Julie Zhuo

Their words

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.

Their words

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

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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.

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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%.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

Their words

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.