Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author)
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- We're seeing this kind of flattening of orgs. Everyone's becoming an IC again. - It used to be, okay, I don't have the skills to do 10 different jobs, but now with AI, allows me to do many of those jobs myself. We need to dissolve the boundaries of these traditional roles and call ourselves builders. I'd love first to get to the world where that's the title. - I also just saw us at Google let go of so many of their middle managers. - 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. 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. - What do you feel is the biggest change in the role in life over manager these days? - It's always been 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. - You have such an interesting trajectory from being head of design to now being obsessed with data and analytics. - You wanna diagnose with data and treat with design. Data is not a tool that's gonna 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. Today, my guest is Julie Zoo. Julie was my first ever guest on this podcast, which I recorded over three years ago. So this is a very special conversation. As I've shared many times before in other places, Julie's newsletter, The Looking Glass, was the inspiration for my newsletter and basically led to everything that I do now. If you're not familiar with Julie, she was the longtime head of design for the Facebook app used by over three billion people.
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