Julie Zhuo

Julie Zhuo on accelerating your career, impostor syndrome, writing, building product sense, using intuition vs. data, hiring designers, and moving into management

Source 1672022-06-0714,530 words

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Opening

Lenny (00:00:06): Welcome to our very first episode with Julie Zhou. Julie spent 13 years at Facebook where she was the head of design for the Facebook app. She actually joined as an IC designer and worked her way up to VP of design. She's also an incredible writer, having written the best-selling book, The Making of a Manager. She's also the author of a newsletter called The Looking Glass which was a huge inspiration to me throughout my entire career....

The opener starts with biography before advice. That order makes the guest legible as a person before the listener extracts tactics.

Accept praise cleanly

Julie Zhuo (00:02:46): Thank you, Lenny. It is a pleasure to be here. I think it's going to be a super fun conversation. Lenny (00:02:51): For...

Accepts praise without shrinking from it or turning it into a performance.

Name the work

more questions I want to ask in different directions. One is coming back to your book about The Making of a Manager. By the way, we haven't even mentioned the name of the book yet. The Making of a...

Names a concrete strength, artifact, or contribution instead of offering generic praise.

Return warmth

Lenny (00:31:38): It's all an illusion, but I appreciate it. And then the other piece is that you pointed this out, that a lot of people don't realize when folks like us...

Matches the guest's warmth and keeps the social temperature generous.

Ask with curiosity

run and you've started doing more tweeting than news lettering and blogging. How do you think about that? Just, is that intentional? How do you think about, I don't know, Twitter versus newsletters and other things?

Turns a moment that could become critique into a question about the guest's thinking.

Accept praise cleanly

Julie, this was such a treat for me. I so appreciate you making time for this. Thank you so much. Julie Zhuo (01:05:25): This was wonderful. Thank you so much for having me, Lenny. Lenny (01:05:29):...

Accepts praise without shrinking from it or turning it into a performance.