YouSaid · the spoken record

Julie Zhuo

lines on the record: 101
first: 2025-09-21
most recent: 2025-09-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Then I think you have to ask yourself, okay, so if I just do this, it's not going to cut it. I might actually need to learn some of these other skills in order to be able to fulfill the job that is going to be valuable enough that people are going to pay me a bunch of money at this certain level so that I can afford my mansion. So I just think it has to go back to like what are your goals? And there are cases in which, yes, like it supports, it will support your goal to do this and to deepen your craft and there are cases in which it won't. I think it's important it's a very individual question for each person, but what I often think suffering is when these things are not aligned. So what you want is like the giant mansion and all of that. But you're like, but I also just want to spend all my time perfecting my egg omelet. And then you're just like in this tension place and it's very hard to feel satisfied and fulfilled because you're a little bit like, oh, why doesn't the world?”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, if that's your high level goal and you're like, I want to be able, let's say your high-level goal is I want to be able to do this 10 or hours a day because I love it and I want to be able to support myself doing it, meaning I get paid and I have like a great job and I want to have a bunch of impact in the world by doing this thing, right? So again, you still have goals. Then you have to see, okay, does my strategy of just deepening these things? Is there a pathway to reach my goals according to that? And if there is, awesome. Then if someone's like, hey, do you want to be a manager? You're like, nope, don't need to because these are my goals. And this pathway actually allows me to do that. But if somehow you get to a point where the skill you really want to perfect is not something that maybe commercially viable in the world that's going to somehow allow you to buy the big mansion that you want to buy to support your family.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really great question. So, the way I think about it is it's very dependent on what is your goal. So for example, let's say that you are, let's even take, for example, ICs versus managers. I think often about the pathway of an IC, an individual contributor, as wanting to deepen a craft. You love this thing and you just want to get better and better and better at this very specific skill or this craft, right? So think about in our dimension infinite, like you pick a couple dimensions. I just want these to be, I want to be like the top 0.01%. And that's kind of the pathway of extending as an IC.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's like so, what I want to get to is not let's reject the strength or this weakness, but just know that that's like where we come from. That's naturally we might be wired in a particular way. Our growth often looks like getting better at doing the opposite, but not rejecting, again, the thing that we're good at, but rather over time getting to this balance where we can read the context and the situation and know, should I lean a little more thoughtful or is this a time where I need to try and be a little more decisive and just share what I need to share what's on my mind right now?”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Figure out in the context what makes sense to be. So I got this feedback and I'm like, cool. One of the things I need to work on is figuring out how to be more open in person, how to speak a little bit more clearly in person, maybe say things like, I don't know exactly how I feel about it yet, but this is what I'm thinking right now. If there's still clear tactics that will allow me to be a more effective team member and to do a better job in the context of what I'm trying to do with my team. So I've tried to build those skills. But the meta skill is now being able to step back and say, okay, in certain context, it is really important that we move fast and we are decisive and we just do something. And even if it's not perfect, we just kind of have to do it. I struggle with that, I should realize that that's an area to improve upon. But there are other contexts in which the right thing to do is actually to take a step back and be very thoughtful and to not rush into decisions.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what allows me to oftentimes be very, very thoughtful, right? Or like that, at least, again, when I was younger, like it's sort of, it's very clear that that particular weakness also very much speaking to a particular strength, which is I am the kind of person that doesn't always have a snap judgment. I have to really think about it and internalize it and sometimes get to how I feel and then I can share it and present it in the world. And so just knowing that about me is supremely helpful. Now doesn't mean, of course, that I can never get better at this thing, but what I often think about is mastery is where we realize that both of these we can get better at. And what we want to do is just”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That somebody can give you feedback, or you can be maybe not great at certain dimensions. We could have room to improve. And so, I think if you can take that and really internalize that, then you can look at yourself a little bit more objectively as a manager. And you can realize that there are areas where you're going to be really strong. There are areas where you have biases. And often they are one and the same. So I'll give an example. People have often told me I would get this in my performance reviews from managers in the past, like, hey, Julie, you're really thoughtful. So when you think about something, you have like a way to think about it. You've clearly thought about it in depth and you've got like these frameworks and all this, that's a great thing. And then on the flip side, I'll get feedback like, well, Julie, you know, you don't really say a lot in a dynamic discussion. Like you're kind of quiet and you don't really think that quickly on your feet. And what you realize is like these are kind of, again, two, like because I don't do that and I'm not just off the cuff.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what I like about that is, therefore, if you take that as the model, right, things that then you realize that none of these dimensions are you entirely. So we can be, you know, I can make a comment like, Lenny, your axe throwing really could use some improvement. And ideally, you're not like Julie is saying I'm a bad person. My identity is at risk, right? Because it's just one dimension of who you are. But what happens sometimes is that we can get very attached to certain dimensions because we start to think that that's who we are. And I think managers can do that. And clearly individuals on their teams. And when that happens, it starts to get very difficult to have, I think, more objective conversations about, okay, what can you get better at? What can you get worse at? And so I say all this because I think this framework for me at least and many people that I've talked to has helped them realize.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How good is Lenny at doing a zero to one type of project in the AI space? So again, just can think about these as infinite dimensions. Reality is each of our profiles is very unique. It's like a fingerprint. So for you, it's like these are all these areas that you're really great at, you know, much better like in the top 1%. And then there's some areas where in the top 10%, then there's some areas where kind of average. And then there's some dimensions in which you're worse than average compared to other people. And that's just true for all of us.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we can kind of look at you in infinite dimensions. There is, for example, how good is Lenny at throwing an axe? That's one dimension.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First thing that comes to mind is the importance of managing yourself and understanding yourself. This was chapter five of my book. It's called Managing Yourself. In fact, when I wrote it, I kind of wanted to be chapter one. And then my publisher was like, well, maybe you should get into some of the tactical, like people don't necessarily think managing other people or managing teams starts with them. But I really do fundamentally believe this because I think all of us are, of course, like any human being. We have things that we're strong at. We have things that we're weak at. 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%. In fact, I think one of the most interesting concepts that we can or frameworks for myself and also even this is also kind of like a data framework concept is this concept of dimensionality. What dimensionality means is like you're a human being.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you don't think it's good, it's kind of a painful way to live. It'll be very, very difficult over these next. So I do think that all things being equal, lean into it. Like if you can wake up every day and see it as opportunity and excitement rather than fear, again, they're all flip sides of the same coin, but I think if we can lean more into what could it be while recognizing that the other side does exist and it's still there. And I think if managers who try to pretend like it isn't there, like it's all good, no one's upset, et cetera. There's something also missing about just addressing and being able to be like, yeah, it's hard. Change is hard. We're probably going to get upset. We're going to have some chaos. Like, this is going to happen, but we will work through it because we're going to be flexible and we're going to be able to put our eyes on the big picture of what is possible, which is exciting.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do we do that in a way that doesn't just freak everyone out? And it's like, ah, it's chaos. Everything's changing. So I think about this metaphor a lot of like the willow tree, which is like the willow tree is a very sturdy tree. It can survive a lot of storms, disasters, et cetera. But it's also very flexible, like the branches are very, very flexible. 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. But I think that's like, at least when I even go into being like be like the willow tree, Julie. Just imagine the willow tree and like try and channel that as the kind of feeling of what it is that we're trying to do together.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communication, feedback, compassion, but just being able to work with humans and to have them understand that like, yes, we are in a state of change. I think every leader has to do this now, every startup founder that I know, every CEO is, how do you land this message that things are changing and we need to be like we need to be very open to change if we go and stick to our old ways, we're probably going to get left behind, our product's going to get left behind, even our way of doing things is going to be left behind. So we need to change, right? We need to change our product and we need to change the way that we work, as we all talked about in terms of smaller teams, more nimble, blah, blah, blah. But at the same time, it's like.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And so I find that there's just a great deal more uncertainty that people have about things. Where is AI going to be in two years from now? I don't know. Who really knows, right?”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like these are just tools for us to use. And I would say every amazing designer that I've ever met is absolutely obsessed with trying to get a better understanding of reality. They want to know what users really think. They want to know what they're really doing. If they could read every user's minds, that's like the thing we would all want, right? As a designer is like, if I could just know what everyone is thinking and feeling every time they used it, my life would be a lot easier because then I would be able to build better and better things. And so that's what it's trying to help us do. It is imperfect. No metric is going to tell you whatever we hope that it can in terms of the true certainty and precision. But it doesn't mean we can't use it to better our product development.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And your interpretation of if the number went up 5%, is that good? Is that not good is also an interpretation and is an art, not a science. It's just that sometimes I think we can give ourselves this feeling. And I get it. Sometimes there's this instinct to want to control things and we want everything to be buttoned up and we want to know that if we did A, B, C, everything will be great. Our careers are going to be awesome. Our product's going to rocket ship. I think designers are rightly often pushing back and saying, no, the reality is like this stuff is ambiguous and there's uncertainty and we can never know for sure. And I think all that is quite true. So the other thing I would say I really support is like you just actually can't make a really great product by thinking you can A-B test your way into it. So that's I fundamentally believe that, but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think there's actually it's not either or. It's not like data or design.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still have to go and invent and create and dream, and there's no formula, and there's no science that will tell you exactly how you're going to make a hit. You can experiment, which has allows you to try more things maybe and more rigorously understand what that does in the short term. It's all very contextualized, right? Because anything don't tell you what will happen in the very long run. And that still, again, it's all still data. You still have to synthesize and figure out what to do. So that's this thing I'll say, diagnose with data and treat with design. I think the second thing I will usually tell designers about is I find that sometimes maybe it's the, let's call it the false precision of numbers that we kind of fall into, right? 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 isn't art, not a science.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People put onto TikTok and which things went viral, and what are they saying in the Twitter verse or X-verse, I guess is what it's called now. And what are, you know, and if you do a customer interview, like that's still all data. It's just that that is a little harder to distill and quantify, although now with AI, we have better tools for synthesizing. So that's all data in my mind and it's just all trying to help us understand what is really happening. is the phenomenon that's happening in reality and how do we understand it”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 cure the fact that you don't have really great retention. It's just not. But it can tell you if you have a problem and where that problem or opportunity might be. But you still need to go back and undergo a very creative process to figure out what's the best way to solve that. So that's the first thing I would say is this framework of like data helps you figure out what's actually happening, what do people like, what are they engaging with, what not, right? It's just gives you a story that better reflects reality. Because again, we all have stories. We're like, oh, my company is amazing. People love us, blah, blah. That's the story I want to believe. But reality may be a different picture. And so what data is trying to do is capture reality. And by the way, I don't think of data just as like it's A-B test and it's quantitative things we can measure. It's to me data is also, well, what did...”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one phrase that my co-founder and I would always discuss with us amongst ourselves very early on and which we shared with like a lot of the companies that we work with, which is what you really want is you want to diagnose with data and treat with design.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time spent on mobile or kind of length of sessions became something that was important for us to understand. If I worked on any of these, I would say one of the probably the biggest questions is, hey, what use cases are growing or what use cases are shrinking? And that's much harder to tell today because it's not just clicks on tabs or pages. It's like we have to probably use an LLM to or a machine learning model to bucket user intent. We probably have to ask questions like, is the flow going really well in conversations? If I just ask one question and I don't go back and forth, like did the user get value, right? I was always trying to get back to like we're trying to figure out if this was a good experience, but now it's like we need to actually invent new methodologies to help us analyze that.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good observability model for your business, it's much easier to start to get into the root cause, 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 key levers are, then you will be scrambling. And at that point, that's usually when people start investing a ton in data. So I wouldn't say that we're a lot of these hot companies that are quite there yet. But what I also think is a trend is that every time there's a new technological shift, we actually have to change the way that we think about analysis has to answer the questions that we have. And if technology changes or context changes, we need new methodologies of analysis. So for example, when mobile came to the forefront, right, looking at sessions or sessions per day or”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They've got hundreds of millions in ARR and hundreds of millions of users. And you know what? They don't actually have all of that infrastructure, that logging to be able to truly do data analysis. So I would say that these companies are totally getting by on just good instincts and good vibes. And we see that, right? Like you don't really need data analysis to sometimes make something that works. But I think what data helps us do is it just in my mind it's sort of helping us reflect back what is really reality. And so of course if AR is going, awesome, great, keep doing what you're doing. But what always happens is eventually things stop growing. Growth does not happen forever. And usually when growth stops, everyone has this question of like, what's going on? Why did it happen? And then you start to be able to see the power of if you've instrumented everything very well and you have a very”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first question was How are a bunch of AI companies using data? 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. And so, you know, if you got to 100 million users, your company has probably been around for a while. And if your company's been around for a while, you've had time to set up things like logging and you've hired a growth team at that point and you've hired a data team and they've like done a bunch of work to log and instrument and then transform the data. And like we've talked about like what is the observability for our business and you just usually had years to build and develop that because of the rate of growth. And so today we see companies that are growing insane and they're still about 10 people or two people or however many people”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the world on the internet about it. This is like the perfect type of question where if you just talk to ChatGPT, it's probably going to give you a much better answer and allow you to go deeper. And a secondary thing we've been learning too is this idea of almost like using ChatGPT, it's like you test your learning. So explains a bunch of things. And so what I often like to do is like, okay, I read this. So this try to explain back what I heard, right? So does this mean, is the right way to think about it that this is kind of like this analogy and chat GPT will critique me? Yes, that is right. Or no, you didn't quite get that right. Like, in fact, and it always tries to say it nicely. This is a funny part. It'll be like, that's close. And then eventually it's like, you were completely wrong just in the style. But like, it helps so much because it's interactive. And so we can really test whether we really understand the concept by trying to retell it back in our own way.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll give an example. I was just talking to an engineer this morning, and he's written a bunch of these algorithms. So one of the things our company does is we're trying to automate data analysis. So one of the things we have to do is obviously understand the best practices. Like if there's a type of question, hey, what features are really the ones that people pay for? We need to kind of figure out what is the right analysis to do. And so the engineer was saying to me, you know, Julie, I feel like I really understand the how like I know the algorithms. I know we do root cause analysis, like how we do that. But what I don't really understand is why or when this would be most useful. Like in what context in a company would this company come up because he's an engineer, he hasn't done that job of being like a PM or an executive that asks these types of questions. And that was like the perfect thing where like, yeah, you know, traditionally you might have asked someone, but this is more general purpose. Like there's so much resource.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accelerate and just learn these skills much faster than before. 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. Just because I know whenever I talk to people, we forget. We don't think that like, oh, wait, yes, we could be doing that and just sitting down and probably in 30 minutes or an hour learn so much faster than what we used to be able to do before.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And their first I have to ask this person, and now I'm going to take a bunch of their time because I want them to explain everything to me. And in fact, I think these days, ChatGPT or these other AI tools are better teachers. I find that we tend to maybe not use them quite as much just for the purposes of accelerating our education or even going through something like sometimes what I'll do is I'll find a curriculum online. If you like, take a course, it'll be like this whatever 12-week curriculum and I'll just feed it into ChatGPT and I'll say, help me customize a program for me using the ways that I like to learn. Like I am a person who really needs examples. I need a lot of explain like I'm five, give me an analogy. And I know some other people on my team are like, I don't get like these examples don't make any sense. Like we're different types of learners. And so the idea of like a tool that personalizes learning for each of us really helps us.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slerly engineering. Engineering is one that most of our company is engineers, so that's the one that we focused on a bunch. I certainly do see more people also prototyping things. And so it's not just, we have like two designers, but we also see engineers. We have one, we have a team that's called product science, which is this interesting blend of, you can think of it as like a Ford deployed person who has a lot of data analysis background and is kind of playing a customer success role and also kind of playing like a product role. And you see them starting to take on building more prototypes or getting into some of the engineering. And so it's really lovely to see that blend of everyone can do a little bit of everything. And we're all encouraging each other. The other thing that we recently, we've also been trying to do a lot more is just, you know, obviously we say, hey, engineer, now you can do analysis.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many more pieces just on their own. And then in specific scenarios, like, oh, this is super front and heavy. Sure, let's still bring in somebody who is more specialized in that particular skill.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Front engineers from about, so if you have a project and it's got some front end and some back end, the shortcut is like I need one of these and one of these and that's how it's going to go. But if you say, look, you're an engineer, you're a builder. This has a little bit of front end, but you know what, you can probably figure that out. Like use AI to help you figure it out, you know, get obviously someone who's a specialist who review the code or to give you some high-level guidance on things, but just do it. And ever since we started to implement that as well, we see, yeah, again, a little bit of, you know, you have to kind of invest a little bit in the beginning. So people are not as comfortable. They have to learn. So you initially, things take longer. It takes a little bit of extra time, right? Versus if you did slot in a front-end specialist and this is a front-end project, it probably would have gone a little bit shorter. But in the long run, that investment really pays off because now you have a lot more people who are, again, a little more well-rounded and can take on.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is true, and I'm not trying to say again that everyone needs to be good at everything. I don't think that's very realistic. I do think, for example, if we were going to create a team and we're going to have a couple engineers and none of them are very good at thinking through product requirements or what the user angle is, we probably do need to supplement the team with somebody with that skill set, right? And that might be a designer or that might be another engineer who's really good at that or that might be a traditional product manager or even sometimes a data analyst who's really good at it. So that skill is still important and the team still needs to have that skill. Otherwise, it's probably not going to produce the best outcome. But I like to think of it as like, what are the skills that are needed for this? And can we now find a couple people? But it doesn't mean we just automatically go to that script of need a PM, need a designer, need three engineers, need, need that. And used to be like, oh, some people.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strictly in my charter. And so that's why I'm such a big fan of like we can make teams smaller and we can eliminate these lines. Sure, again, they're still, I'm not trying to say like everyone has to do everything. We still can respect the fact that you might be much better at this particular skill than me, but it's less about the role and it's more about the specific context that we're in. And I find that whenever you have teams and you empower them to be able to take more action on their specific context rather than having these higher level rules or policies or like this is how it's supposed to be, then you get better work, you get faster work, and you get happier employees because people feel like they actually can have the power to create the thing that they want.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where Letty started, but I find that sometimes when you have 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. And I think that in doing so, again, where we want to be polite, we want to respect everyone's lanes. I think that's a missed opportunity for that, you know, if I'm the engineer to be like, wait a second, I should probably focus a lot too. Like I need to understand and have an opinion about what to build or what the user experiences. And so we found that if we actually make teams smaller and we kind of even like in the past, you know, pre-II, like just have fewer of these, it allowed everyone to be like, oh, wait, we don't have product manager on the team. Okay, so communications up to me, figuring out how we get greatest value to users is something that is now.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have eliminated more roles. For example, we thought we would need a bunch of product managers. It's turned out that actually if you don't have a product manager, I know this might be going against a little bit of the ethos of Poir.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think the real promise and magic of AI that we're seeing in the workplace is that it leads us to each individual is far more empowered. So it used to be, okay, I don't have the skills to do 10 different jobs. So I need to supplement by hiring people to do these jobs. I need someone who's really good at design. I need someone who's really good at coding. I need someone who's really good at data analysis. And then I'll assemble that team. But now with AI and my companion, it's like, wait a second, AI allows me to do many of those jobs myself. Now, I'm not going to do them at the, let's call it the PhD or the highest 1%, 10% level. But if I was at the zero or 10th percentile, it can certainly get me even today very quickly up to like the six.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that an agent can really understand what success and failure looks like is a lot of the game. And I think this also relates to things like, well, that's why we have to write evals and that's why they're so important because they're helping us understand what is the objective criteria. And these days I work in data and my company is all about trying to automate data analysis. And the forever question goes the whole point of data and the whole point of metrics and KPIs is we're trying to put a little bit more of an objective measure or get as crystal clear as possible about what success looks like. And I think it's really an art more than it is like a science, but that's like the first thing. I think if you're really unclear about what success looks like, the prompt, you're probably not going to get the most amazing work. I think that's true for managing teams and it's very much true for managing AIs.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the first is defining the goal and defining the outcome and being really, really crystal clear on what does success look like. I mean, there's obviously lots and lots of, like if you ask a company to do this, we'll know that this is challenging for humans, right? I think a lot of times when you talk about why the alignment is so difficult at a big company, it often comes down to this question, which is different people may have different pictures of what success looks like. And even if I describe in human words, oh, you know, Lenny, I want to build this product and it's going to be amazing or this podcast episode, which you asked me, want lots of people to hear it and take away things, that's very general. Like, how do we get even more specific so that we know without question whether we've hit it or not? This is actually a really, really difficult problem. It's a different question for us because, again, we tend to think very high levels. So figuring out how to boil it down.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true. That's true, though some people do joke that if we don't treat our agents nice, what's going to happen when AGI comes? And maybe it still might benefit us to be kind.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you have to understand the strengths of used to be people, but now it's basically models. And different models have different strengths. So it's like they have different personalities. And so you kind of have to get to know it, like, you know, develop an intuition for it so that you can use the right tools for the right purposes. And I mean, we talk about agents, but we also talk about like what are the tools that agents have access to. So you still have to make decisions around that. And then there's, of course, process, which is how you do it. Now I think with better and better models, perhaps the agents get smarter so they can deal with higher and higher levels of figuring out how to do something. But I think it's still very important for us to be able to provide the right context, provide the right high level instruction so that we get what we want. So really it's the same principles. And I absolutely agree with you that more and more of us are going to have to double down on these skills to be able to use these tools very effectively.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% believe that and agree with that, which is that management is just about, in my mind, having an outcome. So you want to get something done. That's the thing. You have a North Star, 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. And typically when we talk about management and traditional settings, we talk about the resources being people and getting the right talent and making sure that they're got the assemble the adventures, so you've got the right mix of skills that you need. The second lever is around, okay, what's the purpose? Does everyone know what they're supposed to do with their talents? Like, do we have a goal? Do we have a purpose? And then the third thing is process, which is how should all of these different people and tools come together? And these are still the fundamentals of working with agentic systems. Like you still need a goal. You need to be very clear about what the outcome is.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought I was the only one who felt this way, but this book made me realize that hey, these are very normal feelings. And that's certainly how I felt just stumbling through and feeling like an imposter for so many years. And so it really is very gratifying to hear that from readers.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It honestly went beyond my expectations, so I'm super happy with it. My big motivation to write it was, I think, largely because I felt if I had to write this thing, I was likely going to become a better manager. And that was actually a huge part of it because thinking about and writing something, I've been blogging for a long time. And I know that part of my process is when I really sit down to try and put down everything I feel and write letters to myself, it really helps me. And so that was honestly a huge motivation. I hope that it would go out there and it would sell some books. I was thinking about that maybe for people who grew up in companies like”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really incredible. I think it is a testament to just your curiosity and how much you really care about the craft of building great products and sharing that with the world. And I know I listen to your podcast and read your newsletter. My team does. We're constantly sharing things from all the amazing speakers that you've had. So thank you for doing this.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I even remember we chatted. Video was like kind of a newer thing. You're like, we'll record it, but it's really about the audio. And now we moved into the video era.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you, Lenny. I'm so excited to be here. I've been looking forward to this all week. I love your podcast. I love where you've taken it since our very first conversation. And I'm super excited to have a fun and engaging chat.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you want to diagnose with data and treat with design? Data is not a tool that's going to tell you what you should build. I don't actually think a lot of the fast-growing companies are using data well at this point. Traditionally, things just didn't grow that fast. These companies are totally getting by on just good instincts and good vibes. But what always happens is eventually things stop growing.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's always been a manager's job to manage change. I just think the rate of change is accelerating. Today, management is really about this idea of be sturdy while being flexible. So I think about this metaphor a lot of the willow tree. It can survive a lot of storms, disasters, et cetera, but it's also very flexible”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Management is still really critical. You have a North Star, 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. It used to be people, but now it's basically models. And different models have different strengths. You kind of have to assemble the adventures so that you can use the right tools for the right purposes.”
2025-09-21 · Lenny's Podcast · From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source