 How do you go from being an intern to the VP of product design at Facebook? In this video you're going to find out. Julie Zoo is the VP of product design at Facebook which is one of the highest design positions you can possibly ever hope to get to and certainly one of the highest design positions in Silicon Valley. In this episode of the Product Breakfast Club you're going to hear from Julie Zoo how she started as an intern at Facebook and worked her way up to this top position. Hope you like it and if you do enjoy this conversation there's lots more like it on the Product Breakfast Club podcast in all podcast apps. Let us know in the comments what you think and what I should ask Julie next time she's on the podcast. Have a great one. And today we have an amazing guest. We are about to welcome in a, I think I would be safe to say a product luminary. I'm not really totally sure what the word luminary means, how it's different from the word, yeah from the word star. It sounds better than star. It sounds older I think. Okay yeah well Julie we've broken the third wall down. Hey I heard that whole you know the whole singing that was great. I was like should I jump in? Should I start singing along? I mean we could actually do a rendition with you Julie if you want but at the end we'll give you the option at the end. So Julie Zoo is with us today. She is vice president of product design at Facebook and she's probably best known to everyone as an amazing writer on the subjects of management, leadership, building great products, product design, all those things which is a huge following online and rightfully so because her posts are amazing. They're the kind of thing that I go back to again and again and constantly sharing in my newsletters. They're just so insightful. Awesome stuff and the kinds of things that I wish I had been able to read earlier in my career. It's kind of stuff that's really hard to find. Julie joined Facebook as I believe an intern anyway. We'll get the whole story straight from Julie. She's also the author of a brand new book which will be coming out probably right around the time this episode drops. So pause the episode, order the book, write a couple of copies and then resume the episode. The book is called The Making of a Manager. It's by Julie Zoo and I've read it and it is fantastic. It's this really rare like tactical how to guide for how to be a manager and it doesn't matter if you're in design or not, it's going to tell you what it's like to learn how to be a manager on the job and all sort of the hard one lessons that Julie has gotten along the way. So we're going to get into that. We're going to talk about the kinds of lessons she's learned later on in the podcast. First of all, Julie just want to welcome you. So thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here. It's been so fun already. You know, we haven't even gotten started. Yeah, we already wasted about 15 minutes of Julie's time trying to Jonathan and I don't actually know how to record audio. What's a podcast? Why do people listen to this? We only have done like both of us and like a third person. You're only a third person, Julie. Yeah, Jason Fried was one and Kevin Rose was one. And whenever we do it, it's a situation where like it's a guest we're really excited about, not that we're not excited about other guests, but we're really, it's like, it has to be a big deal. And we have no experience doing it. And we're always like really nervous ahead of time. And Jonathan and I are calling each other in the morning and like kind of freaking out. And then we totally botched the audio. Anyway, but it seems like don't tell her, Jake. I know, I shouldn't have revealed No, I've honored really. I want, you know, you guys have such a great dynamic, you know, in this podcast and now I'm like this third wheel, you know, getting in there. So you can only improve the dynamic. Yeah. So enough about what a bad podcast this is. Let's talk about you, which is what people are really that's the reason they're gonna listen to this. So you've started at Facebook a while ago, like was it called the Facebook when you started or like it was kind of had to be in that close to that era? Well, the URL was the Facebook. I think we were probably getting quite close to being able to adjust the normal Facebook domain. But yeah, saving up. How many people were at the company at that time? Like a hundred or so? A hundred. Okay. So the actual story is this was my senior year at college and I was taking this class, this program that was about entrepreneurship. And it's this nine month course. It's really well set up. You know, you do spring, you read about like entrepreneurship. Then in the summer, you're supposed to find a internship with a startup, you know, so you can like really experience it firsthand. And then you go back in the fall and, you know, we do a lot more kind of debrief reflections, you know, more lessons. And so all of us were sort of set with the task to ask around and find a startup with which we could intern. And I would say that I cheated a little bit. I was really excited about the Facebook because we'd been using it on campus for a few years. Plus I had some good friends that have recently joined and they were just like, you got to come over. It's so fun. And so I sort of snuck this in. I was like, oh, you know, it's still startup. Yeah, it's still a hundred people. All my other classmates went to like six or seven person startups. I think they got the like more true lesson. But I think it was still very early stage as a company. And it definitely still had a lot of the startup atmosphere. Well, imagine where your career could have gone if you had done it right, Julie, if you hadn't cheated. So I mean, I had a hundred people. I've been inside enough startups to know that a hundred people is still really small. Like that's big. Obviously Facebook had traction at that point. But a hundred is tiny. What was it like building products in those early days? I mean, tell us about like what your job was and I don't know, just like what it looked like. Yeah. So I show up. Also funny story. I interview for this internship. I'm interviewing for a engineering position. You know, I studied computer science in college and like I've been preparing like all week, you know, I've been doing like all these whiteboard coding exercises because, you know, like you learn that like tech companies, that's what they interview. Exactly. And I walk into this interview and I meet with four people and no one asks me a single coding question. Not even one. Not even one. There's zero code written. Like there were brain teasers. There were like, you know, some sort of puzzles and sort of algorithm types of questions. There was no actual writing code, which I thought was really interesting. And then for years afterwards, I was like, oh my gosh, did I just also like, did they hire me as a mistake because somebody forgot to ask coding questions? Well, why do you think that was? I mean, looking back now, you know that, I mean, you must have been involved in hiring loads of people and seeing how decisions are made there. Do you think they just figured like, gosh, given the context of the referral where you were studying that they didn't need to worry about that part of it? Or what do you think? Yeah, it's possible. I mean, it was a very, very small company at the time. Like it wasn't like, you know, there were a really robust process for interviewing, right? I think a lot of people join, you know, because again, people knew each other. They were friends or classmates. In those cases, it's like, you know, the first number of people that join it, I think, you know, weren't being interviewed, like there wasn't even kind of a process around it. So I think this was still relatively new to the company. So I do get the offer and then I start as an intern and I show up and I get assigned a mentor, right? So someone's like, hey, this is going to be your buddy, your mentor. It was Ruchi Sambhi. She was Facebook's first female engineer. But then, you know, the first thing she says to me is like, okay, so what kind of engineering are you interested in? And I'm like, oh, like the front end, I really like, you know, I've been building websites for a long time. I really like getting into kind of like what users see. She's like, great, I'm gonna sit you over here with the designers because I'm trying to transition to be a product manager, but like, we don't really know what that is. We just know we really need one. So, you know, see you later. Like she puts me in the table with the designers and that's how it all happened. Wow. So you come in and not, no expectation of doing design until you've already started. Yes, because I didn't even know what design was at the time. I had been sort of designing and building web pages, you know, that was my hobby in middle school and high school. I didn't know it's called design. I didn't know that it was like a thing. I didn't know you could get a job doing it. When I went to college, you know, all I knew is like, oh, engineering, writing code, software, that is a job. That's a thing. So I learned that and I fully expected to be doing that as my job. And so it was only when I arrived at Facebook and, you know, I got to meet this table of designers where I was like, oh, they do that thing with Photoshop and, you know, like that I've been doing all these years. And, you know, they figured out like what the front end of the website should be. And then they do code it because at the time we were all working in web. And, you know, again, it's a startup. Like we didn't really have a very separate discipline, right? You know, everyone's sort of doing everything. And so all of the designers are also coding, you know, they're writing the front end PHP, they're writing the JavaScript, they're writing the CSS and they're designing, you know, how that all that is. And as you said, like your mentor, she goes on to become like the first product manager. So there's not even a product manager in the company at that point. So in addition to your designing and building the front end, in those early days, how did the your teams you're working with the company make decisions about what to build and what to launch? Yeah, and it was I think quite fluid. Again, at the time, imagine that Facebook is still for the most part a website for college students, you know, we had just opened up recently to high school students as well. But it was for an audience that we were extremely familiar with because most of us were recent college students or college dropouts or other folks, you know, from all of our friends were kind of in this target demographic. We built for ourselves, we would think, hey, you know, our friends and our dorm mates, this is a feature that would be cool for us or this is something that my friend told me like, hey, we were brainstorming and like, this is a really cool idea. And then we would just get excited and then we would build it. And then we put out there and we'd see what people said. And for the most part, they loved all of the new features, they love the new ideas. It's much easier to design for an audience that you know extremely well. So, oh, man, there's just like a million directions I want to go. This is the problem with being an unprofessional interviewer. I'm kind of tangent here. You see, okay, so over the years of Facebook, you go from being intern, who's like, I think I'm going to be doing engineering to like, well, it looks like I'm doing design. And then the time comes when you become like all of a sudden you this is fast forwarding a bit, I know, but it's like, hey, Julie, like you're now managing a team of people who were your colleagues, like now you're a manager. What was that like? And I'm also curious for like the context of how the complexity of even like what you guys were doing had changed because obviously Facebook's audience grew, like what did that look like? Like if we fast forward a few years to that moment, what's life look like for you? Yeah, so I would say that the answer is terrifying to become a manager because I was really excited about it. I was like, Oh my gosh, I felt like I had, you know, won the lottery. I was when my manager asked me if I wanted to become a manager, I was like, I'm so lucky. This is like the golden ticket to that, you know, amazing career. And this is like how it's going to be. And then, you know, eventually I'm going to be this like really great, confident leader. I was really excited about it. I felt very honored that she asked me, but I'll be honest, I really didn't know what the job entailed. Yeah, I didn't feel extremely prepared. And, you know, I knew that like as a manager, I had to be there for the team, right? And I had to, you know, establish good relationships with everyone on the team, which I had already, you know, I think that's partly the reason why my manager asked me. She was like, you really get along with everyone on the team. But just in terms of like, okay, I don't know that I had a very sophisticated understanding of what the job meant and what it meant to do amazingly as a manager versus like pretty good versus like, okay, like I don't think I had the level of sophistication, the kind of discern between those different levels. And to be honest, I was also just, I didn't know that like I had what it took. So I think I felt like an imposter for many years. It's funny. Someone recently asked me, you know, someone who's a new manager on my team, and we all know that being a new manager, being a new anything is a little uncomfortable, right? Because you're new at it and you're learning and everything is in those early days and years, a new experience. But this person asked me, you know, how long did it take until you felt comfortable? And my answer was three years until I think I stopped freaking out every day. And then probably seven years until I felt actually confident. Oh, wow. So now I mean, when you said cheekily on this, like, I imagined being this great confident leader when I became, you know, that's what a manager would be someday, or you'd be on the path of that. And I certainly from the outside, like, that is exactly what you are. I assume you're well respected inside Facebook, I don't know, but like, you're definitely well respected outside of Facebook. And like, you've just written a book about the stuff and I read it and I'm like, this is a person who knows their stuff that comes through in all your posts. But what does that feel like on the inside? Like, how are you there? Are you where you imagined? I'd say today, and you know, most days when I come into the office, like, I do think I feel like, okay, I do belong here. I do feel like I know what I'm doing. I do feel like I add value. So in those respects, like, yes, I've come a really long way from when I started. But you know, even now, and I think this is true for pretty much anyone at any level, right? There are still situations that come up that feel new, that I don't feel totally prepared for, that I feel like, oh shoot, I might bungle this or not do in the perfect way, but it's going to be a learning experience. I think the key thing that's different through kind of going through this process is I feel a lot more comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense, actually. I have a very different approach. If something comes up and it's new, I've never done it before, it's like, oh, you know, I might mess up. I don't feel kind of the raw like nerves, because, you know, I've sort of developed tools and I've developed like a new framework where now I actually approached it as like, okay, yes, I know it might be hard, I might mess up, that's okay. It's totally fine. Like it's actually extremely natural to not have things go perfectly the first time you do something or when you're learning something new, but I'm going to really appreciate this as a learning experience. And I know that if I fast forward a year or two, having gone through this, I'm going to emerge more confident. I'm going to emerge like with more knowledge. And so I think that's actually probably the biggest transformation is I don't think it scares me as much to do things that I've never done before. That's, I think, such a valuable way of looking at what we get from failure. This is a topic we've discussed before on this show and something that like, I always have a mixed feeling about when people celebrate failure, because to me, failure feels horrible. And like, when people say like, oh, yeah, it's so great that we fail at that thing. And it's like, gosh, was it? It sucks. I hate the way it feels to fail. But I suppose what happens is you start to get a sense of the pain that comes from the failure. It teaches you something, but also it's something you can endure and live through. And the reward of taking the chance or of being the person who gives the advice or whatever is worth it. I suppose it's almost like, the first time you use a saucepan on the stove or you're frying an egg or something, and you burn yourself the first time. It's like, oh, my God, I can burn my hand off. And then you just like burning yourself, is it? Yeah, where are you going with this, dude? No, it's like, you know, like, if I'm cooking, well, I'm terrible cook, but like, I'm not like afraid to use the pan, because I know like, if I do burn myself, it hurts. But it's like, I kind of know where not to put my hand. And I know that even if I burn myself a little bit, like, I'm going to be able to move my hand away in time, it's going to be okay. I'm comfortable with the fear of the burning. This is a terrible one I've ever heard. That's literally the worst one I've ever heard in my entire life, Jake. Okay, let's get me, I'm sorry, can we restart this book? I'm also a terrible cook, and I actually really don't enjoy cooking. So I can't be relate because I'm just like, get me away from, you know, anything related to the kitchen. Yeah, I recently, my wife is a great cook, and he really enjoys cooking. And she's the one who cooks in our home. But I really occasionally feel like I should do more of that work, because it's a lot of work to do it. And so I gave her like a little card for Christmas this year. And I said, you know, once a week, I'm going to Flynn, who's my younger son, he's eight years old, he and I are going to cook dinner once a week this year. And so far we've done it once. It's February. That is a really cute gift. That is like an amazing Christmas present. It's amazing if we had followed through. And the thing that I made was not toast, I made fancy toast. I was like, I know what I'm going to do because, you know, I really am aware of my limitations. So there's a lot of, in San Francisco, like fancy toast. Yeah. I mean, look, fancy toast is highly valued. That's why it's such a premium price. Do you actually, Julie, do you have a favorite toast? Do I have a favorite toast? I like jelly and I like butter on the toast. I'm pretty simple. Do you, is there a place that you like in San Francisco or in the Bay Area for toast? Do you have a go-to toast? I think the only place that I've had really amazing toast is the mill in San Francisco. I really like their toast. That was actually our inspiration point because it's right by my son's school. So we would sometimes get toast there. Anyway, we made some toast. I got to move on. I'm destroying this interview. I like the toast convo because today was the first time that I had what you guys would probably consider to be toast in Berlin because like a kind of hipster San Francisco style cafe opened in Berlin. And I had toast and I was pretty surprised that it was a piece of bread that was toasted with some melted cheese on it. What are they doing with the bread normally? They're not toasting it. We just wouldn't consider that. We just wouldn't consider that to be like something you'd buy and eat. It's just like something you'd make at home when you don't have anything else. It would never be served anywhere in a reputable institution. Yeah. I got it with cutlery and everything and it was like some fancy splashes of brown stuff on it. And I was like, it was like $6. This is just a piece of bread, my man. Yeah, that's what's so great about it. Well, speaking of products kind of coming out of nowhere, things that didn't exist that become really valuable. So, Julie, so you saw Facebook go from this thing. It's like a thing for schools and it becomes this just like, I imagine the process by now like, how big is your team now? Or what does your team look like? What's it composed of? What kind of people are you managing? Yeah, so I managed the design team, the product design team, and we're responsible for the design of the Facebook service, the consumer Facebook service. So most of the things that you would interact with and feel as part of how you know Facebook to work, that's the stuff that my team works on. And what is Facebook? We're in the hundreds of people now. I don't think I can give you an exact number because I don't think I'm allowed to give you an exact number. But we're in the hundreds. Okay, hundreds. And hundreds is that's a lot of people for you to manage. But I know compared to some other tech companies, hundreds might even be on the small side, given what a large service Facebook is. Are you managing people who have a lot of different kinds of expertise? Or are they all sort of product designer generalists? Like what's the makeup of that team? Yeah, so we have product designer generalists. But I actually think product designer design in general is even saying you're a generalist, like there's so many facets to product design. And so I think, you know, lots of people come in with things that they're really, really great at, like we have people who are really great at the visual aspects, interaction, systems design, architecture, some people who are just great at being able to kind of frame and do a lot of the early stage conceptual work versus people who are really great at like sort of detailed thorough, like, we're going to understand, you know, and do a lot of research on like how these markets and these people are and we're going to go and make like tons of little tweaks and then we're going to make the experience better. So, you know, a wide range of I think different specialties, interests, skills, strengths across that team. We also have a small team of design program managers or producers. We also are building an art team and folks who are have a lot of expertise in the brand illustration and art side. Okay, one thing you said that made my ears perk up was the idea that you there are some people who are better at sort of the beginning like conceptual phase of things. And I've always taken it as sort of a given in the world of building products and design that when people, a lot of people say like, gosh, I really like doing that beginning part like the concepting part. But when it gets into like the details or like the final design, then like that's not my thing so much. And I always thought like, gosh, there's not really a place for that. Like in order to do the early stage concept, you really need to know how to make the thing real in the end or the concept is going to be probably of lower quality or it's going to be harder to connect up. That's always been like my bias. But that sounds like that's not the case for your team. How does that work? How do you have people who are doing just that part? It's really important for us that, you know, when no one is like in a box, right? So it's not like, okay, you're going to do this thing and you're going to keep doing that little narrow slice of the product development process forever. I don't think that that is the best thing for both what people want to do. And like, you know, I think get the best work by trying to constrain, you know, the problem set in a really narrow or limited way for someone. I really do think that people do their best work when they feel full ownership over a product, right? And when they feel like at any stage, you know, they have a great idea or they have a suggestion for how something can be better. It's because they care. It's because they care about the final thing. And, you know, they should be able to contribute at all manners. But we, again, as people, there are things that we naturally gravitate to, right? And that really feeds our interests and our strengths. And so, you know, over time, you know, there might be areas that I just personally like to work on more than others. And I think that is actually different for many different people. I think that, you know, creativity can be found in basically any part of that, right? I think having a bunch of constraints and then knowing, you know, how to take that and build something that is the best for the maximal number of people, like that requires a lot of creativity. I think some people would say that and be like, oh, that you can't be creative unless you have a blank canvas. But I actually disagree. I think you can be creative in a lot of different contexts. And I think the problem space is a little bit different. And the things that you need to really think about or your approach to the problem needs to be quite different. If you're sort of looking at, let's say, a mature product and figuring out what the next iteration of that is versus if, again, you're looking at a very blank slate, we have nothing yet. And so let's figure out what even the first version looks like. You do need to kind of use different muscles or kinds of ways of thinking to approach those problems. So taking that idea of like a mature product and trying to figure out what comes next for it. So you're running the product design team. That's actually like a huge responsibility for this product that you saw start off from this thing and just like take off and become just billions of users. Like it's so ubiquitous that, you know, a lot of us probably don't even think of it as being a product. Someone like actually thought about how to build and made all these tiny decisions about. So Facebook does stuff. It's in the news and like Jonathan and I will talk about it. And I'll be like, oh, I can't believe this happened or that or like, and it's hard when you have a thing that's used by so many people and use so much of the time. So we're not going to get into like controversial questions with you about it. But I am curious, as you're leading this team, it feels almost like I imagine like there's just like this booster rocket that's just been like blasting and like this thing is just taking off like crazy. And I imagine you almost have to like figure out like, how do we like steer this thing that's just going like hundreds of thousands of miles an hour? How do you steer the product so that it matches like your values or the values you feel are appropriate for the company? Because product design, that's where the rubber meets the road. That's where it all sort of happens. And as this thing is taking off so fast and so many things are happening, like I'm just curious what guides you and how that stuff works its way into the day to day process. You know, I think if you're designing and I think to me this is the big difference between like design versus art, right? I think art is a lot more about personal expression. It's a lot more about kind of, connecting with humans over these common threads and it's quite personal. I think design, you have to sort of start with like understanding what's my audience or what's my target audience and like what am I trying to do, right? There has to kind of be like a very clear like, what is the outcome that we're looking at? And so for that, and for us, I think it's always about kind of looking back at like, okay, your company, like what it was it founded on, what is the mission, right? What is it trying to do for people? Our mission at Facebook has always been about connecting and empowering the individual and connecting people all over the world, giving them a voice and enabling them to create community with others. And it's sort of a very people-centric approach. And so with that, we look a lot at trying to really understand what it is that people value when it comes to those things. And I think these things are quite complicated. I think if we were to just talk about like, okay, as humans, what do we value when it comes to connection? What do we value when it comes to communication or community? And these are like very, very nuanced topics, right? And they're quite complex because I think humans and our social relationships as a species is extremely complex. Oh, yeah, you know, I, sorry, I'm going to interrupt you with an annoying interruption, but have you read Super Intelligence or are you into any of that like AI stuff? There's this whole thing about like, you know, when Jonathan and I also will sometimes talk about this nerdily, but if artificial intelligence becomes more intelligent than humans, like how do you sort of try to steer it or hopefully like align it with our values? And one of the things is like, we don't necessarily know what our values are. How do you describe them? Yes, I think that is also the thing that like I've learned a lot about, you know, as we've scaled the company, right? I think that's actually for years and years, I felt like I was just learning the same lesson. The lesson is like, don't assume that everyone in the world is like you. But like I said, when we started, we were designing for people just like us, you know, we're designing for college students in these Western markets that we understood. And I'm not saying like every college student is same, but I'm just saying like it's a much easier to kind of know what the zeitgeist is of like that particular crowd, right? And as we've then, you know, expanded demographically, so you know, went to college students to high school students. And you know, there's some similarities, but they're also different, you know, high school students, college students, some differences. And then you get into, you know, early professionals, and then you get into kind of people who, you know, have families or later stages in the professional working world. And then you open it up to kind of not just the US and the UK, which were the earliest markets, but kind of to markets all over the world. And over and over again, as a designer, the most humbling thing was realizing that like your intuition, which served us so well for years, you know, it's like we would just like come out with these products and, you know, we'd always nail it because it's like, yeah, we knew what the audience wanted. And one day it just stopped working. Like one day we were like, Oh, we think, you know, we all would like this thing. And then you'd like put it out there and the market's like, you know, not really. And it's because at that point, you know, the majority of the people who are on the service were no longer extremely similar to us. And it's quite humbling to know that, you know, no matter how well you think you can intuit, like you actually really cannot intuit what a person who is living half a world away in a small village, you know, with a completely different set of wants, desires, like, you know, perceptions on the world and you cannot intuit what they want. Yeah. Yeah, you're talking about Jonathan, I think. Yeah, I think that's exactly. Oh, I might use that as a little cue to jump in and ask a few rapid fire questions. Wait, let me do one more. Let me do one more. Damn it. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. Okay. The one other thing I wanted to talk to you about, Julie, was just how you got started writing. And if people want to search for year of the looking glass, that's your medium publication. And it's awesome stuff. So just like read a few of the recent topics you've written about how to be strategic design for people use people language. This is a post I love. I'm not going to rattle on it, but I love that post so much good pressure and bad pressure many ways to learn. There are things that are like really just about even just about like working advice, like general advice. What inspired you to make that a part of your life and your work? It's a pretty interesting story because actually at the time, I had actually set these goals. Like I'd been wanting to blog more part of the reason why I wanted to blog more was because I had this kind of like debilitating fear of putting my opinion out there. This was true actually at work and big meetings. I like was that person who would really think if I wanted to put this opinion out in front of so many people because, oh my gosh, what if like it's wrong? Okay, that is just like fascinating because to read your writing like it's not like it's aggressive or anything, but it's very like nonchalantly like confident. So you started from thinking like I want to practice that. Yes. And it was really, really hard for me because like even just like getting comfortable enough hitting the publish button was really hard. In fact, prior to me starting the year of the lucky glass, I had tried and fits and starts to try the blog thing before and I wrote some posts and I literally could not tell people that I was writing it. I was like too embarrassed or nervous about it. So there was like these posts in the ether that like no one's ever seen because I just like couldn't bear to like share the link. God, you know, honestly it's so helpful to hear that because I certainly feel that way whenever I write a blog post, I have that fear of like hitting the publish button. I have some posts I just have never hit it on. Like it's super scary, but it's always my assumption that like that's just me. Like I'm just being neurotic. One thing I love so much about your book is that it exposes some of that like, Hey, like this stuff is kind of what happens. Okay, Jonathan, I'm going to stop talking. I'm going to let you ask some questions. Yeah, well, I actually wanted to say one thing about the blog. Actually, it's really good to push off Jonathan as much as possible. So please, please, please, please. Don't worry about the producer. I'm clicking buttons here. But the other thing that I like so I started that year, the year that I started the year of the looking glass. The reason it was called the year of the looking glasses, the goal that I had for that year is just my New Year's resolution was I am going to hit the publish button once a week. That's it. That's the goal. I could hit the publish button on literally anything like it could be a poem. It could be like, you know, here's just like some random bots, but I just had to actually get comfortable and it's the practice of getting comfortable. And of course, you know, the thing that I had to overcome is this like perfectionism complex, right? Because I would say that I just had to hit it and then no, you didn't have to be any good. But of course I would be like, oh, I can't, you know, I like clearly I want it to be like pretty good. And so I think in those first, I would say like 10, 20 articles, I spent like so long on each one, like you would not believe, you know, like it's not a very long thing. And it would be like a 20 hour endeavor for the course of that doesn't surprise me. I spent like all Saturday, Sunday, you know, evenings, but I like I was really dedicated to my goal. I really wanted to not fail at it. And I think I succeeded for that year. I actually did hit the publish button. There were some weeks where I was like, I had no time. Here was like an old thing. I wrote in college. I'm just going to hit the publish button on it. But for the most part, I was able to get like, you know, you do it again, there's 52 weeks in the year, right? And you know, again, you write like 40 things that are new. And then, you know, you borrow some old material for the other 12 because you were busy those weeks. You practice just literally writing 40 things every week. By the end of the year, I was so much more comfortable with it. You know, the ability to then write a thing or put it out there without spending 20 hours on it, like that became much easier. And I was like kind of amazed at how, you know, just like practicing that for a year really made a pretty big difference. And it allowed me, you know, even at work and in other contexts to feel more comfortable putting my opinion out there. So, you know, that was one of the rationale I had to start it. And it actually, it worked. It was extremely effective. I got so much out of that practice that I just continued. I now think more linearly, you know, I think it's maybe weird to say that, but like, it used to take me a really long time to just like map out what was in my head and put it into an article. But through the course and the practice of writing for at this point, you know, four or five years, my mind is now trained to kind of think in terms of like a more structured and linear approach. And so I think like an article and, you know, that and that's actually made me more effective at explaining things in meetings or framing problems, because I've just trained my mind to kind of think in that way. So it has been extremely rewarding for me personally. And that is also why I continue to do it. God, if you haven't written that up, like as opposed about how it went from that experiment to like what it did for you at work and what it did for your thinking and what it did for like setting you up to write the book. That is an amazing post. It's so inspiring to think about starting from that point. It's like you were doing it actually to build confidence at work and it, God, that's super cool. Jonathan, we should watch Jonathan talk. We do have seven minutes left. So I'm going to pick and choose these quick fire questions in not necessarily like a really nice clean order. Conversationally, I'm just going to blast them at you if that's okay. Julie, do you need to run at 10? Let me check. All right, give me just a sec. Keep this in, Jason, please. Yeah, this is good stuff. I do need to run at 10. Okay, no worries. Okay, so now you only have six minutes. Yeah, I was planning on it being fast, so don't worry. Okay, so like for me, the title VP of product design at Facebook, it's just so crazy, so impressive. But what do you do? Yeah, what do I do? That's a great question. So I spent 50% on my time thinking about the organization and the health of the organization. And so that involves recruiting, that involves like one-on-ones with my managers or meetings with folks on the team that involves like a lot of the operational logistics like headcount planning or just, you know, hey, here's a new program we want to introduce into our team that's going to maybe help individual contributors develop these skills. So, you know, a lot of just thinking about like, what does the team need to be successful, to be productive, to be happy, you know, to continue to support our growth and continue to do good work. So that's about 50%. The other 50% of the time I'm thinking and focusing on kind of our products. So that involves sort of thinking about like things like, well, what's our strategy or like, what does success look like for this product or even just reviewing design work? Like, here's what we think this should go in the future. Like, let's all talk about like, what our goals and like what's actually, and getting down occasionally to kind of looking at pixels and specific critiques. But that's actually, I think, a much smaller fraction of my time. I think it's a lot more about it is just like trying to make sure we are aligned on what success looks and feels like. Okay. And so if we're talking about like, you mentioned strategy and you're talking about like, what does success look like? Where do sort of like the new initiatives come from? Like when new products or new product ideas are coming up, do they sort of come from the top? Do they come from the teams? Or is there like a company? Okay, we need to grow this specific metric. And so your team has to figure out what the product will be. How do new things happen? Yeah. So many things actually come about usually in a very organic bottoms up way. And you know, occasionally they come tops down too. But I think the key thing is that if we are all aligned on what again, wild success looks like and what a great idea is, and here are the dimensions and here's why, because it's going to be able to do X, Y and Z. Those are the kinds of things that I tend to spend a little bit more of my time thinking about, because I find that like, especially across like a lot of different people, making sure that what you think success looks like and what, you know, if I'm saying, hey, Jonathan, go and develop some amazing new concept for me, if your idea of what amazing is in mine are different, then it's going to be like a lot of issues down the line, right? You're going to come back and you'll be like, I love this thing. And I'll be like, I don't think this is what we should do. And you'd be like, why it's amazing. And you know, we haven't aligned on the core thing, which is like, what is amazing? Like, what's our criteria of success? Well, that would never happen with me, Julie, but actually what I'd be interested to know is, are these codified? Are these written down? Are they principles? How do you avoid those scenarios? Yeah. And so this is sort of where we go into kind of like, okay, so obviously we have a commission, right? We've developed that, you know, that's something that we really think about. But then we have to develop, okay, what is the Facebook kind of take on that mission? Like, what's Facebook's like contributions? What are our strengths that we have today already? Because you know, again, we're not a new product. So it's like, what are the things that people already find value out of that we can provide more value? And what are adjacent areas where, you know, because we do these things well and people kind of find value, we might be able to extend to, you know, building new services or new ways for people to do things that they similarly would find valuable. So we have to kind of define, like, okay, what's our Facebook level strategy? And then, you know, when that framework can be very clear, then people can propose, you know, oh, hey, here's like an idea that I think that fits in really well into this like understanding. And this is like, how it's going to contribute to that strategy that we've laid out for what we think our app can do and the ways that we want to be valuable for people, right? And we've been very, very lucky in this journey that, you know, like, we have a lot of resources that are as full as we have like really talented people. And, you know, we're in a good place with like being able to spend money or invest in various initiatives. But sometimes like, if you could do anything, there's a question of like, well, how do you choose what to do? And like, we have to be quite disciplined about it. And we have to kind of be principled and we have to kind of create this mapping that stems from, again, our core mission. But that makes it so that an organization of like thousands or 10 thousands of people can feel like they're in sync or that they have room to be creative, be innovative, come up with new ideas. But those ideas don't feel random, like there's some method right to that. If we had more than one minute left, I would love to dig into almost even like the documentation of how that stuff works. But I'm very, very conscious of your time. So maybe we just finish up with where can people find you online? Yes. So my website is JulieZu.com. My last name is very easily misspelled. It is Z-H-U-O. So JulieZ-H-U-O.com. That's where I share some of my, you know, writing. I've got a mailing list where I do a lot of Q&As every few weeks. It's a great mailing list. And then my blog, the Year of the Looking Glass, it's hosted on Medium. And usually, it's like things that I'm grappling with at work. It's like the stuff that I'm thinking a lot about and I'm trying to make a little bit more sense of those are the types of topics I tend to write about. And then of course, my book is coming out. It's coming out March 19th. I'm really, really excited about it. It really is the book that I wish I had, like if I could go back at time, like give this to myself at 25. And I'll be doing a bunch of events and talks and other things to support it in the upcoming weeks. Seriously, if you were listening by that book, listen to some of the reviews for the book, some of the blurbs. She's got Ev Williams, CEO of Medium. He was the founder of Twitter. He's excited. This is from now on, I'm going to hand this book to people thrust into high-growth companies with little guidance. She's got a quote from Mike Krieger, one of the founders of Instagram. Quote from Daniel Pink, super famous author, Stewart Butterfield, CEO, founder of Slack, Logan Green, CEO, founder of Lyft. I really can't believe the people you know. It's just amazing, but this is a book that is going to be a Bible for anyone who either is a manager or has a manager at work, which is almost everyone. So can't wait to read it. Get it. Get it. Julie, thank you. So let's sing it out, everybody. Product. Product. Just make up your own tune, Julie. Product. Just what? Product. Product.rock. Product. Thanks so much Julie. Thanks Julie. Thank you so much. This was so fun. It was great. It was great. I hope we can get you back some other time to ask some of the questions. Yeah, other deep heart. No. I'd love to, I mean, it's super fun. It was actually the funnest podcast I've ever been on. Oh, good. Yes. Yes. Keep that in, Jason. Keep that in, Jason. That's why we're not sponsored by Squarespace. It's the only reason. Have a great one, Julie. Yeah, thank you. I got to run to an interview, but thank you so much. Whoa! And we're back in Berlin. Hey, everybody. Thanks a lot for watching that video or audio or whatever you call it. If you liked it, definitely check out the Product Breakfast Club podcast. It's every Monday on every podcast app on Spotify, wherever you want. Just search Product Breakfast Club. We're also posting on Instagram every day. We're showing you inside the agency what it's like to work at a design agency, all that kind of stuff. Do give this video a like and a comment if you enjoyed it. It helps us get up in the rankings. We do actually really appreciate that. Thanks for your time. Have a great day.