Along with Britt Jamison, Head of Product, ChatGPT Enterprise at OpenAI, Jiaona Zhang is teaching Reforge's new AI Product Leadership course. You can learn more and enroll here. You can check out our other new courses here:
AI Growth | AI Leadership | AI Strategy | AI Foundations | AI Productivity
Jiaona Zhang (JZ) is Chief Product Officer at Laurel, an AI-native time tracking and workforce intelligence platform. She previously led product at Linktree and has spent her career at the intersection of product strategy and rapid execution.
At the Reforge 2025 AI Summit, she delivered a practical playbook for product leaders adapting to AI's unprecedented pace of change. JZ structures her framework around four essential shifts product leaders must make:
The mindset shift
Your role is strategy ownership, not execution or project management
Speed matters more than annual planning cycles
Your capacity is now people plus agents plus workflows, not just headcount
What hasn't changed: solving real user problems, sound economics, and building user trust
Building at AI speed
Automate repetitive work across the entire organization
Expand your capabilities from writing specs to end-to-end prototyping
Ship high-fidelity prototypes that look exactly like your product by componentizing your design system
Equip GTM teams with building tools since they often have the deepest customer context
Going to market faster
Maintain source of truth systems that keep AI outputs accurate
Automate the entire content creation process
Integrate product and marketing as one continuous team
Build review systems, not manual processes
Scaling through leverage
Hire for fast learners, systems thinkers, and builders across all functions
Change your interview process to test for real-time AI usage and prototyping
Give prompts instead of take-home assignments
Build your portfolio of people, agents, and workflows with the same rigor you used for headcount planning
You’ll see concrete examples from her first six weeks at Laurel, including a customer support manager shipping features, a co-founder prototyping new flows in V0, and the team building a complete admin redesign in under a month.
Along with Britt Jamison, Head of Product, ChatGPT Enterprise at OpenAI, Jiaona Zhang is teaching Reforge's new AI Product Leadership course. You can learn more and enroll here. You can check out our other new courses here:
AI Growth | AI Leadership | AI Strategy | AI Foundations | AI Productivity
Jiaona Zhang (JZ) is Chief Product Officer at Laurel, an AI-native time tracking and workforce intelligence platform. She previously led product at Linktree and has spent her career at the intersection of product strategy and rapid execution.
At the Reforge 2025 AI Summit, she delivered a practical playbook for product leaders adapting to AI's unprecedented pace of change. JZ structures her framework around four essential shifts product leaders must make:
The mindset shift
Your role is strategy ownership, not execution or project management
Speed matters more than annual planning cycles
Your capacity is now people plus agents plus workflows, not just headcount
What hasn't changed: solving real user problems, sound economics, and building user trust
Building at AI speed
Automate repetitive work across the entire organization
Expand your capabilities from writing specs to end-to-end prototyping
Ship high-fidelity prototypes that look exactly like your product by componentizing your design system
Equip GTM teams with building tools since they often have the deepest customer context
Going to market faster
Maintain source of truth systems that keep AI outputs accurate
Automate the entire content creation process
Integrate product and marketing as one continuous team
Build review systems, not manual processes
Scaling through leverage
Hire for fast learners, systems thinkers, and builders across all functions
Change your interview process to test for real-time AI usage and prototyping
Give prompts instead of take-home assignments
Build your portfolio of people, agents, and workflows with the same rigor you used for headcount planning
You’ll see concrete examples from her first six weeks at Laurel, including a customer support manager shipping features, a co-founder prototyping new flows in V0, and the team building a complete admin redesign in under a month.