Rewind: Julie Zhuo: Facebook's former VP of Product Design on what she got right and wrong as a leader

Hey folks, we hope your summer is going well. Aaron and I are traveling and spending some time with our families this week, so we thought we'd rewind to one of our favorite episodes with Julie Zhu. The episode came to mind because one of our listeners asked us what episodes we'd recommend to someone who is growing their team, and Julie's book, the Making of a Manager has a lot of helpful advice. We also suggested Tony Fadell's episode to our listener. The inventor of the iPhone and ipod had some great tips about hiring people who are skilled but don't necessarily have the experience. The ticks all boxes of the Posted Job Description we first aired the interview with Julie back in 2019 when she was the VP of Product Design at Facebook. Since then she's gone on to found her own company called Sundial, with a mission to help teams make faster, smarter decisions with data. Enjoy the episode and we'll see you back here next week.

We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. And now back to the show.

You don't need to Be a Manager to be a Leader if there's one thing to take away from our chat with Julie Zhu, it might be the truth in that concept. But if you are a manager and a leader, there's a lot more to learn from Julie, who recently launched her book the Making of a Manager. Julie Zhu is the VP of Product Design at Facebook and in her career journey at a rocket ship startup, she's learned a lot about what makes a great manager and a great leader. We chat with Julie about why writing is a part of her learning process, some of the things she's learned the hard way about being a manager and how she manages people who have more experience than she does. Get ready to take some notes and get inspired to do some writing of your own after you listen to our chat with Julie. Enjoy the show.

Julie Zhu is the VP of Product Design at Facebook, but it isn't only.

Her role in leading teams at one of the fastest growing companies in recent history that she's known for. Julie began writing about her journey and the things that she's learned on Medium, but now she's published a book, the Making of a Manager. Julie Zhu, welcome to the Design Better Podcast.

Thank you for having me.

So the occasion for our conversation we want to talk about a lot of different things today. You have a fascinating career starting at a very high profile company in the very early days and seeing that through some pretty rapid transformations, maybe bigger than any other company in the world at the moment. Right now and certainly a lot of things to learn from that experience. But you've just launched a book and that's pretty exciting. Congratulations.

Thank you. This is day two after the launch of my book, so it's been quite an adventure. And yesterday was a very, very exciting moment. I keep saying it's kind of like your birthday. You know, people write in and they tell you congratulations and, you know, you just get warm vibes all around. And it's also probably a more intense day than the average birthday. I was up very early doing events and interviews, promotions, you know, got to spend the day in New York and we ended with an event where I got to hang out with a bunch of women and talk to them about how to give and receive better feedback.

That's fascinating. We want to dive into that. But let's maybe. Let's start at the beginning. So you joined Facebook when you were really young, which is both exciting and maybe a bit daunting as well. And I presume that there was a pretty steep learning curve going through the company transformation and also a personal transformation starting as a role that's more individual, contributor focused. When it's, you know, it's just a small group of people at a small company to a leader at a huge global enterprise that influences so much of culture and, you know, just global culture in general. So could you walk us through the transformation that you went through personally as the company grew?

I started at Facebook as Facebook's very first Internet. So this is a summer internship in my last year of college. And I went because, you know, they were just down the street for him where my university was. And I had a very good friend of mine at the time. His name is Wayne. He had just joined six months earlier. He had graduated one year before me. And he said, you know, this is a really, really cool company. Come on. You know, you might think we're just a website, but we've got big dreams and you should just come check it out. At least come check it out for the summer. So he convinced me to apply. I'd actually been taking this course around entrepreneurship, and it's kind of a nine month study of entrepreneurship. You know, lots of workshops, a lot of case studies. And there was a summer internship component where the idea was to find a startup in the local area where I could again see firsthand what is it like to be in that kind of startup environment. So I cheated a little bit because Facebook was already on the larger end of startups. It was certainly still a young company, but it had dozens of people it didn't have like five or six, which is where a lot of my peers in that class went to. But it was frankly still in those early stages where everyone wore many, many different hats and when things were still at a very, very frantic pace. And, and the most important thing was just thinking about the next feature and thinking about what could we launch tomorrow, what could we launch Friday, what could we put out there next week to set some more context. Facebook at the time was also just a college and high school site. So when I joined, there were about 8 million users. It was very well known among US colleges. It had just opened up to high schoolers. But you couldn't get on just as a regular individual if you were out of school. And so nobody talked about Facebook. It was not yet in the news. MySpace was the social media juggernaut of the day. It was about 10 times bigger than Facebook at that time. So I show up on my first day and I get hired as an engineering intern because that's what I studied in university. But right away, my mentor at the time, she was Facebook's first female engineer. She asked me, okay, so what kind of engineering work do you want to do, Julie? And I said, well, I've always really liked the front end. I really liked the part where I get to work on what people see and what they interact with. And so she said, great, I'm going to sit you right here with this group of designers and you should just hang out with them and do what they're doing. And that's how I got into design. Previously, I didn't really know that it was a profession, it was something that you could do for money. I had some experience with Photoshop because I really liked digital illustration and that was my hobby all throughout middle and high school. But I hadn't ever done that kind of design work professionally for a company and treating it like an actual discipline. But because it's a startup, lots of people wearing lots of different hats, it's not at all unusual that I opened up Photoshop. I started to design the feature that I was implementing. We were trying to work on our very first monetization strategy, which at the time was photo books. It didn't work out, Spoiler alert. But, you know, I just threw myself in and learned, you know, kind of how to work at that kind of startup. Fast paced environment. Three years later, our design team was growing. And that was when my manager at the time took me aside and said, hey, Julie, you know, we are hiring more designers and I'm really stretched I'm at my capacity and I think we need another manager on the team. Do you want to do it? And that was it. That was the conversation. And I was like, okay. I was excited because I felt like being asked to manage the team felt like a big honor. It felt like a privilege. It felt like the first step in what I dreamed was a very exciting career. But to be honest, I didn't really know that much about management.

Were there traits that you had that got you picked?

What? How did you get that? She told me, well, you get along with everyone on the team. Okay, which was true. I was, you know, I was friendly with everyone on the team. I was the kind of person who, you know, really wanted to hear what all the sides are of a story. You know, I'm always that person who, you know, we have a design opinion, and I'm. I'm the last one to really give my opinion because I'd rather hear what everyone else says first. And so that was the trait that my manager pointed, pointed out and why she asked me to manage the team.

Interesting. So you get this position and how many people were you managing at that point?

My manager was very, very thoughtful about the transition. She said, you know, I really want to make sure you are set up for success, and I know that you still have a bunch of individual contributor work that you like to do, so we're going to start you off just managing. I think it was three or four people. And she's like, we'll scale from there.

And what was that like for you? The first two months of being a manager? Was it, you know, presumably you go into that meeting, your manager says, hey, here's this new opportunity, and it feels like a promotion. And like, you probably called your parents and told them about that. And then the shine wears off and you're two months in and, you know, rubber hits the road. What was that like for you?

So it was extremely awkward. In fact, the first thing that was awkward was, you know, the announcement to my team and subsequently my first set of one on ones with these people who now reported to me because literally the day before, you know, we're peers and I'm treating them, you know, like another design peer of mine. We were trading jokes and critique about Mac versus Windows and like, oh, this new website redesign, like, do we like it? How do we feel? You know, so we had a very good kind of communal relationship. And to be thrust in this position when I was now their manager, I felt extremely awkward about it. And the reason why I felt awkward is that I didn't consider myself a better designer than the people that were on my team. I had a lot of respect for them. A lot of them have been doing the job far longer than I had, as you recall. You know, I didn't even know that professionally designing websites and building, you know, users experiences was a thing until just three years ago. I didn't have, you know, formal typography or color or graphic design theory, and I hadn't gone to school for that, so I felt a lot like an imposter. And so the idea that I was, you know, their boss, you know, it was something that felt very awkward to me because I'm going into the meeting and I'm talking to them, and I can see that they also know that I'm not a better designer than them. And so how is that dynamic going to work?

Yeah, Eli and I were just in Santa Fe with a group of design leaders from lots of different companies. And ironically, these are people at the top of their career. And they reported something very similar of feeling this imposter syndrome. And it makes sense to be still in the early part of your career transitioning into this position of authority with people who you were peers and feeling like an imposter. And that's. That's hard to overcome. But we hear from a lot of design leaders that they feel that even at the top end of their career, too.

Yes, yes, I do think that, you know, nowadays I have this benefit of saying, well, I have managed for a long time. And so while I'm not, you know, definitely not the top designer in the room, I do feel like I have that experience of having managed. I couldn't say that in the beginning either. You know, everyone also knew that I was new to that role. I was new to the job. And that was something that, you know, I felt like I had to really prove myself. I felt like I had to show that I knew what I was doing and that I was competent and that, you know, I was authoritative. And if I could go back in time and give advice to myself, back then I would say, chill out, Julie. You don't need to prove anything. You know, your job as a manager is not to design pixels. And you don't need to be better than your reports at design or at any actual skill. The only thing you need to do is help them do their best work together, be a force multiplier for your team. And that means going in and just being more real with them, saying, hey, I know I'm new to this job, but My goal is to help you. My goal is to understand what your goals are, what are your career aspirations, what do you like to do, what do you consider your strengths and to help you reach those goals and to help you apply those strengths to the problems that the team needs to solve. And I think if I could have said that or felt that, I would have felt so much better because I know today that management is just a very, very different role. And I'm not competing as an individual contributor and I can continue to help and coach and support my people and even if I'm not the best at them. I mean, you look at the world's top elite athletes, they all have great coaches, and those coaches are not better at the sport than they are. Everyone can benefit from coaching and everyone can be pushed and improved and challenged through having a great coach.

So you actually wrote an essay about this on Medium around managing more experienced people. And I thought one of the things that you touched on, which is really interesting, was just an opportunity to learn, you know, learn from folks that are more experienced. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Yes, I really believe that you can learn something from everyone you work with because, you know, we're all, we all have our own strengths, we all have our areas of growth and development. And I really do think that, you know, the thing that makes being an early stage manager harder, more hard than it needs to be, is that perception that you have of yourself that somehow you need to, you know, be great at X or Y, you know, in order to get respect. And, you know, that might be true in terms of if someone just doesn't know you very well and is just looking at what are your credentials on paper. But I think that what ultimately matters in a successful relationship is trust. And you build trust with someone if they feel like they can be open and honest with you, if they've, like, they can be vulnerable with you. And you are going to go out of your way to help them, you know, and you're going to help them ease their concerns, you're going to help them achieve their goals. You're going to help them, you know, figure out how to get those opportunities that are going to help them get that promotion. But in order to do that, you also have to give trust, right? You have to also show up as vulnerable and you have to tell other people, hey, you know, I'm human too, and I'm not the best at everything. I make mistakes. This is what I think I'm good at. This is what I think I could be better at. And we're just going to work together, you know, we're going to go and help each other. And I want you to give me feedback on these things or if you see something where you think I could have done a better job or also, you know, to give me positive encouragement, what do you think I'm doing well that I should do more of, and I will try to do the same for you. And I think in that manner, we can learn from each other and we can build that trust and we can do what we need to do to support each other and get the best out of and each other. Other.

Julie, there's. There's one thing that you said that really resonated with my experience as a product design leader in the past and going through, you know, a company growth thing from individual contributor to a manager. You said that the graph of impact tends to correlate with how many people you need to work with effectively. Once I realized this, I started to see my interactions with other people differently. It was no longer about winning battles and proving that I was right, but about developing stronger collaborative relationships. What was your work life before that realization like and what was it like on the other side of that?

That's a great topic because I think I also had a very similar realization to you. Well, first it was the realization that all of the things that I did as an individual contributor over time would not be how I should view my success as a manager. That my success as a manager is about the multiplicative effect that I have on people. That if I can help you do this task slightly more efficiently or slightly better, then the team's going to be better off. And I need to do that with every member of the team. But the next leap that I made in terms of realization is it's also not just about my relationship with each of my reports. I also need to be able to foster the kind of environment where their relationship is also productive and fruitful and collaborative, because that's a huge part of working together as a team. It's not that everyone just goes through me. You know, it's not a spoke and hub model, right? It's everyone networks with everyone else. And sometimes, you know, the designer on the ground is working on a product, a particular mock, and in order for their work to be better, they need the critique or they need the partnership or they need the collaboration of another designer on the team. And so I also had to think much more intentionally about what is that culture of the team that I want to build. What Is the how of this ideal team coming together and working well with each other, not just with me, but also in these cross relationships that maybe I'm not privy to, you know, I don't always see directly, but that I can get feedback from each individual to see how that's going for them.

We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. And now back to the show.

Molly Graham, who is also at Facebook as a, as a manager and leader, wrote about this concept of giving away your Legos when you're at a really quickly growing startup, that your role is going to change. Not only your role, but the role of the people that you're. You're leading. Could you talk a little bit about that, how you approach this concept of sharing your Legos?

Yes. I love that article by Molly. It's really. That analogy has really stuck with me and resonated with me because the thing that I think can be very, very hard to let go of when you transition from being an IC to a manager, or when you start or you even transition from being a manager of a smaller team where you, again, have a lot more direct relationship and access to projects, to managing a larger team where maybe you're managing managers and so you don't have as much of that direct access. And in each step of that journey, and pretty much in each step of any part of scaling right, of going from a smaller team or a smaller organization to a bigger organization, it can feel very hard. Because the thing you might have thought once is like, hey, when we were four or five people, I was 20% of all of the decisions made, or I was 20% of the output of the team, or I was involved in basically every decision that our team made. So if we were four people and we needed to hire the fifth person, it's like, I'm on the interview loop. I'm a voice. And whether or not want to add this person to our team, or if we're trying to think about a new way to structure critique, then, yeah, I'm part of that conversation because there's only four of us and everyone has a voice in how we control things. But when your team gets to 30 or 40 people, as the manager, I'm not interviewing every single person that comes in. And so one day a new person will join and I don't know anything about them. Maybe if I did, I may or may not have hired them, but it's not actually my direct choice anymore.

Were there moments as you're going through this growth process and in the practice of giving away your Legos to accept bigger responsibilities, where you felt like you had to check your ego along the way to kind of. I mean, that's essentially the core message of Molly's article, is that by giving away your Legos, you've got to see that there's a more exciting pile of Legos over here so you can overcome that emotional attachment to the work that once gave you meaning. So, just curious, like, how did your ego play into that growth?

Yeah, and there were a lot of examples of things that I had done that I felt like were part of my identity and that I was reluctant to give away for a period of time. For example, we ran a weekly design meeting. It was sort of a design all hands, right? I was the one who came up with that idea. I ran the agenda. You know, I'm sort of the person who is the emcee of that meeting. I welcome people, and then, you know, we go and introduce new members of our team, and then, you know, various people give presentations about what they're working on. And I was really proud of that meeting. You know, it's something that really brought our design team and our. Made our community stronger. It was something that people looked forward to every Monday. You know, I liked standing up there and saying good morning to everyone. And I did it for years. And I don't think that I would have maybe even had the idea to let it go if not for external circumstances. I became pregnant. I left to take a few months of parental leave after my baby was born. And of course, I was like, okay, great, someone has to run this meeting in my absence. And it was when I came back and I realized the meeting was running a lot better, Much more organized, much more thoughtfully designed, better presentations. And it was just. It was doing a lot better than when I was running it. And I realized, you know, I should have let this go a long time ago. I should have realized that for me, it was just. It had become routine. And I wasn't sort of thinking every day about how I could invest in it or changing it, because, you know, we had done it this way for so long. I should have realized that new energy would have breathed more life into it and that new perspectives and a new handle on ideas would have made this whole thing better. And I wish that I could go back and have given that to someone else, you know, even two or three years before it actually happened.

So you do a lot of writing on Medium, and you have a newsletter, and I imagine that in your primary role, you're also really busy. And you mentioned you have kids, but you still find a lot of time to write. And can you tell us why that is? Is that helpful for your learning process? Are there other benefits to it that you see?

Writing is one of the most therapeutic and helpful ways for me to organize my own thinking. So I'm that kid that was journaling every day in third grade. I'm that person who, in high school, was trying to write down all of my goals and what I really cared about when it came to a college in order to help me decide where I wanted to apply and where I ultimately wanted to go. So I've had this history and habit of using writing as a tool for myself to solve problems. And that was a very similar motivation that led me to starting my blog. And the selfish reason that I wanted to do it and why I set it as a New Year resolution for myself is that I observed that I was having a hard time really sharing my opinion and being okay with it out there, regardless of whether people agreed or disagreed. You remember earlier in the podcast, I said one of the reasons my manager chose me to be the next manager was, like, you get along with everyone. And I said that I'm the person who would rather hear what everyone else has to say about their design opinion before giving them my own. Well, I wanted to work on that because I knew that, you know, this was ultimately going to be a barrier and that if I couldn't figure out how to get my voice out there or even to find what it is that I stood for, that was going to hold me back. And so I set this goal, this New Year's resolution, where the only goal was to hit the publish button on something once a week. And I tried to set that goal to be more about action than about quality or results or whatnot, just so I could force myself to do it. And I still love setting goals like that because sometimes you just, before you get too hung up on, is this good? Are people going to read it? Is this really what I want to say? Does it represent my voice, etc. You know, because we can be very perfectionist sometimes, and. And all of those concerns can just block us from even starting that sometimes, you know, just setting a goal on the action of hitting the publish button once a week, you know, you can. I said, julie, you can write about whatever you want, you know, whatever happens to be in your mind. You can write about what's going on at work or, you know, what's going on at home, or you can, you know, if you're really busy. You can frankly take a piece you've written before and just publish it and hit the publish button. You know, I would have, like, I would have counted that, right? And so I did this for a year, so 52 times, of hitting the publish button, and I realized just how rewarding it was for me to be able to have that time to reflect, to be able to have that time to take these messy and jumbled, tangled thoughts in my head and try and clarify them, you know, into, okay, what. What did I really think about this? Right? What's. And a lot of times I would approach the prompt with, like, you know, if I were writing about, let's say, design critique, you know, I was trying to figure out what would I tell myself is the best way to do this, you know, given everything that I know. And it was about trying to articulate that in a more structured manner. And then that was sort of a gift to myself because then I could take it and I could talk about it more easily at work or I could know a little bit more of where I stood on that topic. I remember the first few weeks, it was actually really excruciating because then I got that kind of perfectionist syndrome. And I wrote a sentence, and I would start tweaking it before I even wrote the next sentence. And to be able to get to the point where I also remember being very, very nervous, being like, oh, my gosh, is this topic going to resonate? Are people going to think I'm an idiot for saying this? But that's what the practice was about. It was about getting comfortable, getting over those concerns and those barriers. And it took me a long time. I remember the first few articles that I wrote that year, I probably spent like 8 hours on them each, you know, which is a really long time. But by the end of that year, I was able to crank out something in like an hour and a half, an hour and a half to two hours. You know, I had trained myself to think in a more structured way and to get through those hangups, those hang ups around perfectionism, those hangups around, like, being worried what someone was going to say. And that was really motivating to me. And the other thing that was motivating was a lot of people responded really well to my writing. And again, this wasn't the goal that I set out to, you know, try and do when I started, but it was really, you know, it was very heartwarming to hear that some of the things I was struggling with were universal, that lots of People felt that way, and people in different contexts, in different industries, a completely different team environment. And so that was also, you know, something that has continued to inspire me to write and to start my mailing list with the Q and A answers and to, you know, ultimately write this book.

You know, Seth Godin, we all probably know, is a writer and marketing expert, but he talks about. He himself writes every single day on his blog. And he talks about the sort of fallacy of writer's block. You know, that the plumbers don't get plumber's block, they just go and do the work. So if you're gonna be a writer, be a writer, go and do the work. And that will get you past that kind of block.

Yeah. There's this organization that I love called NaNoWriMo. Have you guys heard of it? It stands for National November Novel Writing Month. The whole idea is that lots of people have this goal of writing a novel, of having a story that they want to tell, but then they sit down and they write a few paragraphs and they're like, I don't really like my writing. And then they just stop. So the entire goal of NaNoWriMo is you take the month of November and you commit to writing 50,000 words. And it doesn't matter how good those words are. Your goal is to just write 1,667 words out every single day for 30 days, and then you'll have a 50,000 word manuscript, and then you can, you know, you'll have something you can respond to. You know, you can start to edit it. You could start to chop things up and say, oh, this part works and this part doesn't. But, you know, it is also an accomplishment. Right. There's this real sense of having done something after you get to the end of that month.

I think part of the allure of your writing too, is that it's so accessible. And I think that if you had taken a different approach and not set up this framework of like, just ship it, just make a thing and put it into the world to build the muscle, but also to be okay with the vulnerability, that accessibility that, you know, it's not perfect. You're someone whose work and influence is an inspiration to a lot of people, but presenting those ideas as not totally buttoned up, as almost like a sketch instead of a perfect rendering makes that more accessible and I think resonates with a bigger audience.

Yes. And the other valuable thing that I get as part of that too is sometimes people will share a riff on the idea or say, yeah, that's an interesting way of thinking about it. But have you thought about that? Or point me to another book or article or a resource that they read that was something similar. And I learned so much from that, too. That is what helps me refine my thinking and my concept of how these things should go. And I think this is very, very similar to design. And that's why I think it's so important as a designer to show your work often to put it in front of other people and to ask for their feedback, even if it isn't perfect, even if you know that, yeah, okay, I could have done this or that better. But the more you do that, the more you get inspiration, you get ideas, you get a new way of thinking that you might not have considered before. And then you can go take that and refine your work and you're going to come out with better design work.

Well, that's a good bridge to talking about your book. You've got this new book about management and the learnings over these years transitioning into management. And I think it's a really salient topic and feels like it's written in a way that I think a lot of people who find themselves in this transitory position will identify with. But we're curious why this book and why now?

So when I became a new manager, have this memory of going to the bookstore and trying to find some management books to help me out. And I remember finding a lot of really, really great things, but a lot of them were about, here's a particular organizational trend that you should be aware of, or here's a new theory about how, you know, you can run a great team, or here's a practice that you should take and you should incorporate every day into, you know, how you manage. And I read a lot of that, but what I realized was there's nothing, there was very little that was just, hey, here's everything you need to know. Here's like the basics, here's the one on one on how to have a good one on one with someone, how to run a meeting, how to hire someone and do an interview, you know, how to have a hard conversation and performance manage somebody who isn't doing well on your team. Right? There wasn't some place where all of that was shared in a way that felt appropriate or maybe at the level that I was as a new manager. And the reason why I wanted to write this book now is I realized this is the book that I could right now and it would probably turn out better than if I wrote it in 10 or 15 or 20 years because I still really remember what it's like to be a new manager. The emotions of that anxiety, of that uncertainty, feeling like an imposter day in and day out, you know, having all those questions, feeling like I had to prove myself, like letting my ego get in the way of various decisions. I still remember that really well. And I don't think I would maybe if another 20 years passed. I think by then maybe there be other wisdom that I'd be excited to talk about or share at that moment. But I wanted to write this now because it's like me going back in time 10 years to when I was 25 and having coffee with myself and just sitting down for a couple of hours and saying, hey, here's everything you need to know. Here's the basics. Here's all of the lessons that I've learned through kind of tried and true experience and through, you know, the making of various mistakes. I wanted it to sound conversational, and I wanted it to be extremely pragmatic and actionable rather than theoretical. And most important of all, I just wanted to reassure people that they were going to be fine, that they're going to figure it out, and that the whole process of management is learning. And so much of the learning is learning about you and yourself and the things that you do well, because that's what you need to lead with if you want to create a strong relationship or partnership with someone else.

So in the kind of lead up to writing this book, you also wrote that you have a chance to create a bit more representation in the voices talking about leadership. So what are some of the learnings that you're excited to share as a voice for female leaders or other folks who might be underrepresented in these types of leadership books?

One stat that I learned when I was doing research for my book that really astounded me is that in the United states, since the 1980s, there have been more women managers than men. And I thought that was quite remarkable because again, you go to the business section of the bookstore and you see lots of things written by, you know, former CEOs or leadership coaches or executive consultants, people like that, and most of them are men. So I don't think you. You would have had that impression that, wow, there are more women managers out there than there are male managers. And so it was something that inspired and motivated me as well to write this book and to know that it could add a different perspective. So some things that I think are maybe a little bit More unique to my book. Or again, the voices of women, when you hear them talk about management are I think maybe focusing a little bit more on those self doubts and the psychology of, you know, feeling like, oh, do I deserve this? Am I going to like, did that person make a mistake? And you know, putting me here in this role? I hear that very, very commonly, you know, among women. And I think the research shows that women are more likely to doubt themselves. You know, there's a stat that says a man looks at a job wreck and is like, I fulfill 60% of those requirements. He's like, I'm a great candidate for the job. With women, they're looking to fill 100% of those requirements. Right. So I do think there is a different some perception and I think that is a lot of what my blog has been about. And I think that's been some of what resonates with my readers who are female. I think another one is just, you know, for me, diversity and inclusiveness is really, really important when we think about building teams. I know that when I was, you know, an ic, when I was early in my career, I was very soft spoken in meetings. I didn't always want to share what I had to say because I was afraid of being wrong. I was afraid of being judged. I see a lot of women who know that they need to work on finding their voice. But as a manager, it's important that we also create environments where people can feel safe to participate. Right. And there's a lot of ways that you can run meetings where you go person to person and you ask them their opinion or, you know, you give everyone some post it notes at the very beginning and you ask them to write down their thoughts. That works really well also for folks who are a little bit more introverted, who maybe aren't as comfortable thinking on the spot and then saying what they think out loud. You know, you give them maybe post it notes and everyone writes down their ideas and then you go through a process where everyone goes through ideas and you know, we map it out on the board. But you know, a lot of, a lot of those I think are more inclusive processes that ensure that, you know, all of the voices, even the quiet ones, can be heard because they're important and they're going to make our team do better work.

So Gretchen Rubin, in one of the recommendations for your book, said that Julie shares what she learned, often the hard way. Curious. What are some of the insights that you've learned the hard way as a manager and as a leader?

So Much. I think a lot of the lessons that resonate now with me most clearly are things that I've learned as a result of making that mistake and seeing, hey, if you didn't do it that way, here's what you're going to see. I already talked about one of the big mistakes early on was just thinking that management meant that you had to be authoritative and you had to act like a know it all, instead of the insight that it's okay to be vulnerable. And in fact, you're going to earn more trust with vulnerability. That's a really big one. Another one for me is that, you know, being successful at management isn't about whether you have leadership qualities or not, or whether people look up to you. There's also an important element of are you more motivated by what the outcome of the team is and are you willing to do what the team needs you to do? You know, even if that particular thing isn't particularly exciting to you? Right. Because if you're the kind of person who cares more about the discipline of a particular craft, you care more that you know, the visual design is the absolute best that it could be, or you care more that the collaboration process is really, really great, then it might be challenging for you to be a manager because you can't always pick and choose those things. You know, sometimes you just have to do what the team needs you to do. If you are down four people on your team, you better be spending the entirety of your time hiring. That's the most important thing. And you know, yes, if the visual system isn't perfect, great. But you know, that could be someone else's job because you've got to take care of the thing that matters the most. And I made that mistake because I found folks on my team, people whom everyone else respected, people who, you know, naturally others saw as mentors, people who I thought were brilliant and smart and, you know, great at design. And I told them, hey, I think you should be a manager. And I convinced them to do it. And they were deeply unhappy. You know, they got burnt out. And it's because some of them wanted more to work on the craft of the thing than to deal with all of the, you know, stuff that you just have to deal with as a manager. And some of them frankly, just didn't like interacting with people. And that's okay too, right? You know, your job as a manager is to, you know, work through a team. So naturally you just need to spend a lot of time with people, you know, interacting one on ones meetings. So Forth. And some people are just like, you know, what I look for in a great day is 5, 6 hours of uninterrupted time to focus and to think deeply about problems. And that's just not what you're going to get if you're a manager. And I didn't realize that, you know, and so I put people in situations that made them deeply unhappy and burnt out. And now I know that if someone tells me they want to manage, I'm going to focus really hard on, well, why, why do you want to be a manager? Let's make sure that the reasons you want to do it and the day to day reality of the job are going to match up and make you happy. Because you know, you could also be excited about management because it seems like a promotion, it seems like a prestigious title, it seems like a way to advance your career. I've also seen people do that and then realize that's not what they want to do and they're unhappy.

So in that situation, how do you think about the folks that want to remain on the, on the individual contributor track, creating opportunities for them to advance?

That's a great question, because I really, really believe that the individual contributor track is full of possibilities for leadership and for senior people to have widespread impact across a team. I think that sometimes we don't necessarily always do the best job of maybe structuring it that way or enabling that person to play that role among a team. But I think it's definitely possible. And to me this is the difference between management and leadership. Management is a job, it's a role. It's like being a teacher or a police officer or a heart surgeon. You know, there's various responsibilities that come with that role. It can be given to you and it can be taken away. Whereas leadership is a core quality that you have to earn. Now the best managers need to be great leaders because if people don't follow them and don't respect them and don't trust them, they're not going to be particularly effective in impacting a team. But many, many people can be leaders. And you don't need to be a manager in order to be a leader, in order to, through your actions or your words or through your vision, inspire a group of other people around you towards a common cause or to rally around a particular initiative. And so with individual contributors, you know, I like to sit down with them and understand what they consider their strengths, what, you know, their areas of passion are, and to figure out how to help them basically have that multiplication effect Right. So if someone is maybe a brilliant systems thinker and they really, really care about having a robust and kind of well designed system in place for the, you know, entirety of the design structure and organization, how can I help them play that role? You know, how can I help them act as that mentor or act as that design lead and architect, maybe that system, and figure out what are the right processes by which they can make that impact and ensure that the rest of the team is aligned towards that goal. I find that I often do have to help mentor individual contributors on the art of delegation, because that is a skill you need if you want to lead a group of people again, regardless of whether you are a manager or an individual contributor at a certain point, you know, if you're, you know, the most brilliant designer, you, you still can't be moving every pixel yourself. Again, if you want to be able to oversee a larger swath of the product, right? And so you have to get comfortable working through other people. And that means giving them very specific feedback on what's working and what isn't. That means clarifying what the expectations are, what the roles are. That means being able to help coach, you know, another designer to enable them to do their best work. Right. All of these are shared qualities among leaders, whether or not you are a manager or an individual contributor.

One of the challenges as a leader of a design team is also to protect the team from the occasional swoop in from executives or people at a higher level. And you've written a bit about navigating this scenario. I wonder if you could talk about this. This is such a common thing that so many design leaders deal with.

The skill that I feel like I've had to work on the most in recent years, now that I manage a much larger organization and that I'm playing a slightly different role where I'm not in all of the details, but I have to represent the work of the team as a whole and, and get buy in for the important and maybe controversial decisions that we're all a part of. One of the skills I've had to work on the most is communication, because I see my role as in some ways being the interpreter of what the team has come up with. You know, here's their great work, they've been very thoughtful about it. They've explored many options, the pros and cons, and, you know, all of that. I have to be able to know how to talk about that in a way that resonates with other people, other executives, people who maybe don't come from a design background and don't speak the same language that designers do. I think that becomes a very critical skill in order to provide the things that you were talking about for your team, in order to represent them well and in order to buffer them from thrash or all of the things that might happen in a large organization. But that's one thing that I actively work on and I know that if I get better at this, then I'm going to be much more effective as a leader for my team.

So Facebook historically and still has a really strong engineering culture, and certainly the design practice is also well established. But how do you and your teams communicate the impact of design to the company, given that culture?

The first thing that we find is effective to do is to make sure that we are aligned on what is the big picture, what is the outcome that we're trying to aim for as a company and not just like a design team, but as all of the product disciplines. And for that I include product design, I include content strategy and research, but also engineering and PM and analytics. Those are to me the major functions that make up a team that goes and builds the product and ships it for people. So I think it's very important to have the conversation again, cross functionally with all of those leaders on what does success look like for our product. And we have to be able to have that as a very clear vision because ultimately we need to find ways to then translate that vision into a number of things that we can measure or hold ourselves accountable for. I think one mistake that sometimes we have made in the past or that you can make in, in an organization that's extremely strong in engineering or analytics is that you look at what you're able to measure because again, you can be so effective at operationalizing and you look at things like engagement or clicks on this or what's the funnel or whatever, but the part that sometimes gets lost is, okay, but what about. So we can be very good at measuring what people do, but what about what people feel? Because that is important too. And that's the other side of the coin. And that matters because if people do these things but they don't feel good doing it, they are not likely to be long term customers of your product. Right? Because ultimately, like we're going to realize that we're going to realize, hey, you know, this doesn't make us feel good or we don't like it and something better came along that we can use that does the same type of thing, but makes us feel a lot better and we like it more like, you know, you're not in a strong competitive advantage even if you can measure behavior, but you don't have strong sentiment or strong, you know, people who want to actually recommend and like using our product. And so, you know, I think sometimes when we talk about goals, we can go straight into, okay, wait, let's set some goals around revenue or some numbers. Let's set goals around engagement. And we've lost sight of like, okay, but what is all that is trying to help us do and say something? What is that? Let's define that first. And often what we want is we want our thing to be valuable for people. And value, you can measure by both. Okay, how do they feel about it? Do they tell you that it's valuable? And are they demonstrating that it's valuable because they come back to it and they use it again and again. Right. Those are both good signals of value. And so we need to get alignment on that as just the opening before we start building out features, before we start looking at like, numbers and evaluating what they mean, we have to level set on what those goals are. And if we're able to have a constructive conversation at the level of what do we want to do for customers, then I think, you know, the goals that design teams have or the things that design teams wants to do, you know, can fit in very well with that narrative and that articulation. And in fact, everything becomes easier to frame through the lens of is this taking us closer to that end state where we want to be with the customer?

Julie, we wrap every interview with the same question. Curious. What's inspiring you these days? Is there a book that you've recently read? A movie you've seen? A blog post you've read? What's something that's inspiring you lately that might be meaningful to our listeners?

I just recently finished a book that I can't stop raving about. So that's the first thing that came to mind when you asked that question. It's called the Paper Menagerie and Other Short Stories. It's by the author, Ken Liu. It's a collection of short stories where Ken is really one of the most acclaimed sci fi and fantasy short story writers. The Paper Menagerie story in particular is the only story to have won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy awards in a single year. It is a phenomenal story. But because he's a sci fi and fantasy writer, a lot of his short stories deal with these visions of the future, things like the creation myth. And how would that work with AI or things like, what is the intersection in which a lot of times technological advances can feel like they're taking away from maybe some of the humanity of the work? You've seen that through the Industrial revolution in the past. But he has a lot of short stories that examine those qualities and those moments in time, and they're all centered around maybe a few key individuals. So there's a powerful narrative about families, about people in love, about people trying to make their way in the world against this backdrop of technological progress or war or basically culture clash between east and West. So those are some of the themes of this short story collection. Every single story is a gem. Like, I read each one, I was, you know, I cried. I was sort of biting my nails because I thought, this really needs to be like the next big Netflix thriller. And again, a lot of them are very, very provocative and thoughtful as well about how we think about technology going forward.

That's great. Well, Julie Zhu, thank you so much for joining us. We're excited about your new book, and we hope all of our listeners will check it out.

Thank you so much for having me. This was a real pleasure.