The builder behind Webflow's collaboration layer
Ask Irene Chung what she does and the answer is refreshingly plain: she builds things. Right now those things live inside Webflow, the visual platform that lets people design and ship websites without writing code.
As a Senior Product Manager focused on collaboration, workflows and user expansion, Chung works on the unglamorous plumbing that decides whether a team can actually create together - the sharing, the commenting, the feedback loops that turn a solo project into a group effort. It is quiet work with loud results. Under her watch, the number of people leaving comments on Webflow projects climbed 300%, and the platform doubled both its weekly active users and its rate of new-user acquisition. One recent shift she helped drive: letting reviewers comment on a site without needing an account at all, cutting the friction out of feedback.
That instinct - remove the friction, then measure what happens - runs through everything she has built. It is the through-line connecting a scrappy recruiting startup, a stint at Dropbox, and now Webflow. On her own Medium page she compresses the whole story into four words: Builder, Creator, Product Leader, Founder. The thing she says she is really chasing is a question rather than a title - how we use technology to think.
Starting with the hardest hiring market there is
Before product management, before Dropbox, Chung was a founder. She co-founded and co-ran StellarEmploy, a company that built recruiting technology for jobs most software ignored: hourly roles in food service, warehouses, and call centers, where annual turnover can hit 100%. These are not glamorous markets. They are exactly the kind of problem she was drawn to.
StellarEmploy's pitch was that hiring for these roles was being done on gut instinct when it could be done on data. The team built custom algorithms meant to capture the real complexity of matching a person to a job - not just keywords on a resume, but the messy human factors that predict whether someone stays and thrives. The results were concrete. The company reported cutting new-hire attrition by 30%, lifting revenue per employee by 10%, and saving customers more than $2 million in labor costs. Net Promoter Score tripled to over 70, a rare number in an industry where hiring software is usually tolerated rather than loved.
She took the company through the accelerator circuit, including a Village Capital gathering focused on the future of work and a spot in SAP.iO's New York foundry. The team grew to eight full-time employees and roughly half a million dollars in recurring revenue before StellarEmploy was acquired by Learning Collider. Along the way she became an advisor to HR leaders on how to use data and, later, AI to make better hiring calls.
Prototyping the future at Dropbox
After the acquisition, Chung moved into big-company product work, eventually landing at Dropbox as the Bets & Integrations Product Lead. The title captures the job: place bets, test them fast, keep the ones that work. She prototyped and validated new layers on top of Dropbox, including early AI summaries and productivity browser extensions - the kind of experiments that either become the next core feature or quietly get shelved.
Her most measurable win there came from integrations. Chung launched CRM connections that automated document workflows, letting Dropbox slot into the tools people already used to run their businesses. That work doubled one application's revenue to $4 million. It is a small case study in her style: she did not chase a flashy new surface, she made an existing product disappear into someone else's workflow.
An unusual road into product
Chung did not arrive at product management through the usual computer-science pipeline. She earned dual graduate degrees in public policy and business - one from the Harvard Kennedy School, the other from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Before that she worked as an executive recruiter across biotech, financial services, and higher education, and supported strategy consulting at The Bridgespan Group, the nonprofit advisory spun out of Bain.
It is a resume built for asking why before how. The policy training shows up in the problems she picks - frontline hiring, the future of work, collaboration. The recruiting background is almost on the nose: her first company was about hiring, and she had lived the pain from the inside. Even her earlier product stops, including work at Paperless Post, kept her close to how people communicate and coordinate.
The pattern
Look across the chapters and a pattern emerges. Chung keeps choosing collaboration problems - hiring is a matching problem between people, Dropbox integrations are about tools working together, Webflow's commenting features are about teams working together. She keeps applying a founder's rigor to them, whether or not she holds the founder title at the time. And she keeps letting the numbers, not the narrative, tell her whether the thing worked.
What she wants next is more of the same, at scale: products that help people think and work together better. It is a modest-sounding ambition from someone who has already sold a company and moved the needle at two well-known platforms. But that is the tell with builders. They are less interested in the story than in the next thing to ship. For Chung, the next thing is usually a feature that makes it a little easier for a group of people to make something they could not make alone.