, right? Like I learned so much, like every single week I was shipping a new app to the App Store. That in terms of reps is so different than I think a lot of companies today where you're like, I spent a whole quarter or spent a long time and so get somewhere where you can get those reps in. Is speed in contradiction to quality of product?

Harry Stebbings
People often think if you move faster, you're going to have to trade off on some elements of quality or depth of product. Do you think that they are in contradiction or you can actually have both at the same time? I think there's a couple of pieces here. The first one is that I do think between speed, quality and scope, something has to give. It's very difficult to get all three at once.

Jiaona Zhang
And I also think like, what's scope? Scope is essentially like how much features? How many features? Like the scope of how much you're building, right? So you can do a little thing very fast with high quality, or you can do a lot of things like a much more robust product, probably either very, very fast but low quality or really, really high quality.

But it's going to take you a long time. So those are the three levers that I always think about when I'm thinking about, okay, which 01:00 a.m.. I going to have to trade off? And that is the reality. Anyone who tells you you can get all three all at once with like a team that is still norming and storming is probably lying to you.

But it's the idea of what do you trade off? Which one are you most willing to trade off? I am most willing to trade off scope, and that's because I believe that it is very, very important to get speed. Speed for any company, any product is what gets you your learnings. And if your speed at learning is slow, you are going to die or going to fall behind.

I also do not believe that you can trade off on quality because so many times you'll be like, okay, well, I did this thing. No one used it, it doesn't work. And you're like, well, it's really because, you know, this is what you did. You did not, you did not do it to a level of quality that is going to be accepted by the market because, you know, in the market there's already so much out there. And so it's actually really interesting because quality and scope have like this relationship with each other.

And what I mean by that is in some markets, quality is literally just how beautiful the thing is. You know, in a world where you have a notion versus a Google Docs, right, like, notion, really sweated quality to be this, like, beautiful, delightful, simple experience. You could actually be like, quality to some customers is a combination of how beautiful the thing is, but also how much scope there is. Meaning today, if you are doing something really manually by spreadsheets and you get a product out there that like, makes that thing really automated and really delightful, that could be interpreted as like quality or scope, meaning this thing does this job better, it's beautiful, or it's like easy to use, and that actually gives you the edge. And so I think that the bar between scope and quality, that's this like seesaw that you can get pull one lever or the other.

And I think you gotta be really thoughtful about which one you're pulling because your customer has a certain need. What happens when the data that you get back is slow to come back or slower to come back? So when you think about gaming on a day by day basis, you have matrix is very quick feedback cycles on, say, a PLG SaaS product, it's quickish, but it may not be day, it may be week or month. And so the feedback cycles are slower. How do you think about industries where the feedback cycles are slower?

Harry Stebbings
And does that change your perception of how you think about the three? Yeah. Here's what I would challenge people, which is like, there are things that you can get back. Data is just a term. Data just means, like, information.

Jiaona Zhang
So there are things that you can get back in an hour, in a day, in a week, and so on and so forth. And so what I challenge, even I've worked in b, two c, B, two B. What I challenge people is what is it that you are able to get back in a day, an hour, a week? And that is a leading indicator of things that might take a little longer to converge. For example, I worked at Webflow.

There are things where it's like, yes, the sales cycle is not overnight. It takes time. So if you're saying, I shipped this thing and I want to see how this thing impacted the sales team, being able to sell this thing, that takes a little bit longer, but the thing that you can learn in literally an hour is, hey, I have all these customers out there who've been wanting this very specific feature. Now I have an alpha version of it. I'm going to go out to these people, these clients, these customers, and say, here, like, go use it.

What do you think? They will play around with it, and they will give you data in literally an hour. Sitting with them being like, this is it. This is like localization. This is the thing I've been wanting for so long.

I'm so excited for it. And that is data. And so I think that what I would challenge is like, what are you trying to get back? What kind of data? And you can get data back at any given point is just, is it a, you know, qualitative piece of data?

Is it an input piece of data, or is it ultimately an output metric, which is what you're talking about, the thing that takes the longest time to return. How do you want your teams to codify or document the data and learnings that they have to ensure that teams and product can progress in unison with them? Because you don't want people just kind of having it in their head. Isolated and it not be valuable and shared amongst team. How do you think about having that cross functional benefit and, like, team wide benefit?

Yeah. And almost every company I've been at, I've been doing something called, like, a KPI tree, and you're like, what is that? So really what it is, if you think about a tree, right, you have the top of a tree and then it kind of like, flows down all the branches. At the very top is what I call your business output metrics. So it's like, these are your financial health metrics.

So usually the things that appear on a CEO dashboard, you're like, these are my signups, these are my subscriptions, these are my. Just like high level, like, imagine Airbnb. It's like, these are the number of nights booked. These are the highest level metrics and they're output metrics. Just to be clear, these are product metrics.

Harry Stebbings
They're not revenues, they're not margin, they're not. Are they business, like, financial? No, they're actually business metrics. So at the very top of the tree, always have business metrics. Because at the end of the day, like, your company is living and dying by your business metrics.

Jiaona Zhang
I think that there's this artificial separation sometimes of, like, product and business, and there are times where, like, the product owner doesn't own the business metrics. And I actually think that's very harmful because at the end of the day, your product is helping deliver value to your users and drive the business forward. So at the very top of the tree that is shared by every exact and every single team at the company are business metrics. Business metrics. At the top, then we have what?

Then when you flow down, then you have the input metrics that drive these output business metrics. Meaning in order for our revenue or ARR to grow a certain way, these things have to happen. We have to get these many subscriptions to happen. We have to get these many people to not churn. So now you're getting a little bit closer to product metrics, and then we get even further out into, like, the lower branches.

This is where you have your actual product metrics, which is for most product teams, the thing you are measuring right out the gate is adoption. It's like, hey, is someone using out of the target audience that could use this product? How many people are using the product and are they liking it? Generally, if you were to survey a random sample or just go talk to people, what's their mp's? And then it's like, okay, are they actually seeing real behavior changes because they're using it, because they're happy with it.

And that's when you're like, oh, okay, we are actually seeing churn go down, or we are seeing retention go up, or we are seeing activation go up. Then those you can see are even more closely tied to the top of the tree that I talked about, which are these output business metrics, which is when you literally do the math of like, okay, sign ups have gone up, activation has gone up, conversion has gone up, overall retention has gone up. That actually leads to overall higher revenue. When should we do the KPI tree? Should this be on day one, or should this be when we hit a certain customer account?

Harry Stebbings
How do you think about advising startups on when's the right time to have that kind of metric infrastructure in place? Yeah, I think a company should always have the skeleton of the tree. And the reason for that is this is basically how your product works and how things flow through the business, right? You're like, hey, I know that these are my levers, and I know that if I pull these levers, this is the outcome. I think there's that classic saying where, like, growth masks all problems.

Jiaona Zhang
I think that a lot of times the company's growing, growing, growing, and everyone's like, things are great, and then it doesn't grow. And you're like, oh, my God, what do I do? And usually at that point, they're like, we have no idea what this tree looks like. Like, we don't know what's on the bottom and what feeds up to another thing and then what that then outputs to the next thing. They don't actually know what that chain of events looks like.

And then they start to panic. They're like, oh, my goodness, we got to try this. We'll try that. We got to do all these things. And then they do this, like, slow learning to get to the point where they have that understanding of these are the inputs that lead to our outputs.

So I'd really actually advise companies to try to put even a skeleton that together, which is like. And an easy way to think about it is, tree might feel complicated to someone, but it's like, what are my levers that drive the outcomes that I want for my business? And if you don't know how to identify your levers, you got to take a moment and be like, well, what maybe can I start to tease out? Or where can I go and do a little bit more research and digging to understand? Like, this is a lever that I pull that drives this type of value for my business.

Harry Stebbings
What do you find are the biggest mistakes that founders make? Identifying and then executing against the metrics that they should be focusing on? I think the first one is this over, like focus on metrics. So I gave you the whole example of the tree because it's really just a practice of knowing what are you doing that is resulting in something else. That's really what it is.

Jiaona Zhang
And if you don't know that equation of like, I know I'm going to do something and it's going to make a difference. Like, you should go figure that out. And so I really believe in this concept of like, okay, you have this tree that at the leadership level you're really understanding because you're always like, okay, well, do I understand the link between, you know, different pieces of my business? But then when you're going to teams, you have to give them both a headline. What does success look like?

That's qualitative, right? Like you can describe with words. So what's your headline? What is the metric that accompanies that headline? And then ultimately you should be able to like, walk away being able to tell a story around the investment levels that you believe in.

Harry Stebbings
Can I ask, does that differ by team? And so if you think about the product team, is that headline, is that metric different to the sales team and the customer success team and the growth team, or are they unified across all? So this brings me to like a whole other concept, which is this idea of like, at the end of the day, when you're trying to get your company to march in one direction, the thing I believe in the most is having a really crisp strategy. And that is an articulation of your vision, your mission, what you're doing, your investment areas. Like, these are the things I believe in investing in along with these are the things I don't believe we're going to do.

Jiaona Zhang
That's really, really important. That is shared by every team. It's shared by the sales team, the product team, the support team, the finance team. That is a shared company level thing. Then when you go a layer down how a leader wants to push their team towards aligning to that strategy, it will differ.

There are some teams where it's like the best thing to do is to give them a quota, like a sales team. There are other times when you're like, I need to give them a quota, obviously, but it's really complicated because it's not just about quota. Like, that could actually result in too much competition. It's really about different parts of the sales process and making sure that success, like customer success, is as important as landing the deal. I think what I'm trying to say is, at the end of the day, you got to start with a strategy.

Then you have to understand what is the thing that is going to get that team to execute the fastest towards what you're trying to achieve. And then you want to give that team that metric. And going back to a growth team, growth teams are the teams that are most typically given a number. And yes, you do need to give growth teams numbers. There are literally sign up numbers, there are activation numbers, conversion numbers, so and so forth.

Right. But you don't want to be over optimized on a number because I see so many growth teams do a few things that I think are very big mistakes. The first one is they're like, I just have these numbers and so I'm going to do all these like small things to hit this number when really the thing to hit the number at a global maximum. Right. Like, I'm going to really take this thing and do a step function increase here is to do a very core product change.

And so that's like another philosophy we can spend a ton of time on, which is like, how do you structure growth teams? How do you like, give growth teams goals? How do you think about the line between a growth team and product team? So I do think, like, growth teams have numbers. They should not be micro optimizing those numbers.

They should be really much changing the product in meaningful ways to get to that next step function level of what can drive growth. And then I also think that, like, if you're just given a number, you don't incentivize teams to come back with strong hypotheses on what can work. And this goes back to this idea of, like, always having theses around what your investment levels are, right. Or your investment areas. So I expect to be able to ask any growth team, what are your biggest hypotheses of what's going to get you to that next step function change.

And they should be able to come back with literally a verbal answer, not just, oh, these are my numbers. They should be able to say, hey, I believe that for Linktree, the next big thing is to make it so that regardless of we can pick up who you are, what your goals are, and really quickly create a link tree for you that reflects those goals. So the link tree we build for a restaurant and a chef is very different than a link tree that we'd build for a podcaster. And so I want to hear those like, hypotheses back, because those are the big ideas that we should be pushing towards, not just giving a team like here, go optimize this number because that's where you get very local maximum wins. How long does it take to prove a hypothesis?

Harry Stebbings
Like, sometimes I find that founders slug too long as something that just isn't working. How much data is enough data to know that something is not working? Great question. It brings us back to what we were talking about earlier, which is, yes, there are things that can take a long time if you're looking for this, like end result, but there's also early signal that you get in literally an hour or a day. And so for something like that, being able to prototype something and actually put it in front of a restaurant and say, hey, if we created this link tree for you, are you likely to use this as opposed to going out and trying to figure out how to create your own website using squarespace, wix, whatever it is that signal is signal.

Jiaona Zhang
Every point in the process there's something that you're getting back. That's the first signal. The second signal would be, you don't have to build out the entire flow. You can literally do a landing page that allows people to pick templates and you can see if people are picking some of them. Like that in itself is data.

So you're always like, you've got the big picture in mind, but you're testing small little increments to make sure that you're on the right path. Jay Z the thing I think about constantly when I hear you talk is like, you're just a very cross functional leader. You could be a CPO, but you could also be like, ahead of sales with the development that you're doing on a customer basis and the feedback questions you're asking, you could also be support in many ways in terms of understanding user feedback. And so I guess my question is like, it seems so cross functional. Do you ever find you're stepping on other people's toes?

Harry Stebbings
How do you think about, like, where product ends and where others start? And that challenge, I think that is a fantastic question. It actually encapsulates everything I believe about product, which is the product role is the most chameleon role out of all the functions. Which means at some point you're like, I need to lean into sales because that's actually how I can build the best product by getting that information from my large customers or my. Sometimes you're like, I need to lean into support because I'm not even at the sales point yet I just need to understand what's happening.

Jiaona Zhang
Right. So you're always wearing all these different hats because that is the job of the product leader. To be able to be that chameleon, to be that glue with that exec team, and to be able to spot like what needs more work and go like fill that hole, not necessarily yourself pushing the exec team or the founders to get there. But that's actually how I think about the role. How do you encourage product leaders to push their product teams to the user base?

Harry Stebbings
I find often product teams can kind of sit in isolation building product and not spend enough time with the actual people using it. What advice do you have to product leaders who are like, hey, go meet customers, go sit in support? How do you do that? Yeah, I think the first one is just that remembrance of so much of your role is understanding that user. I think it's so easy to get caught in the day to day execution.

Jiaona Zhang
You forget that you got to be close to the user and talk to the user. Then it comes to the point of, okay, how do I do that scalably? And that is where you do lean on your cross functional partners. You get so much data from your sales team, you get so much data from your support team. So like actually sitting down with them and be like, what are you hearing?

What are you seeing? What are you doing manually? For creators? What do creators really wish we actually like offered as a platform to make their lives easier? You get so much data that way and it's also more scalable.

Yeah. How do you think about prioritization of user data when you think about, I don't know, Demi Lovato, Robert Downey, Junior Halsey. Some of these amazing names that use Linktree, very different, I'm sure, product feedback to a restaurant or to a creator who's got, respectfully, very little following. How do you think about the prioritization of user feedback and where people should spend time and not spend time? That's a great question.

And you know, it is a question that I think I wrestle with almost at every company that I've been at. What I've actually found is that if you really laid out the customer types you care about and then you laid out their needs and their problems, oftentimes you can find that there's a lot at the intersection of what I call that Venn diagram. So the first thing to do is to be very clear of like, who are not your users, who, who is not your quote unquote iCP. Right. Ideal customer that is very important.

But a lot of times you go through that exercise and you're like, I still have way too many people. I still have way too many things that I want to solve for and people's needs that I want to solve for. My goal there is not to be like, let's artificially constrain, because I think that actually artificially constrains your business. That's when you draw that Venn diagram. You say, hey, for Linktree, it's, yes, it's SMBs, and yes, it's creators.

But if you put those two circles together, you actually look at what they need. There are a lot of similarities at the end of the day. First, they want to have some way to unify their digital presence because the world is getting increasingly fragmented with every platform out there and what you need to do on every single platform. So that is a universal common need. Second, the whole process of managing that digital presence, not only on Linktree, but more importantly on these other platforms, super arduous.

And so, you know, how do we make that easier for people? How do we do things like, look at their workflows every single day? Oh my gosh. I am a social media manager for Aritzia, and I actually need to be able to, like, get all this content in, create all these videos, and like schedule it out in a cadence that makes sense. Like that thing, like that need is probably something like a, I need some way to schedule my social media content.

That is actually very true for SMBs where they're like, okay, well, I don't even, first of all, I don't even know what social media content to create, but if there was a world where like, that, I could get guidance on how to create that stuff, and then it was sent out for me, that would be massive, right? So we have this saying at Linktree, which is like, we believe that, you know, creators are SMBs and SMBs are creators, meaning creators are trying to make money. And SMBs, in order for them to be, to survive in the world today, they need to understand social media. They need to be much more digitally native. We believe those things to be true.

And as a result, you can actually figure out the needs across those user groups and prioritize at the intersection. When I hear you speak, everything is very structured. We've got the KPI trees. We have the focus on product strategy very intimately. But then you've said to me before about planning not existing and maybe planning should not exist.

Harry Stebbings
And I'm like, it seems in paradox. Can you talk to me about why plan a should not exist. And does that not go against everything that we've just done with KPI trees, metrics, prioritization, how do you think about planning should not exist? I think that a lot of people spend a lot of time talking about planning, and they talk about process. And those two things, I would really turn on their heads.

Jiaona Zhang
So what I believe in is if you could spend your time doing anything, I spend 80% or more of your time on your strategy and on your rituals. Like, those are the two things I really believe in. So let me talk you through, like, what that means, the strategy. Where are you going? What's the world that you believe in?

And, like, how does that world become different? Because your product exists, right? Your strategy has a couple of key pieces to. It has that piece. It has a piece of, like, what makes you uniquely positioned to win?

Like, if you can't articulate that, like, keep figuring that out. And then it also includes, like, what are you not doing? I talked to you about this concept of having these investment areas and also having this concept of like, okay, well, if these are what we're investing in, these are not what we're going to do. This is not in focus. Right?

You have to articulate all those things. And you can call that a plan. But I really like to call it a strategy because I think so many times you go through planning cycles as a company, whether big, medium, or small, and then literally by Q one of the next year or, like, fiscal year rolls around, like, everything goes out the door. You're like, oh, this took a lot longer to build than I thought. And, oh, my gosh, this new customer just came through the door.

And they are really important. They have all these needs. Right. That happens so often. So I think that a lot of companies that really index on planning get really disappointed.

They're disappointed by the amount of time they put in and the amount of value that they get back out of it. And so that's why I really, like, really push companies move away from this concept of planning. And I spend so much time on this concept, like, strategy. And strategy to make it really concrete for people is you should be able to articulate your strategy in a two page document where one person holds the pen, and ideally that person is the CEO. But a lot of times that requires a partnership between the CEO and, you know, say, the CPO to really write it.

So it's opinionated, it talks about what you're going to do. All the things I just mentioned that is the basis of all the things that you do. Right. So if you spend most of your time on that document debating, that document debating, hey, this is what our advantage is. This is our alpha debating.

These are the things that we're going to invest in and these are the things that we're not going to invest in. If you do that really, really well, you actually do the most valuable parts of quote unquote, planning, and you throw away all the non valuable parts of planning that are really just like a show. And then actually, I'll pause for your questions, but I would love to talk about rituals, which is what I think is really important as opposed to processes. No, I was going to exactly ask what is a ritual and how does that differ from a process? Yeah, again, you might just be like Jay Z.

These are all semantics, but I think the words matter. They matter a lot. And I think that really great product people, they like, sweat every word because they realize that communication is so much of the job. And what you say and the words you pick matter. A ritual is these things that you do on a habitual basis that really build muscle in the organization.

I think that's why I, like, lean so heavily towards rituals. I always tell my team, I'm like, we're going to the gym and today you're lifting weights for the first time. It's really hard, but if you keep lifting the weights, it's going to get easier and easier. What are the rituals that you instill to have a healthy product talk? Yes, I believe in three really important rituals, and it's because I believe in three principles.

The first thing I believe a lot in is this idea of, like, transparency. If you don't know what's going on across the organization, it's really hard to get work done. And Linktree is a remote culture. You know, our founders are in Australia, we have people on the west coast, also people in London. We have people around the world.

And so if you don't have transparency, it's very, very difficult to get people to do their jobs well. And so for transparency, a thing I've done at Webflow, I do this thing called scorecard. And scorecard is essentially like, these are the most important projects. It's not everything. I think, like, once you get to everything, you're like, we might as well just use like linear or a tracker, right?

But it's like, these are the ten most important projects at a company that we all need to be rallying around. Right? And again, if that number could be less than ten, that's great. Five, even better but you know, what are the most important projects that we need to be looking at and have transparency around because it involve multiple teams getting their act together and working in unison. So scorecard is really important.

And I think the thing I want to teach going back to the gym concept, what I want to teach my teams is there's so many times where you do scorecard for the first time. Everyone's like, this is going great. Green, green, green. So you grade every single week, like, are you on track green? Are you off track yellow?

Or are you, like, really off track or like at risk yellow? Or you really off track red. Right. And so we have, like a whole system there and you just see teams being like, green, green, green, green, green. And then the quarter is closing and they're like, red with no chance of salvaging it.

That is bad. Meaning there's not enough understanding what the risks are and de risking and unblocking yourselves. A good scorecard is, you're like, hey, this is at risk, everyone. This is yellow, this is red. I need these resources.

I need this to get de risk. I need go to market to do whatever. That's a good scorecard. And a great scorecard is like, hey, I already spotted this was a problem. It's scorecard today.

But two days ago, I already met with the go to market team. I already did ABCD things. And even though it is at risk right now, I've taken the measures to get us back to green. You basically start to train your team. First of all, you need the transparency, and then you train your team to get a lot better at being able to spot the fact that something's going to go wrong and then to go correct it before it becomes a real problem.

That's one ritual that I believe a lot in this concept of scorecard that gives you that transparency. How do you spot something going wrong? Is it just about analyzing data? No. I mean, honestly, I think that's actually, it's less about data and more about judgment.

At any given point in time, you should be able to ask a product leader of the team, a design leader of that team, and also an engineering leader of the team, and you can be like, is this on track? And I think, first of all, the first thing to do is just articulate what success looks like. If that team does not know what success looks like, it's going to be really hard for them to report out that anything's off track. But if you know what success looks like, it's actually quite easy for you to go around and be like, hey, you three, you guys are the functional leaders of this area. Is this thing on track based on what you've outlined as your goals?

Very easy for the engineering leader to be like, I am really worried about this dependency on this other team, on this platform team not thinking we're going to make it again. You start to see sometimes a product leader thinks it's on track, the engineering leader thinks it's off track, and the design leader doesn't know. And that's a whole other problem that you have to diagnose. You'd be like, okay, everyone, we got to get on the same page, right? And so, like, it's actually the judgment piece.

And the ability for each person in that trifecta to play their role actually contributes to, like, learning the predictability of what you're able to deliver and whether or not you can actually hit some of these deadlines. Just help me understand. So we have transparency in scorecard. One is a ritual and one's a principle. There are three rituals that I do with my team.

So the first ritual is scorecard, and it really gets at transparency. The second ritual I do with my teams is what I call product jams. How do you do product jamming? Yeah. So, again, there's some things that just have to be true, which is, like, if you guys are all out of line on what success looks like, no amount of jamming and brainstorming is going to be productive.

In fact, you're just going to go in circles. I do think that, like, a product review, you have to do a couple of things right, which is you need to be clear on what success looks like qualitatively and quantitatively. You need to be able to define your biggest risk and assumptions and work through those things. But the difference between a review and a jam is, I think a lot of times in a review culture, you're like, it's just this waterfall process. So you're like, okay, I've gone through my review.

Now I'm going to design review. Now I'm going through. You're kind of, like, just going through this phase. And the reason I believe in jams is you actually get the best brain power together and you actually create agility. So you're not, like, going from step to step to step and you're like, okay, like, this is going to be the next week of the step you're trying to get.

You're condensing all the steps together to be like, how do I, like, create this, like, really fast cycle? Who do you invite to jams and how often do you do them? Yes, it depends. It does depend on the stage of the product. So if you are doing a zero to one product, I actually feel like a product jam should be happening almost daily.

Like, I think when you're doing a zero to one product, you either need to be in a synchronous, like, physical space or you need approximate that as much as possible based on, like, getting that team working on it, including sometimes the founder or the head of product just in there, because any small degree of, like, misalignment is going to just cause a bunch of problems. And you're also learning at a pace that is really hopefully fast. Right? You're like, I just tested this thing. I just put this in front of users.

I just went and asked this question. Like, you're learning all the time. So that's what I believe. Like, in a zero to one product, if you're a little bit more further along, I would say the jams are most important when you are at certain stages of the product where you have to go. Like, you don't have to go figure something out.

So maybe you want to jam at the beginning because you're like, we need a jam on what success actually looks like here. It's not enough for us to say we want to beat the competitor. That's never a user, human driven statement, I want to be ex competitor. Instead, we got to jam on what's the real problem here? What is the thing that we're trying to solve for, for people you might be jamming a little bit later, where you're like, hey, we're in the solution space, the general part of the cycle, meaning, like, we know what the problem is, we know how important it is, like, how important this problem is.

But we could go multiple different ways in order to solve this problem. We can go this solution, that solution, this other solution. Let's actually jam together through the divergence part of the general brainstorming process to make sure we've actually thought about all the ideas. And so I think that when you go from a zero to one product to something that's a little bit mature, you have to identify where you can benefit from the jams most often and also like, who you're jamming with. There are a lot of times the jams are with founders.

There are other times when you're like, hey, maybe the jam should be with a sales team so that we are developing a lockstep. Are jams worse when they're done asynchronously or not? Asynchronously, but not in person. They are harder, for sure. You need to do more prep, but they're not impossible.

Again, Linktree is a distributed team, so we have to figure it out. And there are ways you can figure it out. There are tools out there, right? If you are doing a jam with something like a fig jam or a miro, you can actually get a lot of the people, cursor wise, mind space wise, in the same space, putting up post it notes, brainstorming together. Nothing quite beats a whiteboard, in my opinion, especially in the zero to one phase, but you can get there.

Harry Stebbings
Okay, so that's number two. What's number three in terms of the ritual? Yeah. So the last thing I care about. So the first one, again, transparency, which is why you have scorecard.

Jiaona Zhang
The second one is this idea of, like, co creation and, like, the best ideas out there and being able to move really, really fast, which is why you have jams. The last principle for me, or like, the last thing I really try to get out of teams is this idea of, like, pride, of ownership and accountability of their work. And that's where I really believe in this concept called, like, demo power hour. I brought that, you know, to webflow, brought that to Linktree, and this idea is like, you literally have an hour and it's very free flowing. It is like people just showing you what's in progress.

And I think that there are so many times where teams feel like things have to be so polished. You know, designers have this fear of, like, showing something before it's like pixel perfect. Engineers have, you know, sometimes this fear of, like, I don't want to, like, show you the thing in my sandbox or before it's ready and, you know, it could break during demo power hour. And I really encourage this idea of, like, let it break. Let us see the, you know, the work in progress because it shows, it actually reinforces this concept of velocity.

If every demo power hour is packed to the gills with stuff that people are shipping at all different stages, you're able to see, like, across the organization, everything that's going on, and it brings this level of pride. Like, engineers are like, I'm so proud to have done two demos in demo power hour, three demos in demo power hour, right? And so you get this sense of, like, speed and ownership, even when you're shifting the culture from that because it didn't exist before. I think there'll be a lot of founders who listen to this and go, shit, I don't feel like we're moving fast enough, and I don't feel like we have that urgency. What would you advise them to instill that sense of urgency in product deployment development?

Harry Stebbings
How can they inject their organization with urgency? I think humans respond the best when they're like, I am making an impact on other humans. Like humans in general feel very motivated when they can see the results of their work. So the first thing I'd recommend is founders should really bring that impact to life. That impact is on the users out there, whether they're perspective because they're a really early startup, or they're existing.

Jiaona Zhang
Right. Because you have a more established user base, bring that to your company. Show people what that looks like. At Linktree, we bring a user literally every, almost every single, all hands, which happens every other week. We bring a linker to that all hand to show people how they use Linktree, the things that they're struggling with, the things that they love about Linktree, and that builds that user empathy where you're like, I just know that the thing I'm doing is going to help that person.

And when you're like, ah, man, the thing I'm doing can help that person. You're motivated to do it faster, to do it really well. So I think that's the first thing, which is like, bring your users closer, because humans are driven by making an impact on other humans. I think the second thing is you want to model that behavior. It's really unproductive to be like, everyone move with urgency and you're sitting there and you're not moving with the same urgency.

I would actually encourage leaders to almost model 1.5 x what they're hoping out of their team. If you're like, I want my teams to move faster, then you as a leadership team need to make faster decisions. You can't be like, oh, I want to consider all the angles and make this thing perfect and then not expect that to seep through the culture. You'll see that, like, everything starts from the top. Whatever your leader does, it will always make its way through the organization.

So I push my founders really, really hard to model the behavior that they want at scale at the company. You said about pushing your founders there. I do want to ask about hiring and they go through a couple of different lenses because it's really hard. But so many people said that you're incredible at it. So I do want to spend some time on it first.

Harry Stebbings
When's the right time to hire a CPO? And how do you think about hiring a CPO versus a head of product. Let's put aside the titles for a second. Let's talk about, like, when do you hire a product person? Let's talk about it at each scale.

Jiaona Zhang
So I do think a classic mistake is that you hire a product person too quickly and you delegate the responsibility away. You're like, I'm a founder. I need to scale myself. And therefore you, like, bring in a product leader. I do not think you do that.

I think that is very dangerous. You need to stay really, really close to your product for as long as possible. In fact, I do recommend a lot of early stage founders. I'm like, look, if you want leverage, look at your existing team and think about the people that can create that leverage for you. It might be the engineering manager, it might be the designer.

It might be the customer support person who's really, really close to the user feedback, and they can play that PM like role to give yourself a little bit more leverage. So I think the first caveat is like, do not hire too quickly and try to delegate away that responsibility. Then if you're like, I am definitely not delegating away that responsibility. We have product market fit. I'm really trying to scale this thing.

I really cannot physically be in all these places, and there's not enough internal people to really, like, kind of lean in. Then I would say, okay, go hire a product leader. The biggest advice I usually give here is, like, understand yourself deeply. Because of all the functions out there, the product leader is the most, like, complimentary to a CEO, right? So getting that relationship right is really, really important.

You want your product leader to bring out the best out of you. There's a classic failure case there, too, where, like, I'll give an example. I'm super, super visionary. And so when I go interview founder or go interview product leaders, that visionary founder gravitates towards other really visionary product leaders. And what often happens is they'll join the company and you have two competing visions, and both people will not concede because you hire this really senior product person.

They're like, I have these strong convictions. And so I think you got to really be like, what's going to compliment me as a founder to bring out the best out of myself? And that could be like, hey, I have a really strong vision, but I really don't know how to sequence. Like, I see the world. I can see all these pieces, but, like, how do I sequence this thing?

Like, that is a certain type of product leader you go after, right? Or it might be like, hey, I actually am great at sequencing but I need to think about the next like four steps. Like I product a, but if I want to create a portfolio of products, what is product b, C and D? Then you might want to go out and you might actually want to look for someone with like more industry expertise. Expertise.

Hey, I've done this portfolio thing in this kind of like space. So it really depends. And I would say, I say this about all product things, whether it's building the product, building the product organization, always start with a problem. What problem are you trying to solve? I think that founders really need to be able to understand that for themselves.

What problem I trying to solve in this hire and being able to be honest about it and go look for it. Do you care if they've had domain expertise in the domain that you're building. For in general, I've personally found that there's a lot of benefit. There's a great power in being a generalist. As a journalist, I think that I always go into a situation without that expertise.

It's like I don't assume I know it. I'm going in eyes wide open, really uncomfortable because I'm like I don't understand the space. The rate of learning that I push myself to have in any given role is really, really high. I think that's really valuable because you can have, you have a lack of bias, you have a lack of pre existing assumptions. I also think you can take mental models from different places and apply them.

So the number of times I've been like, hey, I've built a marketplace and that's really interesting. What if at Webflow, yes, we have a SaaS business Plg, but if you actually put a marketplace here so you can connect companies that need these beautiful websites built with freelancers and design agencies that can do it like that unleashes a new vector of growth, right? And like same thing, like coming into Linktree and being like, hey, again, I have built marketplaces and I see a really interesting thing where you have the supply, you have all the creators, you can easily get the demand, you can get all the brands that want this data, that want access to these creators, you have the supply and the demand. And like you can build this really interesting marketplace in a way that nobody else can at the scale that we can. So these like existing mental models for a generalist help you kind of like spot opportunities.

I think like sometimes like a domain expert get really tunnel vision on. And then lastly like the world is changing at a rate that we've never, like we're just trading at a really fast rate. I wouldn't say that we've never seen before because I do think there's these like, waves of innovation. But in that world, you're like, what I believe true to be today versus, you know, in a month versus the next time that OpenAI releases something like, it's just gonna like vastly differ. And so being able to like, throw all those things away and start kind of from first principles is really, really important.

Harry Stebbings
Is it harder to be a product leader, say, than ever before? Given in a month, OpenAI can not always open air, but most of the time OpenAI can release a feature and it just completely changes everything. Again, I think it's the most exciting time to be a product leader. There's so much innovation happening. And so if you're someone who's really excited about like, well, what does that mean for real users and real people for the problems that they have, that gets really, really exciting because I think before you're like, I can do this thing for a really long time and hope it works.

Jiaona Zhang
And you're like, I can just prototype. I can prototype this tomorrow, see if it works, get learnings and move on. What is hard today? I think that if you are rigid, your life is going to be harder, right? So I do think you're probably going to get different answers based on who you talk to.

I think for some people they're like, yeah, it is really hard. It's hard to plan. It literally means you shift from things like what I was saying about planning and process, and these things feel very rigid to like, what's your strategy and what are your rituals? Because at that level you can be like, you know what? New information just came out.

We are actually going to update our strategy. We just learned XYZ. We believe that now this is something that we didn't think we had an advantage on before, but we do today. So it's actually really easy to update your strategy and have that flow through versus if you have plans and processes and these rigid roadmaps. And you're like, I think the world works in a certain way.

It is much harder to be a product leader in that world because you're like, the ground is changing underneath me all the time. But if you're not like that, if you're like, I really have sweated the details of my strategy. I know what new information coming in would make me change aspects of the strategy. And I have enough of a system in place with my rituals, but they're not so rigid as to like, this is the exact, like, step by step process that something needs to flow through that gives you the agility with enough structure to not be like, complete chaos. Right?

It gives you enough of the combination of, like, agility and structure so that you can get, you can catch these waves and catch the new things coming out. I worry in the end that a lot of businesses all just converge in the same center point, whether that's your squarespace and your wix and your webflow kind of converging with actually Linktree in terms of creating amazing websites for restaurants and landing pages for restaurants and everything in between, also with square doing the same, and then maybe your toast doing the same, and then actually people being able to just create that in OpenAI with one simple command. Do you worry about this kind of convergence of where everyone ends up? The first thing I'll say is, actually really great businesses are built in crowded spaces. Because one, I think that usually when there's a crowded space, you're like, there's something here.

There's user demand, there's user pain, there's user need. And I'll just go with the example that you gave given Linktree, Webflow, a couple of places that I worked at. The need for a digital representation of self entity, business, whatever it is, that has only increased and that will continue to increase. That is a trend that is going up. So, like, I really believe in that.

Call it whatever you want, the tam, the trend, the future. Like, I believe in that. Then the question is, like, okay, within that trend, what do you actually believe will be true? Do you believe that, like, in the future, you're gonna be like, I would like a website that looks like blah blah blah blah blah, and boom, just gets created for you? Like, do you believe that?

Like, what do you actually believe? And also, like, at what pace do you think the market is really going to change? I believe personally that, like, I think there's going to be two, two, two things which actually benefit both Linktree and Webflow. And part of the reason why I went to Linktree after Webflow, I don't think I'm destroying value in any sense. I think that there.

I think that there is companies out there that, you know, for the past ten years plus, they've been spending very expensive engineering dollars, development dollars, on building their website. There are real engineering teams. For the many past years, I've been at, like, an Airbnb, where it's like, you are building their website. But when I think about marketing pages like these, like, really important websites, even your main.com I don't see a world where you need to be having your engineering teams do that anymore. That really will get solved by software.

But I do believe that those companies have a very strong desire to have, like, pixel perfect websites. Their website is their brand in many ways. Again, like, based on the trend I just talked about before. So in that world, you actually want tools, technology that enable that, like, deep brand, like affinity and building an apple.com. Like, you can do that on Loveflow.

You can't do that with any other tool really on the market. Right? And so, like, I believe that that is going to continue. Like, every single company is going to have a marketing website. They are going to want that marketing website to look really beautiful, really perfect, and they want a lot of control.

And they are definitely not going to be spending engineering hours on it. They're going to outsource that because that's way cheaper. So, like, I believe in that trend. At the same time, I also believe that for most people who are not, you know, Amazon, Nike, you know, apple, like, all those companies, like, I believe that for everyone else, including, you know, you and me, but more you than me because I'm pushing myself to be a creator when I'm actually not really a creator. That's why I'm teaching so much to, like, get that empathy.

But, like, for you, you're like, I have a real. I have, like, a fun. But I also have, like, you know, all the podcasts. Like, I think that for creators and for SMBs, basically what I talked about before, I think this idea of, like, needing a digital presence, but, like, not wanting a webflow. Like, that.

Webflow is not for these people. Like, not wanting to get a really hard product. Sorry. Like, webflow is a bit like shopify. They're like, fucking hard.

Harry Stebbings
I'm really sorry. I know, I know. I've seen your part, but Jesus, it's like, not that easy. No, I totally agree. And that's something I wrestled with a lot when I was at Webflow.

Jiaona Zhang
I was like, the trade off between power and simplicity. Yeah. Who do you solve for? Like, the power users who love it and who need that depth versus me, who's like, oh, my God, this was more challenging than I thought. I think the power users.

And, like, why? Because for Harry, the right solution is a link tree and it's not a webflow. But I would then say the webflow sits in the messy middle. People who really want, like, advanced features but not that advanced that they're, like, on the most pro tools, do you see what I mean, I know what. You mean, and it is something I wrestle with.

But here's what I actually believe. You're right. It is in the middle, but you're competing against. So I think the ultimate question is, how much up the stack can you get for webflow? Right?

So the reason we bought intellimize recently is because at the end of the day, like, you build a website, that's what Webflow is really great at. But there's all this other stuff you do, and there are all these companies out there. There's, like, optimizely. There's, like, all this other stuff. If you can actually build that full website development stack.

Like, I'm at Linktree, and I am actually, like, now a customer, and I am not even pushing buffalo. I'm like, hey, furnace. Hey, team. Like, you guys decide, but, like, you go do the research. I think they're doing the research.

Like, I'm looking at one, just putting my own engineers on it. No go. So expensive. Not a good use of time. Right?

Like, not gonna happen. Two, they look at, like, software esque tools, like a Vercel, and they're like, oh, that's still gonna require a non trivial amount of engineering work. That's also not gonna happen. Right. And so ultimately, you're kind of like, okay, well, how do I get, like, the brand flexibility and, like, the pixel perfectness that I want?

So, like, ultimately, we decided on webflow because we're like, hey, these are all the things that we need. We are not going to spend millions of dollars, because that's how much it costs. If you put engineers on it, we're happy to spend the 50k with webflow. Not a big deal. And then once Webflow goes and gets the other parts of the stack, this is where every marketer is like, I'm trying to test the crap out of my landing page header button layout.

That's where I think the repeat usage actually is. Because I think with Webflow, what was hard was that we would land very easily, but you wouldn't be able to expand because they're like, oh, okay. Like, I build a website, and then they're like, what else? And so you got to get into the expansion motion. And that's where I think a lot of the money is.

And so webflow needs, really needs to nail that. Do you think Linktree is $100 billion business? I think it has a shot to being $100 billion business, but I think that the most important thing that we got to do is we got to sequence it right because the $100 billion version of Linktree is one that is very consumer first. And I think we are very far away from that being the place where you actually discover all of the content from your favorite people. That is the $100 billion dollar play.

You gotta really crawl, then walk, then run, and we gotta do that in sequence. I'm constantly telling Alice, we just need to be like TikTok. I think that if you go too hard there, you're gonna be underwhelming and people are just gonna be like, meh, no. Thanks again. Going back to the crawl to walk, to run.

This is where I think, like, if Linktree today, you're like, hey, we do have just a lot of people using link tree. We have some semblance of, like, this is like people's most important stuff. If we get to a world where it's like, hey, there is repeat usage. Like, creators are actively, like, there's no more, like, go from your Instagram to your link tree, to your LTK or to your shopify. Like, if you just like, cut that layer out, that's where I think it gets really interesting.

That's the crawl, right? So you're like, okay, like, we are going to be like the, we're going to get closer to being a destination than being just a train station. Or at the very least we're going to cut out one stop in the multiple stops of the train station. I think that's the crawl phase. And then I think, like, you get to run.

And the run phase is like, oh my gosh, like, we have all the data. We have all these brands coming because we have brands coming. Creators will go to the place where brands are because they offer partnerships. That's the walk. And then over time, you earn your right to run.

Harry Stebbings
Listen, I want to do a quick fire round. So I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Sounds great. So what's the most common reason founders don't get product market fit in your mind?

Jiaona Zhang
I would say it's because they jumped straight to the solution space and they skipped really understanding people's problems. What's your biggest advice to PM's who want to get promoted today? Be useful. Be very, very useful. Stop thinking about the promotion.

Just do really great work on an area that is high impact. And then lastly, I would also say, like, be known for something, so be incredibly good at one thing that you develop a brand around it. And so you're constantly picked because of that brand. What's the most recent wow moment? You've had with the consumer product.

Harry Stebbings
And what was it about it that made it so special? I'll give you two, actually. I think that one obviously is like chat GPT. Like with every version you're like, oh my gosh, like yesterday's announcement, you're like, ah, we are in the world of her. And this is really amazing.

Jiaona Zhang
Multimodal, like being able to take all these inputs, video, audio, super cool. But I would also say, you know, quest has actually come a really long way. I think that when Zuck first bought Oculus, I was like, huh? Like what? And then I actually give Zuck a lot of credit for like, really seeing like the long term view and using the most latest version of the quest.

So like, Oculus, Oculus Quest, so on and so forth. Like, I'm pretty blown away about how far it's come because before, the earlier version that I tried is like made me sick. It had to like had all these sensors was really plugged in and being able to just like put the thing on and do a workout, it's been amazing. What function has the most tension with product? Every function should have tension with product.

I typically would say it comes in the form of like sales and engineering in the sense that they're always asking for. They're trying to push on prioritization probably as much as product is, but I really believe in the best orgs. There's always tension across all the functions, but then the product person is able to dissipate that tension and turn into something really productive. What would you most like to change about the world of product today? Going back to what we were talking about before, it's a chicken and egg thing.

To get a great product job, you have to have been a product manager before. So how do you break that cycle? I think taking bets on younger people, you know, I teach a course I hire for my course. I really believe that we should be hiring designers, especially from the younger generations who just, you know, there's so many people where you like, they like, use something like snap and they're like, I don't get it. Versus like, Gen Z.

They're like, oh, I get it. This is how we grew up. And this is like, I'm okay with the idea of, like, there's more flexibility, personalization. I actually love that they're able to see some of those trends in a way that I think that, like, not all older folks, myself included, are able to see. So I really, like, want to give more young people that opportunity to build.

Harry Stebbings
When you think about other companies product strategy. Which one have you been most impressed by recently? So the first one is OpenAI. I think just the way they've been able to execute them going after search, I think that is very obvious value add. What is the search experience in a world where we can actually have AI?

Jiaona Zhang
I think they've really executed really well there. So if you can just imagine a world where you take some of the components of Arc browser organization, you merge it with chat, GPT, the power of it. They just hired the search leader from Google. They are going to go after that space, which is the most lucrative space and also a space that should be innovated on. Like, that's very impressive.

I think another one I talked about, Zuck. I just feel like, you know, what he's seen with like, something like VR, ar, but also even something as simple as like, messaging. Just the way he thought about the world of, like, here's Facebook, here's WhatsApp, here's a Venn diagram of people who use the two things. And in a future where we want to reach everyone and, like, getting in touch with people like that, whether it's customers or friends, like that is the most valuable thing. Being able to bet on something like a WhatsApp that has the market penetration it does.

And also really relies on the fact that the rest of the world, like, very data, like, sorry, data, meaning, like, you know, telecom data, right? Like very data driven. Like, it's just super, super smart. And I do think WhatsApp is doing crazy amount of business. And, like, just being able to see those chess moves is really fascinating.

And maybe the last one I just say is like, because I have kids and so I've been suckered into paying for that subscription. But, like, Disney plus is also really fascinating because I feel like what Disney saw at the end of the day very quickly, well, actually maybe they could have seen it even faster. But this idea of, like, at the end of the day, like, streaming platforms are all the same. Content is king. Like, who has the content?

Disney has the content, right? So, like, just like, I've just been really impressed by some of these companies seeing some of these, like, bigger moves and going for it, like, taking that big bet. Listen, I totally agree with you on Disney plus, and I think that Zuck is probably consistently the most underrated CEO. I'm like the biggest buyer of meta stock that there could be. So I'm totally aligned to you.

Harry Stebbings
And this has been so much fun. Like, you saw the schedule we sent beforehand. It didn't really stick to it. So I'm glad that I sent it so late, but thank you so much for being so brilliant and also for such a great discussion. Of course, it was super fun.

That was such an incredible show with Jay Z and I really started these verdict class shows because I really wanted to share the wisdom of these incredible functional leaders as granular and detailed as possible with founders starting out. If you want to see more behind the scenes, you can of course watch the show on YouTube by searching for 20 vc. But before we leave you today, we're. All trying to grow our businesses here. So let's be real for a second.

We all know that your website shouldn't be this static asset. It should be a dynamic part of your strategy that really drives conversions. That's marketing 101. But here's a number for you. 54% of leaders say web updates take too long.

That's over half of you listening right now. And that's where Webflow comes in. Their visual first platform allows you to build, launch and manage web experiences fast. That means you can set ambitious marketing goals and your site can rise to the challenge. Plus, Webflow allows your marketing team to scale without relying on engineering, freeing your dev team to focus on more fulfilling work.

Learn why teams like Dropbox, ideo and orange Theory trust Webflow to achieve their most ambitious goals today@webflow.com. And talking about great companies like Webflow, let me introduce you to airtable. Half of product managers say bad processes and tools are their biggest challenges. That's why more and more companies are turning to airtable to transform their product operation. As one senior product leader puts it's complicated to keep everybody in the loop, and airtable really helps us stay in the loop.

Harry Stebbings
With airtable, you'll build the right products grounded in what customers really want, unify your entire product portfolio and workflows in one place, and ship those products to customers faster than ever. In fact, one global financial services company cut its time to market for new features by half. Maximize your teams impact too with airtable. Give it a try for free today@airtable.com. Podcast that's airtable.com podcast to get started.

And finally, we need to talk about Pendo. A really simple way to describe Pendo's value is to simply say, get your users to do what you want them to do. What is Pendo? The only all in one product experience platform for any type of application? What are the features that make Pendo so awesome?

Pendo's differentiation is in its platform every capability, from analytics to in app guidance to session, replay, mobile feedback management and road mapping are all purpose built to work together. What is the social validity? 10,000 companies use Pendo, and we also manage mind the product, the world's largest community of product management professionals. Where do we want to drive people? Give it a try and visit Pendo IO to learn how your team can use Pendo to start building better digital experiences.

There, you can also check out Pendo's lineup of free certification courses, 12 hours of in depth training for your product management teams on topics from AI to product analytics to product led growth. To check it out, simply head over to Pendo IO 20 product. That's 20 product hyphen podcast. As always, I so appreciate the support. And stay tuned for an incredible episode this coming Monday with Nikasharora, CEO at Palo Alto Networks.

20Product: How Linktree, Webflow and Airbnb Used Rituals and Product Principals to Guide Product Roadmap, Why All Product Teams Should Have a Scorecard and How to Use it & How to Run the Best "Product Jams" with JZ, CPO @ Linktree

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1: Introduction to Product Management Challenges

2: The Role of Product Scorecards

3: Conducting Effective Product Jams

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