Narrative-Driven Roadmapping
by Jiaona Zhang (JZ) • SVP of Product at Webflow
Jiaona Zhang (JZ) is the Senior Vice President of Product at Webflow and a lecturer at Stanford University. She previously held senior product leadership roles at WeWork, Airbnb, and Dropbox, and is known for her expertise in product strategy and scaling teams.
🎙️ Episode Context
In this episode, JZ shares insights on evolving from Minimal Viable Products (MVP) to Minimal Lovable Products (MLP) and dissects common PM mistakes like solution-first thinking. She details her unique frameworks for narrative-driven roadmapping, setting qualitative OKRs, and structuring the first 90 days of leadership. JZ also candidly discusses the failure of Airbnb Plus and how to leverage core product strengths.
Problem It Solves
Solves the issue where roadmaps become dry spreadsheets of features that lack strategic context, leading to team misalignment on the 'why'.
Framework Overview
A roadmap should be a document that tells a story about strategic themes and the 'why', not just a spreadsheet of RICE scores. It serves as scaffolding for the team to define the 'how'.
🧠 Framework Structure
Story over Spreadsheet: Write a doc e...
Themes over Features: Group work into...
Link to Reality: Keep the high-level ...
Adaptability: Change the roadmap only...
When to Use
During quarterly or annual planning to align stakeholders and engineering teams on strategic intent.
Common Mistakes
Presenting a spreadsheet with effort/impact columns as the roadmap strategy. Getting bogged down in execution details too early.
Real World Example
Instead of listing features, JZ creates a document outlining big areas of investment (themes) and links out to Jira for the actual project status.
What humans really crave is like, 'Why am I doing this body of work?'... You're telling a story.
— Jiaona Zhang (JZ)