When everyone looks to you: Julie Zhuo and the making of a manager

The most useful sentence in Julie Zhuo's career is also the most disarming. "It's OK if you don't know what you're doing," it runs. "Nobody else does either." It is the title of an early chapter in The Making of a Manager, the 2019 book that turned Zhuo from a respected Silicon Valley design leader into the quiet patron saint of the first-time manager, and it is, by her own telling, the thing she most needed to hear on the day she became one.

That day came when she was twenty-five. "I was 25-years-old," she has written, "and all that I knew of management could be neatly summarized into two words: meetings and promotion." The honesty is the point. The genre of the management book is crowded with people who arrive on the page already certain. Zhuo arrived on it remembering, vividly, what it felt like not to be, and built an entire field guide around the gap.

The first intern

The gap was forged in an unusually fast furnace. Born in Shanghai, Zhuo immigrated to the United States as a small child, settling in Texas at around the age of five, and grew up under the high expectations common to immigrant households. She read computer science at Stanford, and in May 2006, before she had held any other job, she joined a four-year-old social network as its first intern. The company was Facebook. She would stay nearly fourteen years.

It was, in retrospect, the ideal place to learn the lesson her book would later teach, because the role kept arriving before she was ready for it. Hyper-growth does that: it promotes people into rooms they have not yet earned the map to. Zhuo rose from intern to designer to design manager, and ultimately to Vice President of Product Design, leading the team responsible for the look and feel of products used by more than two billion people. The features she helped shepherd, News Feed, the like button, the grammar of a platform that became, for a time, the default surface of the internet, were not minor. Neither were the consequences, and she has not always been comfortable with all of them.

The essays came first

Long before the book, there was the writing. In 2013 Zhuo began publishing on Medium under the title The Year of the Looking Glass, fifty-two pieces in that first year, some on designing products and teams, some closer to personal observation. The essays were unhurried and frank in a way corporate blogging rarely is, and they found an audience well beyond Facebook's walls. They are the soil the book grew from.

What gives the writing its grip is a refusal to mistake the title of manager for the substance of leadership. The distinction is one Zhuo returns to repeatedly, and it is sharper than the usual platitude.

"Leadership is a quality rather than a job. While the role of a manager can be given to someone (or taken away), leadership is not something that can be bestowed. It must be earned."

From that distinction follows most of her practical advice. If leadership is earned, then the manager's job is not to issue answers from on high but to improve the people and the work. "Your feedback only counts if it makes things better," she has said, a line that quietly demolishes a great deal of what passes for managerial communication. And her favourite tool is not authority but enquiry: "Questions are a manager's best tool." The book's most quoted gut-check belongs to the same family, the test of whether each person on your team would, given the choice, choose to be on it again.

The book that found its moment

The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You arrived in 2019, published by Penguin Random House. Its subtitle does the work of a thesis: it is, in the publisher's framing, "an everything-you-need-to-know field guide to rocking your job, earning your confidence, and leading your team to new horizons." But its real innovation is one of altitude. Where most leadership books are written from the summit, Zhuo wrote hers from the base camp, for the person promoted on Friday who has to run their first one-on-one on Monday and has no idea what to say.

That choice of audience explains its staying power. The supply of advice for executives is effectively infinite; the supply of honest, specific help for the newly-minted manager is not. By writing the book she had wanted in 2006, Zhuo claimed a piece of ground few established authors had bothered to occupy, and it has remained, in the years since, one of the most reliably recommended starting points for anyone leading people for the first time.

An ending, and a beginning

In February 2020, after nearly fourteen years, Zhuo left Facebook. The explanation she gave was characteristically plain: "the world is large," she wrote, "and there's more to see and do. I'd like to try my hand at different problems from different vantage points across different teams." It is the same instinct that runs through the book, the willingness to step into a room before you are certain you belong in it.

What came next was a turn from pixels to data. Zhuo went on to co-found Sundial, a data-analytics startup built to help organisations make better decisions from the numbers they already collect. The throughline is easy enough to trace. A design leader who spent years arguing that good judgement comes from context, that managers and teams decide well only when the data, the goals and the trade-offs are in front of them, has gone off to build the tools that put that context within reach. The medium changed; the underlying conviction did not.

Look back across the whole arc and one thing stands out: how little Zhuo has traded on certainty. Her authority rests, almost paradoxically, on a willingness to admit the limits of what she knew at each step, the intern who didn't know the job, the twenty-five-year-old who didn't know how to manage, the executive who left a comfortable summit to start again at the bottom of a new hill. The book endures because it says the thing the management shelf usually airbrushes out: great managers, as she puts it, are made rather than born, and the making is mostly the work of staying honest about how much you still have to learn.

It is a useful idea to leave a reader with, and an unusually generous one. When everyone looks to you, Zhuo's whole body of work suggests, the first thing to do is admit you are still figuring it out, and then get to work anyway.