Julie Zhuo
Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.
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What they believe
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Okay design improves what is put in front of it; excellent design changes what is possible.
Okay design improves what is put in front of it. Excellent design changes what is possible.
lg.substack.comSaid 14 Apr 2026This on korrents
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Great taste is more objective than people assume.
But great taste is more objective than we assume.
lg.substack.comSaid 24 Jun 2025This on korrents
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From one piece How to Spot a World-Class Designer 2 beliefs · lg.substack.com
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Their words
Excellence in design is not just about craft quality. It is about whether a designer is both willing and allowed to create impact.
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korrents.com
Okay design improves what is put in front of it; excellent design changes what is possible.Their words
Okay design improves what is put in front of it. Excellent design changes what is possible.
11 March
15 January
6 November 2025
Nothing matches.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 43 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Okay design improves what is put in front of it; excellent design changes what is possible.
Okay design improves what is put in front of it. Excellent design changes what is possible.
How to Spot a World-Class Designer Said 14 Apr 2026
Excellence in design is not just craft quality; it is whether a designer is both willing and allowed to create impact.
Excellence in design is not just about craft quality. It is about whether a designer is both willing and allowed to create impact.
How to Spot a World-Class Designer Said 14 Apr 2026
Managing agents is the same job as managing people: fix the outcome, work out what your resources are good at, and design the process.
management is just about in my mind having an outcome. So you want to get something done. That's the thing. You have a northstar. You have a vision and you're just trying to figure out how to use the resources that you have to get that thing done.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
Show 40 more
Models have personalities the way people do, and using them well means developing an intuition for which one to reach for.
And you have to understand the strengths of of you know used to be people but now it's basically models and different models have different strengths. So it's like they have different personalities
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
If you cannot say crisply what success looks like, you will not get great work — out of a team or out of an AI.
if you're really unclear about what success looks like the prompt, you're probably not going to get the most amazing work. Um I think that's true for managing teams and it's very much true for managing AIs.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
AI has made individuals capable enough that the boundaries between engineer, designer, researcher and product manager should be dissolved.
And so the main thing that I felt so excited about and this is something I tell my team all the time is we need to dissolve the boundaries of these traditional roles.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
AI will not make you world-class at a skill, but it takes a near-beginner to roughly the sixtieth or seventieth percentile of it today.
but if I was, you know, at the zero or 10th percentile, it can certainly get me even today very quickly up to like the 60th 70th in terms of um what the state of the art is.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
Putting a product manager on a team invites everyone else to delegate the product thinking away, which is why she does not hire them.
I find that sometimes when you have like a designer or product manager and let's say I'm an engineer, then when I have a problem like, oh, I need to figure out the product definition, my default will be, well, I've got these people and that's kind of their job description, so I'm just going to delegate that to them.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
The most underused thing AI does is teach you: people reach for it to write their code and forget it can take them through a curriculum in an hour.
So yes, the tools are great. We can use cursor. It helps us. It autocompletes. It writes a bunch of things. But the acceleration of learning I think is another maybe underutilized tool in all of our arsenals
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
The fastest-growing companies are not using data well, because they reached enormous scale before they had time to build any of the instrumentation.
So the funny thing, my funny answer to this is I don't actually think a lot of the fast growing companies are using data well at this point. And the main reason why is because traditionally things just didn't grow that fast.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
Growth always stops eventually, and only a company that instrumented its business beforehand gets to find out why instead of scrambling.
It's easier to even predict whether growth will slow down at a certain point. it's easier to catch these trends earlier. If you don't have good observability over how your business runs and what the company's um key levers are, then you will be scrambling.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
Conversational products have made user intent far harder to measure, because a click on a tab told you what somebody wanted and a conversation does not.
used to be let's say in the Google world right I knew you were interested in shopping if you click the shopping tab I know you're interested in maps if you click the maps tab, we can measure clicks. Today, it's just all conversation. And so, it's actually harder for us to tease apart what is the user intent.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
Diagnose with data and treat with design: data can tell you that you have a problem and where it is, and it can never tell you what to build.
what you really want is you want to diagnose with data and treat with design. So data is not a tool that's going to tell you what you should build or what the solution is or how we're going to, you know, cure the fact that you don't have really great retention. It's just not.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
Numbers offer a false precision: which metrics you choose to look at, and whether a five percent rise is good, are both art rather than science.
Because it's like okay we got these numbers and the numbers go up. It's like no, the fact that you still have to choose which things you look at is an art, not a science. And your interpretation of if the number went up 5%, is that good? Is that not good? Is also an interpretation and is an is an art, not a science.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
You cannot A/B test your way into a really great product.
So the other thing I would say that I really support is like you just actually can't make a really great product by thinking you can AB test your way into it.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
Managing change has always been the manager's whole job; the only thing AI changed is how fast the change now arrives.
I think that managing change, it's always been manager's job to manage change and there's always the chaos of what's going on. I just think the rate of change is accelerating and we've seen that over the last couple of decades.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
Management today is the willow tree's trick — being sturdy by being flexible — and it is very hard to pull off.
and that's in some ways what allows it to be very sturdy so I Think today management is really about this idea of like be sturdy while being flexible and that is a very hard thing to pull off
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
Every strength is its own weakness and every weakness is a strength; nobody gets every dimension of themselves to a hundred percent.
And I am a very big believer that every strength is its own weakness and every weakness is a strength. There's no such thing as you're going to somehow, you know, get every dimension to be 100%.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
Feedback should be a daily practice rather than a twice-yearly review, because the team that improves one percent a week overtakes the team that improves one percent a month.
But feedback really in my mind ideally should be like a daily practice because the thing that matters for us in the long run as a team is how quickly are we getting better. So a team that just gets 1% better every week compared to a team that gets 1% better a month is even if they start off at a much lower baseline is going to outperform in a very short amount of time the team that doesn't get better.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
In the best working relationships the manager is a guide, not a judge deciding whether you deserve a promotion or a firing.
we often also have this mental model of like oh our managers are a judge and they're going to judge me on whether or not I got it I did well I should get a promotion I should be fired so there's this sometimes fear that people have but I think in the very best relationships the manager is like a guide
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
No project run by a manager who privately thinks it is a bad idea has ever turned out wildly successful.
I can tell you right now, every single manager I've ever managed where they're like, I don't really think this is a good idea. The there's no case where I can think of where the project somehow turned out to be like wildly successful.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
People are unhappy in their careers when the thing they want and the work it takes to get it are out of sync, not because they climbed the wrong ladder.
I go back to usually when people are unhappy it's because these things are a little bit out of sync. Like they want this big thing, but they don't actually they're not actually excited about what it takes to do that thing and therefore it's just going to be a mismatch.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
Boredom is a missing skill rather than a property of the situation: there is infinity in every direction, including a blank wall.
And so it's not really about the environment or the wall. It's really about how we see it and whether we can find the thing that is deep and rich and infinite in that direction.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
The real danger of AI is not that it does our work but that it lets us shortcut hard feelings, the way a phone already lets us avoid a difficult conversation.
You can shortcut like hard feelings because now you can just watch TikTok instead of actually dealing with the very difficult emotion or tension that you had with a colleague or with your partner or with your children.
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo Said 21 Sept 2025
Great taste is more objective than people assume.
But great taste is more objective than we assume.
When AI Has Better Taste Than You Said 24 Jun 2025
Seen as prediction, human taste is far more vulnerable to AI than people like to admit.
Seen as a prediction engine, human taste is far more vulnerable to AI competition than we'd like to admit.
When AI Has Better Taste Than You Said 24 Jun 2025
At the highest level taste is not just prediction but movement-making, and the most significant tastemakers take social risks.
at the highest echelons, taste is not just prediction, it’s also movement making. The most significant tastemakers take social risks.
When AI Has Better Taste Than You Said 24 Jun 2025
The most powerful rule for an exceptional interface is that it feels obvious to use; novelty, minimalism and simplicity are means to that, not the end.
Sometimes designers will go to great lengths to make a user interface novel, or minimal, or simple. This is the wrong goal. Novelty, minimalism or simplicity are good heuristics for obviousness, but do not mistake the means for the end.
Conversational Interfaces: the Good, the Ugly & the Billion-Dollar Opportunity Said 12 May 2025
ChatGPT exploded because of its obvious chat interface, not its technology, which had launched earlier in a different wrapper that few noticed.
The technology powering ChatGPT had already launched prior to November 30th, 2022. It was just wrapped in a different interface. Very few people paid attention. Why did ChatGPT explode in popularity? Because of its obvious chat interface, which everyone intuitively already knew how to use it.
Conversational Interfaces: the Good, the Ugly & the Billion-Dollar Opportunity Said 12 May 2025
A blank chat box is lazy: it violates the first rule of a good user experience, that it is obvious what you can do.
The problem with a blank chat box on a blank page is that it violates the first rule of a high-quality user experience: it isn’t obvious what I can do.
Conversational Interfaces: the Good, the Ugly & the Billion-Dollar Opportunity Said 12 May 2025
Conversational interfaces get to the first seventy percent quickly and are bad at iteration; the future is chat married to traditional direct-manipulation controls.
Conversational UIs are great at quickly getting to the first 70%, but suck at offering easy controls over narrower areas for iteration.
Conversational Interfaces: the Good, the Ugly & the Billion-Dollar Opportunity Said 12 May 2025
Mocks and docs are dying: AI-native teams prototype and prune with code-first prototypes instead of static mocks and product requirement documents.
Say goodbye to cycles of mock and doc feedback, and say hello to code-first prototypes with constant iteration (on prompts, models, etc) to answer three key questions.
The Death of Product Development as We Know it Said 25 Mar 2025
Taste is the ability to distinguish excellence from mediocrity, and the hand can never consistently produce better than the eye can discern.
Good taste: taste is the ability to distinguish excellence from mediocrity. The hand can never consistently produce better than the eye can discern.
The Death of Product Development as We Know it Said 25 Mar 2025
AI favours tiny teams of high-agency individual contributors with blurred roles, and the coordinating manager is not needed until it is time to polish.
Welcome to the era of AI-native companies, where individual contributors (ICs) reign supreme.
The Death of Product Development as We Know it Said 25 Mar 2025
Do not judge a product's beauty by its aesthetics; judge it by how it made you feel.
Do not judge a product’s beauty by its aesthetics; judge it by how it made you feel.
The Looking Glass: How to tell if work is beautiful Said 16 Nov 2023
If the people a product is designed for cannot generally agree that the design is good, it is not good.
If you cannot get a group of people for whom your product is designed for to generally agree that your design is good, it’s not good.
The Looking Glass: How to tell if work is beautiful Said 16 Nov 2023
Obviousness comes from conforming to people's existing mental models: do not reinvent a common UI pattern unless the new one is at least twice as good.
Obviousness comes from conforming to people’s existing mental models. Don’t waste time reinventing common UI patterns or paradigms unless they are at least 2x better, or you have some critical brand reason to do so.
The Looking Glass: How to tell if work is beautiful Said 16 Nov 2023
Better design does not mean more design: the most obvious designs are often invisible.
Better design does not mean more design. Often, the most obvious designs are invisible.
The Looking Glass: How to tell if work is beautiful Said 16 Nov 2023
Design is not how a product looks; it is how it works, and all builders are designers.
Design is not the way it looks, or beautiful colors and animations. It's not the brand or the logo. It is how the product works. Designing is the the process of exploring and arriving at a solution. I believe all builders are designers.
The Looking Glass: What AI Won't Change Said 20 Apr 2023
The more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition.
The more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition. Despite having seen thousands of a/b test results for minor design details, I am still regularly surprised and humbled by my intuition being wrong.
The Looking Glass: What AI Won't Change Said 20 Apr 2023
Effective writing requires empathy for the reader, not only thought about what you want to say.
But effective writing is a two-way street and requires empathy for your reader.
The Looking Glass: Reader Empathy and Weird People Said 27 Feb 2023
Rather than coasting on intuition and taste, a data-informed person starts from the assumption that they know nothing.
Rather than surfing by on intuition and taste, the data-informed individual adopts a beginner's mindset: Assume you know nothing
Stay Healthy. Stay Data-Informed. Said 17 Mar 2020
Taste makes only a small ripple in a pond you already know; it is luck that sometimes carries it further.
Taste, that lovely thing, is simply an ability to make a small ripple in the small pond we are familiar with; sometimes, luck takes that ripple and propels it across other ponds and oceans.
Stay Healthy. Stay Data-Informed. Said 17 Mar 2020
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Recommends Leah's ProducTea
Practical, actionable growth advice from someone who has seen it and done it.
Where they publish
Site juliezhuo.com Her book, talks and where to find her.
Link verified 6 Sept 2026.
Newsletter The Looking Glass Essays on building products, teams and taste, and on AI.
Recent
- What would make AI truly social? 13 Oct 2026 A blueprint for consumer agents on the hardest and most meaningful problem
- What will we use our minds for? 7 Oct 2026 AI, mental gyms, and the most important choice we face
- What will make personal AI go big? 24 Sept 2026 Four design principles behind Muse’s appeal
Show 17 more
- AI for No Good Reason 17 Sept 2026 The most creative ways people have used AI for leisure
- How to Stop Complaining About Your Software 9 Sept 2026 Welcome to the era of digital hyperpersonalization
- You Cannot Mandate an AI Transformation 1 Sept 2026 A complete 10-step guide to pulling it off with care and human agency
- Eye, Hand, AI: a letter to my daughter 5 Aug 2026 The value of trying when AI makes things so easy
- How life was different during the early Internet 6 Jul 2026 AI for nostalgia's sake
- To All the Folks Who Are About to Be Rich 13 Jun 2026 Because of IPOs, acquisitions, or just doing some damned good business
- The Art and Excellence of Sales 9 Jun 2026 7 Lessons from former Meta Chief Revenue Officer David Fischer
- I am an idiot 21 Apr 2026 Notes on idiocy, in the age of something smarter.
- How to Spot a World-Class Designer 14 Apr 2026 7 lessons from designer, inventor and angel investor Soleio on what separate excellent from mediocre
- What Excellent Growth Teams See That Others Miss 11 Mar 2026 Watch now | A conversation with Brian Hale, Chief Growth Officer at Doordash
- Playing Authentic Games 15 Jan 2026 Intentions for 2026
- The Lost Art of Crying 6 Nov 2025 How to build and dismantle a kingdom of ice
- Unsent Letter #25 16 Sept 2025 To the arrogant young, newcomer
- You're definitely going to be a manager now 9 Sept 2025 Book launch! + Predictions for the manager in the era of AI
- The Making of a Founder 21 Aug 2025 On conviction and the hero's journey
- Unsent Letter #11 2 Jul 2025 To the maestro who passed me by
- When AI Has Better Taste Than You 24 Jun 2025 How machines conquered our skills, infiltrated our aesthetics, and left us with one final advantage
Link verified 6 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
x.com @joulee Short posts on product, design and AI.
Recent
- Love seeing the vision of @ekuydax @henrymodis and the whole team come to life! Finally collaborative AI! 19 Oct 2026
- what can mad men, reunions and marriage markets tell us about the future of social ai? 13 Oct 2026
- If someone happens to be creating a mental gym, please let me know! Also please make it look like the hanging gardens of Babylon kthx 8 Oct 2026
Show 17 more
- Latest essay, from hot bodies to hot minds 7 Oct 2026
- This is cool. Fantastic way for people to learn about the power of agents through their friends. 5 Oct 2026
- The 4 principles of consumer AI 5 Oct 2026
- 4 tests any personal AI needs to pass to go big: 1. The mom test 2. The spare key test 3. The putting-it-off test 4. The bored-in-line test ...and my review of how @Muse does across each of them! Buckle up with a coffee and a snack, cuz this one goes deep. 24 Sept 2026
- what if Elizabeth Holmes is the first actually good humanoid ai and this movie is an application of the Turing test? 23 Sept 2026
- one of the things i really appreciate about muse is this yeti character. it's a perfect mascot for an ai agent: cute, hardworking, sincere. makes you want to root for your agent to succeed 20 Sept 2026
- I've been enthusiastically bookmarking every project I come across that inspires me. Let me show you my collection. 17 Sept 2026
- The software of the future promises more power and flexibility for more imagination. We started with use-case software, moving to platform software, moving to all-purpose coding agents. Interface design is shifting rightward. A few things to keep in mind for designers: 1. Make the interface malleable. 2. Let preferences reach past the rule book. A descriptive vision beats fifty toggles. 3. Let feedback change the product. 4. Treat the seams as part of the experience. Nobody lives in one tool. And of course, the hardest of all: help people imagine bigger. Imagination is now the scarce resource. 11 Sept 2026
- the trick to never complaining about your software 9 Sept 2026
- Chatgpt is outta control 8 Sept 2026
- asked astra to draw my portrait and it hired a landscaper 8 Sept 2026
- Things my (Chinese) mom thinks are unbearably white: - snacks with no flavor (eg pretzel) - spending a disproportionate amount of total gift value on packaging (eg gift bag, tissues, bow) - investing into pets rather than kids 5 Sept 2026
- This question... I have spent far too many hours contemplating it. I have discovered multiple answers depending on how deep you want to go. The most pragmatic answer: you want to win a marathon, not a sprint. Too much sprinting makes you worse at marathons. The hard part, of course, is knowing how much is 'too much sprinting.' But in my experience, if the person thinks they need a break, they need a break (or, more extremely, they are not a good fit for the company.) 4 Sept 2026
- Loved talking with @daraladje, one of the most well-prepared interviewers able to go really deep. Especially loved chatting about the true nature of individual companies, and what it means to build the company only *you* could really build. Continue the conversation with my Delphi! 3 Sept 2026 delphi.ai
- Too many teams are doing AI transformation poorly, so I wrote down everything I have learned in my journey and in chatting with many other leaders. A long read, so get your coffees. 1 Sept 2026
- Showed this to my kids and now they wanna work at Apple. 27 Aug 2026
- Expecting we will see more and more examples of this, where a good product or service is offered for free, with the goal of collecting data that then improves models. Lab companies have an insatiable appetite and deep pockets to spend on better data! 24 Aug 2026
Link verified 6 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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