Julie Zhuo on career growth, writing, product sense, and design leadership

Executive overview

Feeling like an imposter is not a sign of failure — it coincides with the fastest periods of career growth. Julie Zhuo spent 13 years at Facebook rising from IC designer to VP of Design, then left to found Sundial, a product analytics startup.

Writing forces clarity of thinking. Designing for the right audience requires understanding whether your intuitions are still reliable as your user base expands.

The fastest growth happens when you're in situations you're not prepared for.

Imposter syndrome and career acceleration

• Zhuo felt like an imposter for her first seven to eight years at Facebook, including as VP of Design
• Discomfort and rapid growth are two sides of the same coin — unfamiliar situations force learning
• Being at a scaling company creates opportunity: more roles open, more chances to raise your hand
• Faking confidence blocks the support and empathy that would accelerate growth faster
• Ask for help earlier; reach out to people a step or two ahead who have lived through it
• Vulnerability in manager and report relationships creates deeper connections and shared problem-solving

From IC designer to founder: what changes

• At a large company, specialists handle finance, HR, legal — as a founder, you handle everything yourself
• Going back to IC work reveals how much management had developed the eye but not the hand
• Managing early-career and new-grad employees requires fundamentally different habits than managing senior directors
• Founding a startup is humbling in exactly the way that produces growth

How writing accelerates thinking and career

• Zhuo started writing publicly to overcome silence in large meetings — not for audience or likes
• Goal was simple: publish one opinion piece per week for a year, 52 times, regardless of quality
• The first weeks were painful; by week 10–15 it became a cadence and a form of self-therapy
• Writing organises fragmented thoughts and creates clarity that feeds directly into verbal communication
• Treat posts as letters to yourself — the advice you need to give yourself, not what others want to hear
• By year-end, speaking up in large rooms became significantly easier
• Twitter threads became a separate exercise to build crisp, enumerated communication — a distinct skill
• Word count goals beat time goals: 30 minutes can produce one sentence, but a word target creates discipline
• NaNoWriMo instilled the habit of getting words out first, editing later — the same approach drove the book
• The Making of a Manager emerged because no book existed for new managers who hadn't done an MBA or a long ladder climb

Building product sense

• Start by observing yourself: track your emotions and assumptions at every step of using a new product
• Extend outward: discuss products with others, share observations, ask what decisions the builders made
• Regularly dissect apps with peers — if you aren't having product conversations frequently, growth slows
• Follow analysts like Eugene Wei and Kevin Kwok who go deep on why specific product decisions work
• Run or study A-B tests: causal data validates or refutes intuitions in ways qualitative observation cannot
• Data and design are not opposites — quantitative results confirm assumptions; qualitative explains why

When to trust gut vs. run experiments

• If you are the target user, your intuition is highly reliable — early Facebook was built by its own users
• As the user base scales or diversifies, intuition degrades — Facebook's 2008–09 launch failures marked this inflection
• For B2B or SaaS: you probably did the job at one company, not fifty — customer interviews are essential
• Spending time doing the customer's job yourself is the fastest way to make intuition reliable again
• The larger the user base, the more data is available to run experiments — lean into it at that stage

Running effective product and design reviews

• More feedback sessions are better than fewer — run critiques with design peers, cross-functional teams, and actual users separately
• Each group has different bias and knowledge; their feedback will contradict — that is expected and useful
• The synthesis job: align everyone on who the target user is and what problem you are solving before comparing solutions
• Prioritise feedback in sequence:
  1. Value — does this solve the core problem at all?
  2. Ease of use — can users access the value without friction?
  3. Delight — does it exceed expectations aesthetically and emotionally?
• A beautiful animation on a 10-second load time is irrelevant — tackle value first
• Set the agenda at the start of each session: state what phase you are in and what feedback matters most now
• Prototypes mislead audiences into giving UI polish feedback before value is validated — name the fidelity explicitly

Giving feedback to designers

• Focus on naming the problem, not proposing a solution
• Going straight to "make the logo purple" skips explaining why the current design is insufficient
• State what confused you, where you got stuck, why a colour or layout isn't working — then let the designer solve it
• Offering a suggestion is fine; imposing a solution removes the designer's ability to apply their full knowledge
• When everyone aligns on the problem, collective solutions are better — brainstorming before alignment wastes the room

Path to management for ICs

• Tell your manager your ambitions explicitly — they cannot advocate for you if they don't know
• Ask directly: what skills do I need to demonstrate to be trusted with a team?
• Many management skills can be practised as an IC: recruiting, mentoring interns, onboarding new hires, redesigning meeting formats
• Volunteer for an intern manager role or become a new hire's onboarding buddy — small scope, real practice
• Management readiness is not binary: each piece of responsibility taken builds the evidence base
• If no role opens at your company, the environment may be the constraint — consider moving somewhere growing

Hiring designers as a founder

• Designers want to work with people who genuinely care about design, not just fill a headcount box
• Before your first design hire, invest in a quality agency or contractor — your site signals your values
• Learn the tools, vocabulary, and values of design; inability to speak the language signals low commitment
• Ask designers to teach you about their domain — relationships built now yield referrals and interest later
• Being people-centric and having taste matter more than having a design background yourself