About this episode

Jiaona Zhang discusses building a Company OS at Laurel and the integration of AI tools across various business functions.

Today’s episode Product teams have figured out AI for engineering. The PMs are using Claude . The engineers are in Cursor. If you’ve been reading this newsletter from the start, you’ve seen how the top 1% are using AI to 10x their output. But there are still teams at companies like Adobe, teams in sales, customer success, finance, who don’t have access to any of these tools. You ask them what AI to use for their next task, and you get a blank stare. That gap is the real problem. And it compounds every day. Jiaona Zhang “JZ” has built the fix. She is the CPO at Laurel, which just raised $100M in Series C , and she has led product at Airbnb, Dropbox, Webflow, and WeWork. Today she runs a product team that ships frontend and backend features end to end, without any engineering handoff. In this episode, she screen-shares everything. Laurel’s full Company OS built in GitHub, with skill files for every function from CS to legal to finance. The playbook to agent pipeline that turned 50-page docs into automated workflows. The daily Slack briefing that tells every person exactly what to do and which skill to use when. And a ton more. This is one of the densest episodes I’ve ever recorded…

People in this episode

Host: Aakash Gupta

Guest: Jiaona Zhang

Topics covered

• AI in business
• Product management
• Company operations
• Automation
• Engineering tools

Keywords

• Company OS
• AI tools
• product management
• automation
• engineering

Sponsors

Ariso, Bolt, Pendo, Product Faculty

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Laurel, Adobe, Airbnb, Dropbox, Webflow, WeWork

More episodes of The Growth Podcast

• The PM's Guide to Governance with Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup · July 20, 2026 · 1h 20m
• Claude PM Masterclass from Former FAANG AI PM Jyothi Nookula · July 13, 2026 · 1h 33m
• The PM's Guide to AI Design that isn't Slop · July 9, 2026 · 1h 15m

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