Author
Julie Zhuo
The designer who became a manager at twenty-five with no training, and wrote the book she needed that week.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Julie Zhuo joined Facebook in 2006 as one of its first interns after studying computer science at Stanford, moved into product design, and was made a manager in 2009 at twenty-five, with no idea what the role was.
Over the following decade she rose to vice president of product design, running the teams behind much of Facebook's interface, and wrote a widely read column answering the questions new managers asked her. Those questions became The Making of a Manager, published in 2019.
She left Facebook in 2020 and co-founded Sundial, a company working on data and analytics for product teams, while continuing to write about management and design.
The signature
Zhuo writes as a colleague debriefing you after a hard week: concrete, unheroic, and honest about her own early mistakes. Her signature is the definition that replaces the myth, a manager's job is better outcomes from a group of people working together, and the insistence that feedback only counts if it changed what someone did.