Julie Zhuo
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Notes
First of Kind · Julie Zhuo: The Miseducation
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Why Did Julie Zhuo Struggle to Speak Up at Facebook?
Julie Zhuo struggled to speak up at Facebook because she cared so much about being part of the whole that she lost a little of herself. She grew up in a Chinese household, a much more collectivist culture than the US, and she had always straddled both lines. She can see what is great about collectivism and what is great about liberal western democracy, and she is biased more one way than the other.
Coming into Facebook, the same instinct made it very hard to speak up in meetings and very hard even to have an opinion. Asked what she thought about something, she would turn the question around and ask what everyone around her thought, then curate an opinion. She still went back to which view w
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How Did Julie Zhuo Get Into Writing?
Julie Zhuo says going home to write every night is probably how she got into her writing practice. She joined Facebook as a designer and an engineer and honestly was not sure she was going to succeed in the profession. If it did not work, she needed a plan B, and the plan B was to be a novelist.
In the first four or five years, after she came back from Facebook, she worked on a novel on the side. She thinks of the novels as an insurance policy of sorts. She has four unpublished young adult novels. She sent them to a bunch of agents, and they were all summarily rejected. She looks back and agrees the novels actually suck. She turned out to be a better designer and technology builder than a n
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How Did Fear of Failing Hold Julie Zhuo Back?
Julie Zhuo waited to start a company because she was too scared she could not succeed. A perfectionist fear of failing kept her from trying until she believed the attempt would still be worth it if it failed.
The wish went back to college. New to Silicon Valley, she took an entrepreneurship class, thought it sounded amazing, and admired people brave enough to make something out of nothing. She resolved to work at a place like that, which is how she joined Facebook, and she kept the plan to start a company one day. She would have started earlier. She held back because she did not think she could succeed, and the odds looked sobering. Getting ready to start was about building confidence and t
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Why Does Julie Zhuo Treat Team Confusion as a Mirror?
Julie Zhuo treats confusion on the Sundial team as a mirror of a conflict she has not settled in herself. When the team is confused, she asks what she really stands for, because mixed signals from her usually mean she has not decided how she truly feels.
She says one thing and then another. People get confused because the messages conflict, and they conflict because she has not figured out her own view in her heart of hearts. She reads how the company is running as a mirror of what she still feels conflicted about. Running a company is a game with a basic rule of capitalism: make more money than you spend, and make more over time. A choice between feature A and feature B is never only about
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Do People Remember Failed Facebook Launches?
Soleio says nobody remembers the Facebook launches that failed. Print out every announcement from the first five years and 80% of it can be ripped up and shredded. People do not remember the shreds at all, and they do not hold the failures against the people who shipped them. Nobody is still saying group deals failed at Facebook and calling the team dummies.
He has forgotten a long list of attempts. Group deals is one of them. Another is the moment you shop for something and it automatically publishes a story. The toaster is a launch a lot of people miss. Pandemic is one people did not like when it launched.
The pile of attempts is not what stays in memory. Early Facebook put out announcem
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How Do People Learn Product Development Best?
Julie Zhuo believes people learn product development far more when they create the process themselves and then reflect on whether they believe it is the best idea. Naming the success outcome and asking a group to figure out the right way to build the product teaches more than handing them a method and telling them to implement it.
When a team lands on an approach she has tried before and thinks will probably fail, saying so outright teaches less than letting them try it, see why it fails, and run a retrospective together. She used to shut the idea down and tell people not to build it that way. A story from one context rarely convinces anyone, because people ask how she knows the same failur
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What Did Julie Zhuo Realize About Customers?
Julie Zhuo realized, six months into building her company, that she had not talked enough to customers. The team was stuck choosing whether to do A or B. Both ideas looked strong, and the struggle came from a weak grasp of what customers needed.
She had already read the YC literature, and as a design leader she had preached that teams always have to talk to customers. The line had turned into a cliche she could repeat. Knowing the lesson and saying it still left it unused in day-to-day work. The opening to apply it stayed hard to spot until an error, a difficulty, or a challenge appeared. Once that struggle hit, the lesson went in more deeply.
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Why Does Being in Person Help You Learn?
Julie Zhuo says being in person makes a big difference to learning, because an environment where other people think about similar things gives more exposure to ideas. The amount of exposure to new ideas is an input metric for how much a person can then learn, change, and adapt. Meeting for coffee in the Bay Area, rubbing elbows, and sharing what is going on produces more of that exposure.
The internet is the forefront, and everything people want to know probably already exists there. Finding it is the work. Thinking to ask the question that leads to the answer is the larger open question.
Exposure is only the first piece. There is also how much a person can internalize. She has run many ex
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How New Was Early Facebook Growth Work?
Julie Zhuo says a lot of what Facebook did back then was very new. The growth team, and the way Facebook used data to learn what people were doing, was pioneered there from first principles. The team kept asking the same questions and built a methodology around them. No off-the-shelf tool was being sold to explain cohort analysis, which numbers to track, or why cohort analysis was worth doing.
The obsession was simple: how do we keep growing, and how do we know the growth is healthy? For a social media company the mechanisms differ. Virality and network effects matter, and getting people on quickly was important very early. The company, the era, and the problem then produced the processes a
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Why Do Enterprise Products Still Pick Up the Phone?
Julie Zhuo says enterprise products still have to answer the phone in the middle of the night. Accountability runs deeper than on a free consumer app: an edge case that affects even a couple of people has to be prioritized when it is very serious for the company or the customer. The business is still a product company, not a services company, so a duct-tape fix that solves one problem without making the product better is a trade-off she has to weigh.
The goal is an enduring, sustainable product that takes on more of the work humans would otherwise do manually. A strong enterprise company productizes the jobs a team does not want to keep doing by hand, whether data pipelines, repeated analys
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What Is High-level Design?
Julie Zhuo calls high-level design one motion used at every scale. A task, a team, and a company are the same kind of work.
She started by designing a small thing, a task or a feature. The work then moved up to an application, and later to a system. After she became a manager, it was no longer only the product. She had to design a team, or a group of people, that could build the product or the feature in a high quality way and in a sustainable way. Growing through levels of management made culture the same problem: how to design a culture, beyond forming the team and coaching. Starting Sundial took the ladder one level further. She set out to design a company that can build a product, using