We're JZ and Anand Subramani, and we teach product management at Stanford with nearly 30 years in product between us. AMA!
Hey r/AMA! We're Jiaona Zhang (JZ) and Anand Subramani, and we teach product management at Stanford. Between us, we've spent nearly 3 decades in product, and we'd love to hear your PM questions, whether that's breaking in, leveling up, or figuring out what AI means for the work.
Proof Photo: https://imgur.com/a/sU0IoUv
A little about us...
JZ: I'm the Chief Product Officer at Laurel, and before that I led product at Linktree, Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, and Dropbox. Airbnb, WeWork, and Dropbox were about scaling products and orgs during hypergrowth. Laurel, Webflow, and Linktree were about being the decision-maker building out the entire platform and driving revenue growth 5-10x by building up product, design, partnerships, growth, and deployment functions from scratch.
I've also taught product management for over a decade at Stanford, Yale, and Reforge. I love operating while teaching so the material I bring to class is whatever I was wrestling with that morning: a roadmap tradeoff, a hiring call, a launch that landed differently than we expected. When I'm not at Laurel or teaching, I'm at home with my two kids, renovating houses, and building adventureworlds.ai.
Anand: I've spent 18 years in product. I studied robotics in undergrad and grad school, fell into product by accident, and never left. I ran Words with Friends, built products at Dropbox, Gusto, and Pilot, and was SVP of Product at Rula. These days I advise startups full-time and teach. I teach because product is one of the most important jobs in tech and almost nobody learns it before they're already doing it. I want students to see what the work looks like before they bet a career on it.
I grew up in San Diego, and spend a lot of my free time tinkering with software tools and building personal software for myself. Surprisingly, I also love gardening because it's the opposite of technology, slow and single-player.
Ask us anything about:
- Breaking into product management, especially from engineering or another non-PM path
- What a PM actually does day-to-day, and the skills new PMs need most in their first year
- Hiring PMs, structuring teams, and what changes when you go from PM to CPO
- Consumer vs. enterprise product
- Running product at a company shipping AI every week, including the stuff that doesn't work
- How AI is really changing the PM job, minus the hype
- What great startups do differently
- Career moves: when to jump to a startup, when to stay, and how to know you're ready to lead
Let's talk about product, AI, and what the job looks like in real life.