From Intern to VP of Design: Julie Zhuo on Imposter Syndrome, Writing and Building Product Sense

Zhuo describes herself as a first-generation immigrant who was told she could be a doctor, lawyer or engineer. Scared of blood and a lover of fiction, she gravitated towards engineering, but what she actually loved was digital art. Because her hands are shaky, MS Paint's undo function was a revelation: she could keep trying until a line looked right without anyone knowing how many attempts it took.

Digital art led to building websites, and she studied computer science in college. After a class on Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship she decided she wanted a startup rather than a large company. A startup down the street from her university, a product she had used for two or three years, turned out to be Facebook, which was then a high school and college network with 8 million users.

On her first day as an intern, her mentor Ruchi asked what kind of engineering she liked. Zhuo said she liked the parts people can see, and Ruchi told her to sit next to the designers. It was the first time she had heard that design was a profession. In those days the design team was technical, doing both front-end engineering and design, and she felt she had found her tribe.

She frames her Facebook years as chapters: learning to be a designer and think about users other than herself, then managing a team without preparation, and finally learning to scale management, build a wide range of products and fit design into strategy. About two years before the conversation she left to become a founder, working on a product-analytics company aimed at making data accessible to every business.

Lenny asks how she rose so quickly, and Zhuo insists it was not easy. For the first seven or eight years at Facebook, she says, she felt like an imposter every single week, with a constant voice asking whether she deserved to be there. Eventually she looked back at what she had worked on and realized that being in a situation you are not prepared for goes hand in hand with the most intense periods of growth.

Her advice has two parts. First, she was lucky to be at a company that was scaling, where there are always chances to raise your hand and be thrown into something new, so people who want such opportunities may need to seek out a place that is growing. Second, accept that not knowing what to do is normal and approach it with curiosity, because it is what forces you to do the work and learn.

On coping, Zhuo says everyone feels this way to some extent, including people she regards as role models, because doing anything for the first time is never comfortable. Her toolkit includes reminding herself that it is natural, asking for help rather than trying to fake it until she makes it, and talking to people who are a step or two ahead and can say it will be fine.

The third tool is vulnerability. Some of her most meaningful conversations with managers and reports came when they were open about what they found hard, which deepened connections and let people share the load. Even as a department head or founder, she says, she will never have all the answers, and sharing the problem usually produces a better solution.

Asked how being a founder differs from leading at Meta, Zhuo calls it humbling but exactly the journey she wanted. At a large company experts in every field are a message away. In the early days of her startup, with her co-founder Chandra, it was just the two of them handling taxes, incorporation and a thousand small decisions, which showed her how many things she is bad at or does not enjoy.

She also now works with people at very different career stages. For the last five to seven years at Facebook she mostly managed senior designers, managers and directors, so working with new grads and early-career people forced her to change many of her management habits. She found she loves working with people in that early phase, even though what they need is quite different.

The other shift is putting the individual-contributor hat back on. As a manager, she says, you develop your eye but not your hand, so she became a good critiquer of design while the limits of what she could make herself became obvious. At the new company she has to act as a kind of IC product manager and designer and rebuild those muscles. Lenny shares the reverse experience after selling his startup, where a single goal felt easier but eventually got itchy.

Zhuo's writing started with performance-review feedback: she was engaged in small discussions but quiet in rooms of seven, ten or fifteen people. She recognized the fear of looking stupid in front of many people. At the new year she resolved to put her opinions on the internet once a week for a year, with no goal about readership or quality, only to hit publish 52 times.

The first weeks were excruciating, with hours spent editing a single piece, but by weeks ten to fifteen she had a cadence. Writing became a kind of self-therapy, a quiet time to organize the thoughts she carried through the week. She treats her writing as letters to herself, containing the advice she most needs, and by year's end she saw a real difference in her ability to speak up in large meetings.

She kept going because she did it for herself, and readers resonating with it was a wonderful side effect that made her feel less alone. Lenny asks how she found the time. Zhuo says she had practiced through NaNoWriMo, the November challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, which taught her to just get the words out and fix them later. She prefers a word-count goal to a time goal.

She used the same method for her book, dividing a 60,000 to 70,000 word draft over a year, which came to about 500 words five nights a week. Her advice to others is to find an angle that works for you, such as clarity of thinking or comfort with putting your voice out there, and to make the goal an action like a word count. Structures like 30-day challenges or Inktober make it easier, because anyone can commit to a limited stretch and then reflect.

Zhuo says she never planned to write a business book, having long dreamed of writing the great American novel. Publishers contacted her about her blog posts, but she doubted she had the stamina or the appetite for research. A publisher call about her advice for new managers changed her mind, because it reminded her that most management books she found as a new manager were written by long-time CEOs or consultants.

She felt little existed for someone with no MBA who was suddenly given four reports, and nobody had explained what a manager actually is. She also expected that writing the book would make her a better manager by forcing her to reflect on her frameworks. Asked whether people hold her to her book's standard, she tells reports she is still learning, because theory is easy to understand but hard to apply every day and to tailor to each person.

On Twitter, Zhuo explains that she set a second New Year's resolution: she tends to ramble and wanted to be crisper in the moment. She admires colleagues who can boil a complex topic down to a clear list of problems, so she committed to publishing a thread each week for a year, forcing herself to strip away ornamentation. It helped her enumerate ideas more naturally in her day job.

She advises against writing for likes, and Lenny agrees that attempts to go viral come across as lame, whereas sharing something genuinely interesting to you tends to work better. Zhuo adds that if you try to say what people want to hear it feels less genuine and less interesting, and that what really interests you is the thread to follow.

Zhuo's top advice for building product sense is observation and curiosity, starting with yourself. When you try a new app, reflect on your emotions and assumptions at each step: when it became clear what was going on, where you were confused, and what led you to try it in the first place. Then widen the circle by discussing products with others, asking why they downloaded something and what decisions the builders made.

She recommends reading deep dissections of products by writers such as Eugene Wei and Kevin Kwok, who look at apps like Figma or TikTok and the patterns behind successful ones. The next step is to validate, using qualitative reactions and quantitative data. She loves A/B tests for the causal learning they provide, and suggests asking product managers on other teams what their experiments taught them.

She rejects the idea that design and data are on opposite sides of the coin. Numbers will not tell you the leaps of faith needed to start something new, but they can validate assumptions about how people behave, and she knows brilliant product thinkers who got there through disciplined study of impact. Subjective observation and quantitative evidence support each other.

Lenny asks when a founder should trust their gut. Zhuo says that if you are your own target user, as the early Facebook team of students and dropouts was, your instincts are strong. As Facebook expanded across countries, the share of users like the team shrank, and she believes a string of big launch failures in 2008 or 2009 came from reaching the end of their intuition. Founders building for others, as she is with an analytics product, must spend lots of time with customers, and the larger the user base, the less any handful of people represents the whole.

On structuring product and design reviews, Zhuo says more feedback is better and no single meeting should be the place where decisions are made, since consensus among smart people is impossible. She suggests critiques with design peers, then the people closest to the product, then people outside the team who lack bias, and finally target customers through user research. These groups may contradict each other, but each brings a different perspective.

The key job is synthesis, anchored in a clear picture of the target audience and the most important problem, with the job to be done for that person. Feedback is then sorted into layers. First, is it valuable and solving the problem; second, is it easy to use, including speed; and only third is it joyful, covering colors, animation and delight. If the core value is missing, she says, the rest should be disregarded for now.

Lenny notes this is an ongoing process rather than one meeting, and Zhuo adds that each critique should open by stating where the team is and what feedback matters most at that phase. Early on a team may have only a brief and no high-fidelity mocks. A prototype meant to convey how something works can invite comments about a shade of blue when nobody has yet validated that it is the right thing to build.

Customers cannot easily separate feedback about value from feedback about ease of use, and Zhuo says that is fine. Collect everything, then do the synthesis and prioritization with the right stage in mind.

For colleagues giving feedback to a designer, Zhuo's most important advice is to identify the problem and make it clear. Because we are all solvers and builders, people say things like make the logo purple, which assumes the current design is insufficient without saying why. Jumping straight to a solution takes power away from the designer, who knows the problem best and has thought about it the longest.

She does not say never to suggest solutions, but advises giving examples and showing where you got stuck, so everyone aligns on the problem and can then compare solutions. Lenny jokes that product managers are very guilty of this, even though they dislike being handed solutions themselves. Zhuo agrees that everyone forgets it, because jumping in is fun.

For people struggling to become managers, her first step is to make sure your manager knows your aspirations, and to ask what skills you need to show. Then make a plan together. Many management skills, such as hiring, mentoring and improving process, can be practiced as an IC, for example by mentoring an intern, being an onboarding buddy or leading a process change, though you cannot practice firing without the role.

These small tasks also let you test whether you enjoy the work and let your manager see you succeed, so the path is not binary. She adds that sometimes the obstacle is that the company is not growing and no manager role exists, in which case moving to a different environment may be the way forward.

Asked how founders and PMs can hire designers amid a shortage, Zhuo says designers want to work with people who care about design, not people who toss over a spec. Demonstrating real commitment, rather than ticking a box, already puts you ahead of the pack. One way is to work with a good agency or a contractor on a polished website and a strong first version of the product, since candidates will look at your site and form judgments.

The second is to speak the values of design: being people-centric, having good taste, and understanding what a design organization is. If the tools and vocabulary are foreign, do the research by interviewing designers and following top designers on Twitter. Saying that design is someone else's thing will not make you stand out in a competitive field.

Asking someone to teach you about their discipline can build relationships that pay off over the long term, because people see you care and may later refer designers to you. Zhuo closes by saying she can be found on Twitter and LinkedIn, in her newsletter The Looking Glass, and through her book. Her company is Sundial, and she invites growth PMs and data-team members to talk with her about how their companies use data.