Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Julie Zhuo on accelerating your career, impostor syndrome, writing, building product sense, using intuition vs. data, hiring designers, and moving into management

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

Julie Zhuo is the co-founder of Sundial, a company that helps builders make meaningful use of data to fulfill their mission. With over 400K followers across social media, she is one of the most influential leaders in product design, and product thinking broadly.Julie started her career at Facebook as a product designer and eventually led teams of 100+ designers as the VP of Design. Her experience leading at Facebook motivated her to publish the Wall Street Journal best seller The Making of a Manager in 2019. On the side, Julie shared her thoughts on technology, design, and leadership in The Looking Glass, the blog that inspired Lenny’s Newsletter.—Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/episode-2-julie-zhuo—In this episode, you will learn about:1) The making of a VP* How did Julie find her way to product design? * How did she navigate through impostor syndrome given the growing responsibilities as Facebook rapidly scaled? * What are the challenges she faces as she transitions from VP to founder? 2) The impact and habit of writing* What goals was Julie able to achieve through writing?* What did she do to build a habit of writing?* Does she think tweeting is better than blogging?3) How to develop product sense and make better design decisions* What are the three tried-and-true steps to develop product sense?* When do you choose intuition over data?* What’s the secret to facilitating great product/design review meetings?3) How to take your first steps into management* What can you do to unblock your path to become a manager?* What’s the must-know trick in competing for design talent?Where to find Julie:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-zhuo/* Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/joulee* Sundial: sundial.so* Book: The Making of a Manager, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079WNPRL2/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1* Substack: https://lg.substack.com/* Medium: https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glassOur amazing sponsors:* Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/* Productboard: https://www.productboard.com/* Sprig: https://sprig.com/lenny This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Welcome to our very first episode with Julie Zhu. Julie spent 13 years at Facebook where she was the head of design for the Facebook app. She actually joined as an IC designer and worked her way up to VP of Design. She's also an incredible writer, having written the best-selling book, The Making of a Manager. She's also the author of a newsletter called Looking Glass, which was a huge inspiration to me throughout my entire career. Since leading meta, she started her own company called Sundial, which you'll hear a bit of about and in our chat we cover career advice, imposter syndrome, product review meetings, hiring designers, giving feedback to designers, and so much more. I hope you enjoy this chat as much

as I did. This episode is brought to you by Amplitude, the number one product analytics solution. Amplitude helps product teams, growth teams, marketing and data teams, build winning products faster and turn products into revenue. Amplitude has everything you need including an integrated CDP, self-service analytics, and even an experimentation platform to help you better understand your users, drive conversions, and increase engagement, growth, and revenue. Amplitude is built for teams that want to learn as fast as they ship and ship as fast as they learn. Ditch your vanity metrics, trust your data, work smarter, and grow your business. With over 1,700 customers like Atlassian, Instacart, and HBO, Amplitude is helped

helping companies build better products. Try Amplitude for free. Visit Amplitude.com to get started. This episode is brought to you by Product Board. Product Leaders trust Product Board to help their teams build products that matter. From startups to industry titans, over 6,000 companies rely on Product Board

to get the right products to market faster, including companies like Zoom, Volkswagen, UiPath, and Vanguard. Product Board can help you create scalable, transparent, and standardized process so your PMs understand what their customers really need and then prioritize the right features to build next. Stakeholders feel the left, too, with an easy-to-view roadmap that automatically updates so everyone knows what you're building and why. Make data-driven product decisions that result in higher revenue and user adoption and empower

your product teams to create delightful customer experiences. Visit product board.com to learn more. Julie, I am so excited to be chatting. You've been such an inspiration to me, both in my PM career and in my writing. I think I mentioned that your newsletter inspired my newsletter. And so I'm really excited to be chatting and I'm really thankful that you're joining me on this podcast. Thank you, Letty. It is a pleasure to be here. I think it's going to be a super fun conversation. The most fun. For listeners who maybe aren't familiar with you in your career, could you just kind of briefly walk us through your journey in design and then a little bit about what you're up to these days? Let's see. I'm a first generation immigrant to the United States,

and so with Asian parents, there were really only three options that I had for a career. From like the time I was six years old, I was told I could either be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. Nothing else was really in the realm of possibilities. Unfortunately, you know, I was really scared of blood, so I couldn't be a doctor. And I only liked reading fiction growing up, so it could never really be a lawyer. So I was always like, okay, this engineering thing. But actually it was during middle school and high school that I discovered what I love to do is drawing. And in particular, digital art. And the reason for that is because I actually have very shaky hands.

And so whenever I draw a line, it never looks good. I have to erase it, start over. And so by the time the art was done, it was like a mess. It was like, here's like 20,000 erase remarks. But when I discovered MS paint, and I kid you not, that was my very first design application. I was like, oh, my gosh, I can draw a line. and even if it looks crummy, which it always does because you have to use a mouse in those early days,

I can just control Z, go Z, go Z way, and just keep trying over and over again. No one ever has to know how often I tried to get this to be what I wanted. And so MSPaint became Paint Shop Pro, and then one summer, you know, I finangled my way into a pirated copy of Photoshop because, you know, I couldn't actually afford real Photoshop, and I was off to the races in my digital art career.

And it was actually through digital art that I realized, okay, I've actually amassed all this collection of art. What should I do? And I was like, well, let me go and actually build a website. You know, it's all of these artists that I admire on the internet did that. Like, so I'm going to learn how to write HTML and put together a website. And that's essentially what I did on the side in my middle and high school years. So that's kind of how I got into like design. But I didn't know was design because I really still thought of myself as an artist and I thought that the only thing I could be was an engineer. But I went in and studied computer science in college, right? I has had this vision, okay, if I like building websites, maybe, you know, computer engineering is the closest thing to that. And I had this idea that maybe I could go work for one of these big tech companies. And it was really after I took a class my senior year that taught me, you know, what is Silicon Valley? What is entrepreneurship? By the way, here's like all these stories of two people in a garage and then they went and built something big. And I totally just was so into that. I was like, all right, I do not want to work for a big company. I want to figure out if I can

do this startup thing and make something small into something big. And I just happened to be very lucky at the time. There was a startup down the street from my university. It's a product I had been using for two or three years. It was Facebook. It was still a high school and college social networking product at the time, eight million users. They were doing a lot of recruitment at Stanford.

And so that's how I decided to go and join for an internship. And on my first day, I remember my mentor, Rucci, she said, you know, what kind of engineering do you like to do? And I was like, the stuff that people see, of course, you know, the stuff that I'd always done, right? And she was, oh, I see, you should go sit next to the designers. And that was the first time I heard that design was a profession, that it was actually a job. It was like a thing that people did. And back in those days, you know, all of the design team was technical. So we were both the front end engineers as well as the designers. But I felt like I'd found my tribe, but I had found people who kind of had always been

passionate about this thing that I did that I didn't really realize was a job. And so I realized, though, as well, that I had a lot to learn about design. I was never really formally trained in it, right? I'd only ever designed for myself, for me to express my creative, artistic side. So there was a lot in those first three years. I would think of my time at Facebook as chapter one, learn how to be a designer. You know, learn about usability, learn about the actual language, nomenclature of design, you know, learn how to think about the user as somebody separate than just me and my own work. Then because Facebook was always scaling, I got the opportunity to eventually manage a team of designers. Totally I'm prepared for that. No idea what I was doing. Kind of jumped in and just,

you know, started to manage. But there was a huge amount of learning around, you know, recruiting process. Like, what even is good design? What is the way that we want to design at this company and our team? And so tons of learnings there. And then I think the third chapter is just is sort of thinking about scale, right? Learning how to scale and management, learning how to build a wide diversity of products, learning more about strategy and how design fits into working with all of these other disciplines to build something great. So that's kind of how I think about my time at Facebook and the various chapters. And the latest chapter is, you know, I eventually left Facebook about two years ago.

And now I am a startup founder. So it's something that I've always wanted to do. so go back to the early phases of figuring out how to build something from zero to one. And I'm working on a product in product analytics. I'm really passionate about the idea of making data accessible. I've seen the power firsthand from working at Facebook of what data can do to help us make better products, especially for people at scale, to help us reduce the bias in our intuitions and how we think about what is the way that we should prioritize.

And I'm really passionate about the idea of making that. such that every single company, every single business in the world, can properly use data, know how to interpret it correctly, know how to use it to influence roadmap strategy and prioritization decisions and make better decisions as a result. I feel like this idea that you're working on has such intense founder market fit, and I can't wait to hear more about it when you're ready to get and go deeper and for people to use it. But going back to your time at Facebook, you kind of like made it sound like you just kind of like, I joined as a designer, figured out design, became a manager, and then, like, somehow

he became VP of design. And it sounded too easy. That's like an insane trajectory for someone to follow. Do you have any thoughts or advice on what contributed to your success rising through the rings that quickly for folks that are kind of just early in their career, maybe? Absolutely. And I want to make it really clear. I would say that, like, the first seven or eight years that I was at Facebook, every single week, I felt like an imposter. I had no idea really what I was doing. You know, the constant refrain in my head is like, well, do you really deserve to be here? Do you really know what's happening? You know, you're not really prepared for this job. You've never done this before. Like, what right do you have to be put in this situation and get to do what you do?

Right. And that was really the constant refrain in my head. But looking back, you know, I think it probably took me about, yeah, seven or eight years until I became a little bit more comfortable with that. You know, after seven or eight years, I could look back. I could see all of the, you know, the things that I got to work on. I could see all the ways that I had grown and learned in that experience. And something clicked for me where I realized, you know, it's kind of two sides of the same coin, right? Being in an uncomfortable situation, being in a position where you feel like, hey, you know, do I really know how to do this? I'm not prepared for it is kind of coin sides with the fastest and most intense periods of growth, you know, in one's career. And I started to realize,

well, maybe it's not so much of a bad thing, right? Maybe if I'm constantly putting myself in a situation where I haven't seen this problem before, that's also what's going to push me to grow and learn, right? And so, yes, you last first specific advice. I think there's two things. The first is, well, I was lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. I was at a company that was scaling. And when you're at a company that grows, there's always a lot more opportunity to then be able to try something new, right? To raise your hand, to volunteer for things, to be just, thrown into because somebody has to do it because it's a growing company and there aren't a lot of other people. So the first piece of advice that would have would be like, if you want those types

of opportunities, sometimes you just have to be at a smaller place and you have to be at a place that is going through that rate of growth. The second thing is embrace the fact that it's okay to be in a position where maybe you don't know what to do. You haven't been trained for it, right? It does coincide with that intense learning, maybe approach it with that sense of curiosity. and that sense of, you know, yes, it's hard. Yes, I might be an imposter and I might feel that way for a while. But this is also what's going to help me get there. It's going to be what forces me to do the work and in that process, learn and become better. It's amazing to hear that you had imposter syndrome for such a long period of time. And you basically ran design for like the Facebook app, right? Yeah.

It's kind of an empowering, inspiring, inspiring insight that someone at your level went through that for so long. and made it through that. Do you have any other advice or thoughts for folks that are going through that? Because I had that to you for a number of years just like, what the hell am I doing here? People are going to see, I don't really know what I'm doing, and it's all going to crumble as soon as I make my next mistake. Do you have any other advice there for folks going through that themselves? No, just exactly what you said, Lenny, right? I think so much of it that helped me was realizing that everyone feels this way to some extent. And that's also why I always want to talk about that, right? Because I feel like sometimes you can see from the outside, You're like, oh, this person has this title, they have this position, they have these responsibilities.

Clearly, they've made it. They know what they're doing. But that's never the case. And I mean, logically, let's think about it, right? If you're going to do anything new for the first time, how are you ever going to feel totally comfortable, you know, totally prepared, right? Every time there's something new that you hadn't encountered before, you know, it's always going to be a little bit rough. You're never going to feel like perfectly at ease. It's only upon doing something multiple times that you start to see the patterns, you start to realize, okay, it's going to be all right. And even now, the people that I talk to, the people I really look up to, the people who I think are role models and mentors for me, I mean, they regularly also share with me that

it's the same. It's like, you know, they still encounter things that are unprecedented, right? And if we work in tech, I mean, the rate of change, the rate of, you know, the industry and companies and kind of these new experiences that we have, that never goes up. way, right? That's just part for the course. And so I think that feeling always exists. I think that what I have learned is that there are better, you know, tools in your toolkit for dealing with it. One of them is, of course, me just reminding myself that if I feel uncomfortable, it's okay. Other people feel that way too. Everyone does. It's totally natural. But then to also find other pieces in that toolkit, right? One is, I am much better at asking for help now than I was

earlier in my career. You know, I used to actually just try and hold it all in. I was like, hey, I better make it until I make it. You know, if everyone thinks that maybe I'm coming to a table like I know it, then I can fool them. And now I realize I was preventing myself from being able to get that support and that empathy and that camaraderie and that advice that would have helped me actually grow faster and maybe with a little bit less pain in the process. And so one of the things I learned is it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to reach out to people who both may be going through the same things you're going or maybe are a step or two ahead of you in the journey, right, who have actually gone through that and have lived to tell the tale and can tell you it's

going to be okay. Because often that's just what you need. You just need people to tell you, it's going to be fine. You're fine. You're good. You've got this. And, you know, that's so meaningful, right, whenever we sometimes feel down about ourselves. So that's another, you know, I would say tool in the toolkit, right, asking for help, finding groups of support. And then I think the third is, it's also okay to just be vulnerable and just talk to people about, right? Like, I found that some of the most meaningful conversations I had, whether with managers or whether with my own reports, is when we can, you know, be much more open about what it is that we find hard. What are we struggling with? And in that way, you actually form deeper connections and people

are more able to help out, right? We can spread the load a little bit, you know, we can put our heads together and brainstorm a better way to solve the problem. And I find that too, even as like, you know, the head of a department, right, or like a founder, it's like not going to solve everything myself. I'm never going to have all the answers. Sometimes by just sharing what the problem is, by sharing the load, you know, we're all going to collectively come up with a better solution. I love that advice. It's so simple and so effective. It reminds me of advice. A coach once told me that when you're in a new role, you are an imposter. You're doing something you've never done before, and that's normal and don't feel like that's unusual. Speaking of being uncomfortable

and being vulnerable and doing hard things, you now have a startup that you've started. And I'm curious what's kind of different from the experience of being a leader at meta versus being a founder, especially things that maybe are surprising, good or bad. I will say it is definitely a very humbling experience, but it's also the exact. exactly the journey that I wanted. And a lot of it is just going back to kind of this like base layer. You know, when you're at a large company, a lot is taking care of for you, right? You know, if I have a question about, I don't know, like finance or how to deal with the people situation, right? They're experts. There's like experts in every single field. And I just go and,

you know, reach out to them and talk to them and, you know, they can kind of handle that and help me. But, you know, when you get back to it, you're like, okay, it's in the beginning. It was myself and my founder, Chandar. It's like just to two of us. And it was like all sorts of stuff, you know, talk about being an imposter. It's like figuring out taxes or just like figuring out how to incorporate or just a thousand little decisions, right, a thousand little things that were new and different. So there's a huge amount of learning. There's a huge amount of just like having to do it all yourself and realizing in a lot of ways,

just like how many things you're bad at or don't really like to do. And because you don't like to do them, it's like hard to get them done. Right. So it's humbling that way of just like helping you realize these things about who you are. I think the other thing is, for me, it's going back to the idea of being much more focused on doing, working with people who are at different stages in their career. You know, when I was leading design for, let's say, the last five or seven years, right? It was often directly managing senior people, you know, either senior designers or managers or directors and so forth. And going back to working with folks at various stages, right, including new grads, right, early career folks.

I was actually both me realizing I had to kind of like really change a lot of how I manage. So it was again also very humbling in that respect. I had to change a lot of like what, you know, good management looks like in that context, which was different from a lot of the habits that I had built up. But it was also so rewarding. And I realized like I actually really love working with people, you know, who are in that early phase of their career. It's totally different, right?

And what they need and how to best support them is really different than what you would do with a director or, you know, you know, a very senior person. But it's also just a whole lot of fun. So that was, you know, something that is really new. And then, of course, so much of it is, again, putting that icy hat back on, right? And it's been years since I've actually sat down and designed. And, you know, often as a manager, the thing I develop, right, is, you know, I've developed my eye, but not my hand. So I learned to be a good critiquer of design. But actually, because I stopped practicing design, you know, definitely the limits of like what I can actually make and what I can produce myself

become really evident, right? And so again, back in this like new company setting, well, I have to put on a bit of that icy hat. You know, I have to like learn how to be kind of an ICPM, learn how to be an IC designer, realize that there's so much that, you know, I'm actually really bad at, you know, as well in that way, you know, but develop and grow some of my muscles and those skills again. The first point you made about having to kind of do everything again, I I remember the reverse of that when we sold our startup. I was so happy just to like, okay, here's a one goal we're going to focus on. We don't have to think about everything in the company all the time.

I'm just going to hit this one goal, this one product. It's going to be so much easier. And that was really fun for a while, but then it gets itchy and hard again. And you kind of want to have more responsibility and more challenge. It's fun, though. I am really enjoying it. I want to transition a little bit to talking about your writing and writing in general. I think I mentioned that your newsletter, The Looking Glass, inspired my writing in a big way.

I basically modeled your newsletter and focused it on growth and product, and that was the idea. Let me just do what Julie's doing, and I'll do it around a different vertical. And so, first of all, I just want to thank you for writing, all the writing that you've done over the years because it was really impactful to me. And so, first of all, thank you for doing that. Well, thank you for sharing that. It's really meaningful for me to hear as well. And I still go back to a lot of your writing, even though, you know, I know you've slowed down. to focus on the startup, which makes a lot of sense.

And we'll chat a little bit about that. But I'm curious, what got you to kind of start the writing and broadly, what impact have you seen it have on your career and just anything in life? So what actually started me on this writing journey was a piece of feedback I got during a performance review cycle. And I remember I was talking to my manager, and, you know, he shared that, hey,

one of the pieces of something you should work on in an area of growth is that, you know, you have a lot of really great ideas. and you're always really engaged whenever discussions happen in a small forum, right? One-on-one, or there's like two or three people in the room. But whenever there's a large room, you know, and we're talking about like seven people, 10 people, 15 people, nobody ever hears from you, right? You're just sort of quiet, you know, and you're not really telling your perspective. You're not really contributing to these larger conversations. And that's something for you to think about and work on. And it was really good feedback because, you know, I absolutely felt it. I definitely felt that

barrier of speaking up in a large room. I think the fear could be summarized as I don't want to look stupid in front of a lot of people. And so I had all these like barriers. I was like, okay, am I sure that what I'm going to say, what comes out of my mouth is absolutely brilliant? And that was really, you know, just this motion, right, that was getting in the way. And I was like, okay, I really want to work on this. Like I want to figure out how to get that to be less and less of a friction for me. And so it was around, I think, the January time frame, right? It's when the new year came, I was like, okay, here's an idea. What if I just did something that at the time seemed really scary to me, which was put my opinion out there on the internet and just do it for a

year. My goal was post one thing every single week. And it seemed terrifying, right? I'm not sure what people are going to say. Again, maybe all my ideas are stupid, but I just want to get better at doing that and hopefully through that year get more comfortable with that. So that's how this whole writing thing began. It came with this kind of, you know, New Year's resolution of just 52 times I was going to click publish on something, some opinion piece. And I was like, it doesn't even matter what the opinion is, right? Just like put something out there and just, you know, expose yourself a little bit in that manner. So that's what I did. And I tried to not have any goals around like maybe people will read it. Maybe it'll be considered high quality, not right.

Those are all just, again, additional barriers that I was putting that would make it even harder for me, right? The only goal was to hit the publish button. And so the first couple of weeks were actually quite excruciating. I remember I would just spend like hours on this piece and I just kept editing it. And I was like, you know, I don't know if this is any good. Like should I actually publish it? Like, and so forth. But eventually I did it, right? And again, little by little, it started to just become easier as anything does when you just do it a lot. So by week 10, by week 15, I had gotten into a bit of a cadence. And I realized something that was having an impact on my work. I realized that it became much more clarifying for me to have that space to be able to write.

And it almost became a kind of self-therapy because, you know, through the week, I would have all these thoughts running around my head, you know, things I wanted to get better at, pieces of product that I was mulling on. And the act of writing allowed me some quiet time to just sit down and try and organize those different threads of thoughts. Right. And I always approach my writing then, and I still do now, as letters to myself. You know, this is the framework, this is the advice that I need to give myself, that I need to go and really, you know, do better. And that is what my writing became for me. And it was hugely helpful for clarifying my train of thought. It was hugely helpful for me to then be able to do a better job of expressing myself.

And by the end of that year, I saw a huge difference in my ability then in large meetings to speak up and to become more comfortable. But even after that year, because I had seen all of these advantages and what it did for my clarity of thinking, I just decided to continue. And it became, I think, a wonderful side effect that other people started to resonate with the writing. You know, they were like, oh, this is actually helpful for me. Or I was feeling the same thing. Or, you know, this gave me a little bit of additional structure to think about the problem. And that was also extremely motivating. But I will say that what I think helped me continue the writing habit is like I always did it for me.

You know, I always did it because I felt that there was a lot that I had to game from it. And it's been obviously a wonderful experience to connect with readers and other people in the community about it. It definitely made me feel less alone. It definitely confirmed a lot of, you know, the ideas that I had about, you know, is this the right way to think about something? It led to a lot of really rich discussions with my colleagues. and with people who just emailed or responded about the writing. So that was a wonderful side benefit as well. But yeah, I really credit my ability to think better through the process and the practice of writing.

That's such a cool story. I love that it was kind of driven by a manager, but it kind of led to so many externalities. One thing I wanted to ask you is, how did you find time to this writing? You know, people always want to write, and very few people do or find time to you. How did you actually make the time and keep that up? So I actually had this practice of writing even before I did this more publicly with a blog. And it was because I heard for this dream back when I was a teenager and well into my college years of one day writing the next great American novel. So I wrote a lot of fiction and I wrote a lot of, you know, I have like kind of four unpublished novels just like collecting dust. They are not very good. I can say that now with a lot more objectivity. But I did that. And I would participate in this program called Nano Rhymo. every year, which later I was fortunate to kind of be on the border for a number of years.

But what Dano Rhymo was is this idea of like, it stands for a national novel writing month in November. So it's exactly what it sounds like. And the month of November, the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. And the whole purpose and the whole point of Nanorimo, and again, I did it for a number of years in my early 20s, is that it's all about just getting the words out, right?

It's not about like, you know, every paragraph is every sentence pristine or do you have like the right beginning, middle end? It was like, no. It was like, you're going to write a novel every single day. You need to write 1,667 words. And you just do that over 30 days, you'll have 50,000 words. And the whole premise was like, yeah, no, those 50,000 words, they're definitely going to be junk. They're not going to be really good. But at the end, you'll have something that you can then edit and then you can shape and you refine, right?

And the hardest part is just getting started. You know, it's just getting past like the blank screen and the first page. And so because I'd gone through that experience, I had really internalized that writing for me is just get the words out, right? It is just about sit your butt in the seat and just do it. Get the word count goal out or get like a time goal. I actually like word count goal even better than time goal because sometimes you can spend 30 minutes and then still just produce a sentence. And so that was always how I approached my writing. I was like, I'm going to sit my butt down.

I'm going to write for 30 or 45 minutes, but it's going to be, whatever, like 250 words. It's going to be 500 words. It's going to be this number of words. And that just gave me the discipline to just get it out and then think about revising, think about quality, think about all that later. And when I got into writing my book, that was exactly how I approached the first draft. I was like, okay, I'm going to divide up. It needs to be, you know, 60 or 70,000 words. I have like, a year, I'm going to divide it up into like the number of days and weeks. And I think what it came down for me was like five nights a week, I needed to write 500 words each day. And I eventually got that down to it was like 30 or 45 minutes, right? I mean, some days a little longer,

other days a little shorter. But it was about that. And I just kept that weekly goal up until the book was written. This episode is brought to you by Sprigg. If you've been a member of my community for a while. You know I'm a user, fan, and investor in Sprig. Sprig is a user research platform that makes getting user insights from your product as easy and fast as getting analytics. The best product and research teams, at companies like Loom, Open Door, and Dropbox, use Sprig's in-product surveys to target specific users, start collecting insights, and identify issues and opportunities related to activation, onboarding, engagement, and more. Talk about a platform that pays for itself. But I'm perhaps most excited about Sprigg's newest launch, which extends the power of the

platform pre-launch, and makes it possible to test mock-ups and prototypes with your own users in minutes. The testing interface is super slick and doesn't require any of the typical plugins that make testing with your own users unappealing. And with unlimited seats, you're able to invite anyone from your company to view and use insights generated by Sprigg. If you want to get started, head over to break.com slash Lenny and mention that I sent you. Speaking of the book, I definitely wanted to chat about that briefly. Did you always know you wanted to write a book or is this kind of thing that emerged from people just asking you the same questions again and again?

And then similarly, what impact have you seen from that book, which I own many copies and have gifted many copies? Thank you. I still, I had this dream that I would write the Great American novel. I still want to do that someday. You know, one day I really do want to sit down and hopefully write a fiction book. So I always had that on my mind. I don't think I ever thought that I would write like a nonfiction book. I never thought I would write like a business book, right? That really came about organically. And it came about because I was writing this blog and I was publishing these letters to myself, right, that I was again putting on the internet. And then occasionally I would have, you know, publishers or various folks reach out and say, oh, you know, like this was a really great article. Have you ever thought about developing that into a book? And my answer for the longest time was always like, no, because I don't think I have the stammer. I don't think I have the stammer.

to like, you know, make this one topic into like this huge thing. I don't think about myself as kind of like a career writer. And I honestly just, there wasn't necessarily anything that I felt was that differentiated or maybe a unique angle, right? And often, I also felt that most books that I read, there was always like a huge amount of research that went into it. And I was like, I know this about myself. I don't love research. I'm not great at it. You know, I don't want to like sit there and compile a bunch of stats and whatnot to make an argument. But, One day, a publisher reached out and they were like, you know, we had some ideas about the fact that, you know, you're writing really, especially the part about for new managers, right, your advice for new managers or for people new to leadership. Like, it really seems like it strikes record for that particular audience and we have some ideas.

Like, why don't, you know, we get on the phone to discuss. And I took that call and that call just did change my perspective because it gave me a particular angle on something that I felt was missing in the market. Right? Again, most of the stuff that I'm writing, again, their advice to myself. But I was brought back to when I first became a manager. And I went to the bookstore one day. I was looking for resources on what it means to manage and, you know, just stuff that would help me become a better manager. And not a lot of it spoke to me because it seemed like most management books were written by CEOs who had been, you know, leading their company for years and years. Or it was by management consultants who, didn't really seem like they had been in the situation of just like, hey, I was an IC on the team, and now next week I have four reports that I'm going to be working with. There just wasn't that much for like the completely new manager who didn't have an MBA, wasn't on some sort of ladder, and just like one day got dropped and asked to kind of go and support a couple people who were starting next week. And I was brought back to that moment in time and realizing, you know, there really isn't

that much that is great out there, as particularly geared for new managers. And I felt that I had to really learn and make a lot of these mistakes on my own. And even very fundamentally, I don't think that, you know, people ever really explained to me, like, what is a manager? Like, what does it mean to do a good job as a manager of a handful of people, right? And so it sparked this idea that like this was something that was somewhat missing in the market, that there was an opportunity to just, you know, really write something that could speak to people. And so, you know, like me and people, again, similar to me who maybe weren't on this ladder for 10 or 12 years, especially in tech, right? I knew many people who had gone through that. And the second thing for me

is I realized that I would likely also become a better manager through this process because it would force me to think about management a lot every single day. It would force me to reflect on my frameworks for management. And whenever you think about something all the time in the back of your head. It's just more top of mind. I was looking to become a better manager myself at that point. And that was the additional boost that I needed to kind of commit to the project. Has that last piece bitten you in the butt at all when you maybe make a mistake as a manager? And people like, Julie, you wrote this book on management with what the hell's going on? I always tell people, I tell my own reports as well. I was like, you might come in and you might

have read my book and you might think that somehow I am, you know, a really great manager and an expert in management and I always try and like, you know, like, I'm going to lower your expectations. I'm still learning. There's a lot of things that I'm still working on, right, that I know I'm not perfect at. But that's what I think it is, right? I think so much about, for me, at least, learning to be a better manager, and I know I'll probably be on this journey for the rest of my life, is that you can know, oftentimes the theory, you know, because like the theory is, it makes sense, right? It's like, okay, we all, you know, been in that situation we can feel. It is so hard to just actually put it in practice. It's so hard to do some of these things every single day

because they're sort of counterintuitive. And it is so hard to apply it to the appropriate context, right? Just even the example I gave earlier. You know, managing early career, right, new grads is just completely different than managing really senior people and, you know, being able to tailor to each individual person or each specific group of people, which is, you know, again, because humans, we're all different. We're all unique, right? No two people. are the same, no groups of people are the same. So it is, you know, an art as anything else. And a lot of it, too, is about learning about who I am, right? What am I good at? What am I not good at? How can I be more honest and more authentic to my own strengths and weaknesses and then be able to, you know,

pair that up with the person that I'm talking to or the group of people that I'm working with? So definitely, you know, not by any means today, still consider myself great or an expert or whatnot. I think like everyone else, I'm still trying to get better. That's a little bit how I feel where people think that I've got it all figured out. I'd be like the most amazing product manager they've ever worked with. And I feel like I could never get a regular job again because the hype, the bar expectations would be way too high. People forget that I have time to think, research process, right, and that kind of thing. And so I can never get a PM job again is basically the problem.

I think you'd be a pretty great PM, Lenny. It's an illusion. But I appreciate it. And then the other piece is that you put in this out that like a lot of people don't realize when folks like us write. It's like us figuring it out. It's not like we have the answer. And we're just like, okay, here, I'm just going to write down the answer already have in my head. It's the process of writing is how we learn a lot about these sorts of things. And a lot of people don't realize that. Yeah, I absolutely agree. Like I said, it's about reminding ourselves, right? I always often say I'm like the number one audience for my own writing because I'm the person who needs to really hear it the most. That's exactly why I feel a lot of times. And I go back to my own. pieces like, oh yeah, okay, that's what I wanted to remember. On the writing, something I wanted to ask about is you've kind of slowed down for a good reason. You have a startup to run and you've started

doing more tweeting than newslettering and blogging. How do you think about that just like, is that intentional? How do you think about Twitter versus newsletters and other things? Yeah, you know, this is another New Year's resolution that came up later, right? And one of the things that I recognize about myself is like, I kind of have a tendency to ramble, you know, and I've gotten this feedback as well in 360s where I'm not always the clearest communicator. I can be a pretty good storyteller. And I am clearer in writing often than I am in person. But this was another area that I wanted to get better at.

I wanted to get better at in the moment communicating more clearly and being just a little bit sharper, a little bit crisper, and the points that I had to make. And I remember I work with a number of colleagues, which is so good at this, right? There will be some really complex topic, this big product thing that we're trying to figure out. And in the moment, it would go and they would say,

okay, I see, this is what the problem is. The problem is one, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Three, right? Everybody would be like, yeah, you know, that's amazing. Like, you know, that's so crystal clear. Like this huge thing we're all talking past each other now became boiled to something so sharp and so beautiful, right? And I always had so much respect and admiration for the people who could do that.

And that wasn't me. But I was like, okay, well, as anything, if I have a thing I like and admire and respect, I could at least get better at it, right? Maybe I'll never be at that level, but I can work towards it. And one of the ways I saw of working towards that is, well, let's just change it up. You know, I've been doing long form, right, which again, works really well for these stories and this kind of like, you know, more meandering pros. But what if I just push myself to communicate in a much shorter form, which is going to force

me to really strip away all that ornamentation and focus on the core idea? I'm just going to go and publish threads on Twitter for a year. Again, same thing, right? Once a week, a little thread, and just take whatever the advice I needed to give myself and then boil that down to a tweet form. So it's also, it has helped me. It has helped me to get better at enumerating things, right? I think more naturally now sometimes it's like one, two, three. And that has, you know, helped me as well in just, again, the day job and the way that I communicate. Still a long ways to go, but that was, I think Twitter is really great at that. It's really great at trying to boil it down to the essence of what it is that one wants to communicate.

I love that you use these tools to help work on a very specific skill that you're hoping to develop. So you said that worked. Is that something you'd recommend to folks that are working on something like this and have a challenge there too? I do. You know, I talk to a lot of people who want to write more because they feel like there is a lot of benefits or maybe it's because, you know, writers often talk about like all of the benefits. But, you know, a lot of people do maybe find it, as you were saying earlier, hard to get started, right? And my, Number one advice is like, try and find an angle that's going to work for you. Because if you find yourself writing for your audience, you know, if you find yourself writing

because you want likes or you want a certain number of views, that actually is a really hard barrier to overcome because you don't have control over all of that, right? But if you write because you're trying to work on a particular key skill, you know, whether it is clarity of thinking, whether it's, you know, again, helping you work through some stuff that's complicated in your mind, whether it's just, again, you know, working on being more comfortable putting your voice out there, then make it a goal, but make it a action goal, right? Make it like a word count goal, you know? I saw this on Twitter. I think it was last year, the idea of like, I forget who, it was like the 30 days of just, you know, writing a thing every

day or tweeting a thing every day, right? And you see this in design too. There's like in October, which is like you just draw a thing every single day in the month of October. And I love those types of, you know, kind of structures and programs. I think that they're a way to go and get into the habit of that. And, you know, everyone can feel like they can do anything for 30 days, right? You can do anything, you know, for like three months if you just commit to doing it once a week. It doesn't have to be forever. It doesn't have to be some sort of like five-year thing and the commitment that's like a huge milestone. You just have to do it for a little bit and then reflect on it. Is it really helping you? Right. Is it actually helping you get closer to that goal? And that's usually the easiest way I

found to get started. I love that. Just creating a little bit of structure for yourself so you don't have to think about it, you just do it. And I don't care what I do on that day, but I'm doing it. And maybe one time something will come out really great. And that reminds me of something I wanted to plus one, the point that, especially on Twitter, I find whenever you're trying to go viral, it just comes across often is just like, okay, they're just trying to go viral. So like, lean, this person just wants a lot of likes versus like, I just want to share a thing that's interesting to me quickly, or here's how I want to think about it or here's just like a thing I want remember in the future, find those end up being a lot more successful.

Yeah, that's totally right. I think it's what really gets you interested in it is likely this thread that you want to enroll and to continue to explore. If you just try and say what you think people want to hear, it just comes across not that genuine and personally not that interesting. Yeah, like the thing I've kind of learned is if I find something interesting, other people find it interesting. And so I'll just share that in some form and often ends up being really helpful to a lot of people. Speaking of Twitter, one of the threads I've like best that you've written about and I think you've done this a couple of times is around product thinking and product sense and how to build that muscle. And so I'd love to just hear your advice for folks that are thinking

about how do I get better at product sense and product thinking. What are ways that people can get better at these things? The number one advice that I always have for people when talking about product sense or product thinking is it's just really about observation. It's about curiosity. right and you can start by first observing yourself i know like every time you're going to go and use something right every time you're going to have a new experience you download an app you try something new it's like take the moment to you know reflect on your emotion or your assumption at every step right like what was the new user experience like at what moment did it become clear to you what was going on when were you confused what did you do how many times did you tap something and then had to like

exit because you like went down a wrong pathway right and even before that it's like what even led you to trying this service in the first place to downloading the app you know is it word of mouth that a friend did you see something on the internet that somebody that you respect pitch it right but these are all ways in which we're learning about how things work how products work and always starts by just if you first observe yourself then you'll make a lot of progress right and oftentimes you know it's hard to do that right? It's because sometimes we're just, we're going through the motions or we're not necessarily sitting down and analyzing every step of it. But the first step, I think, is just to get, you know, really good, comfortable, familiar, habitual with just that personal observation. The second step is then,

okay, cool, you do that for yourself. Well, that's not enough because you're not the world, right? You don't necessarily present everyone. But now it's to just sort of to build on those circles. So the next thing you do is like, you go and actually observe and share those observations with somebody else, right? And so how that often looks is like discussions about. products. So you download this. Why did you download this? You know, like what made you decide that this was a great app? Do you think it's a great app? You know, what was compelling about it? And to just really, you know, find the curiosity of thinking through which decisions did the builders or the creators of something make and what was the impact of it on, you know, us users,

as customers and so forth, right? So often it goes into then the next step, which is spending a lot of time sharing those observations and critiquing, right? I mean, a rule of thumb is like, you know, if you really want to get better, how often are you having a conversation with somebody about products, dissecting something, right? And really, you know, sharing, yeah, like, what did you think was good or bad about it and engaging that? Because if you aren't, it's going to be harder for you to actually learn about, you know, all of those different micro decisions and what its impact is. And then you can go a little broader than that, right? Like, there's lots of really great resources. There's amazing folks on the internet who will go down and really dissect something.

I love Eugene Way's writing. I love Kevin Kwok. I always learn something because they take these apps like Figma or TikTok or whatever it is and then they really go very, very deep with their own observations. Like what works, what doesn't, what patterns do we see across different apps that are successful and that aren't. And this is all helping us to understand what are these again. the key decisions and what impact does it lead to that helps us become better at

than making those intentional decisions in the product. So that's a huge part of it. I think another thing then is, of course, you have to try and validate, right? So one thing we can do is, of course, we look at opinions, we look at reactions. That's data, right? That's the qualitative side. I think the other side is quantitative. So often, you know, if you are building products and you have the opportunity to run experiments, to do A, B, tests, or if, you know, again, you're working on one team, but lots of other people and lots of other teams are also doing A-B-Test. It's so interesting to them be able to ask people, right,

ask the product manager on the other team about what they're learning about their products and to really be able to look at specific decisions and what causally happened as a result. That's what I love about A-B-Test. And I think being really deep in the data and really going back to like, you know, can we infer some sort of causal relationship

because we're, you know, correlation or causation? but with causation with the AB test, can we actually pick up some of these learnings? Can we look at patterns and can we take some insights away? That helps validate and confirm a lot of the hypotheses that we had about product. And ingesting as much of that as you can also helps develop your instinct for what works and what doesn't. I always find, you know, people often have this like, oh, you know, design and user experience is on the other side of the coin. You know, it's like it's a totally different industry and they're at odds with each other. right, being data informed and being quantitative versus like being very designery and subjective

and caring about those aesthetics. And I just think that's totally wrong. Like, I think that one helps confirm the assumptions for the other, right? No, it is true that, you know, looking at a bunch of numbers isn't often going to tell you exactly the leaps of faith that you need to make to start something new, but they surely can help you validate whether a number of your assumptions about how people work or the way the world works are true or not, right? And so I know a lot of really brilliant product thinkers who got that way, not necessarily because they came through the route of like subjective observation, but because they went and they were so disciplined about always studying what happened, right? What was the impact in the numbers and people

and so forth? And then eventually you marry that, of course, with, you know, well, why might that be the case, you know, and you get into the qualitative side and the observation. But these two, both support each other and helping to build a really great product sense. That's awesome. There's so much material there that we could go on and on. On that last point, I wanted to kind of double click on it a little bit. Say you're a founder and you're like, man, I have all these really clear vision and ideas of where I want to go with my product. And, you know, there are teams like, oh, I don't know if this is right. What if we do a little more easy research or run some experiments? Do you have any advice to the founder of just like when to rely on their gut and experience and just go with that

versus doing more research, getting more data. That is a really great question because, you know, I think one of the most common pieces of advice for founders, right? And I actually also had to like remind myself constantly of this one is like you just, the more you know your customers, the more you can really, you know, like close your eyes and just like imagine everything about their life and what they're doing on almost like a minute to minute basis. probably the better you're going to do in terms of coming up with something that's going to

meaningfully solve a problem for them. And so that comes from a couple of different places. So the first is like, look, if you're the person you're building for and you're the target audience, awesome. You know, you probably do have a lot of stuff that is instinctively, you know, known to you, right? And maybe in those cases, you know, your team doesn't have that experience and they maybe can't feel the same level of conviction you do. And they might, you know, be asking you, hey, well, can we validate and all of that, right? It's not, it's always good advice, but sometimes, you know, you're just actually, you're so deep in it and you can, you're this person or you know this person or you did this job that, that, you know,

you probably can trust your instincts and your gut quite a bit, right? And I remember early days at Facebook, right, that was us. Like, everybody who worked at the company was either a college dropout or a recent college grad, and we were building a product for college students. I mean, we're the perfect, you know, it was like, for us, by us, right? We understood. did exactly what this audience wanted. If we didn't, we would call up some friends. I mean, this was just pure target demographic for what we were building. But eventually, if that's not true, and this was, you know, it evolved that Facebook, right? It evolves for companies. You know, you might start out that way. But eventually, you know, we started to open up to the world.

We started to add people in different countries. Like the percentage of people that were like college grads who were like us, who were using the product, started to shrink, became a smaller and smaller percentage of actually all core Facebook users. So therefore, our intuitions started to become less and less reliable, right? And I remember in spectacular fashion, I think this was like in 2008 or nine, we had like a string of failures, you know, big kind of launches that were failures. And I think it was because we reached the end of our intuition for the user base at that particular moment, right?

And that's true for founders as well. Like sometimes, you know, you're building a product in a domain where you weren't the target audience, right? And I feel this right now for myself. You know, I'm building an analytics product. I was never a data analyst. I understand, you know, from the outside, the value of data, but I never did the job. And therefore, what I really needed to do was just spend a lot of time, you know, with data scientists and mercy. I'm actually just trying to do the job myself, you know, because the better that I understand what it is and what it's like and what the company context is. And I think with for SaaS companies in particular, you might have done the job at one company,

probably didn't do it at like, you know, 20 or 50 companies and you're probably selling to like a lot of companies. So it's just way more critical for you to spend a lot of time interviewing customers because your intuition is likely not going to carry you nearly as far as if you're building a very consumer product for a very consumer audience of which you yourself are part of, right? So I do think that, you know, it doesn't matter that you need to really understand your customers. Do you have to go out and do the work, have the conversations, you know, teach yourself the things that they do. Yeah, depends a bit on the context, depends on where you are, but it's never bad advice. The better you understand your customers, I think the better you're going to be able

to build a product. I really like that advice of just like this model of the more time the founder spends with their customers, the more you can trust that they're going to have the right sorts of instincts. And the less they start to spend time there, maybe start running more experiments and doing more research as a team around the founder. Or the larger your user base becomes the less reliable any one or 10 or even 100 people are in terms of understanding the whole. It's just that the numbers get too big. And luckily, in theory, you have a lot more data at that point. And so you can actually run experiments and start relying on data. That's right. Yeah.

Something I also wanted to get your advice on, it's something that a lot of founders and even PMs that come to me around is product review meetings and design room meetings. And I know We've run many. And so I wanted to get your thoughts of just how should company structure product review meetings or design review meetings? Who should be in the room? How should they be set up? Any advice for folks that are trying to figure that out? I really believe that it's never a bad thing. It's always a better thing to have more feedback, right? And so often, you know, I think you don't necessarily want to be like, oh, you know, we have like the one review meeting and that's the one in which we like get everyone's opinions out and we make all these

decisions and that we're done. I think about product and feedback as kind of just, you know, the more, the better, right? And most people, again, everyone, especially with design, like, has an opinion to some degree, right? And so all opinions are valid because they are a true opinion. The question is how do you then prioritize? How do you figure out what it is that you should do? Because it isn't successful to try and, you know, do things by consensus. You're never going to get a group of people, a smart people to agree about what is absolutely the best design. So one principle is, okay, great, you know, if you're going to have, you know, if you're going to have feedback on the product, more is better. Try and have, like, different sessions, right,

with different groups of people. You know, often I would advise a designer, hey, go in actually do a critique with a design audience, but go and then show this to the people who are most directly working on the product, right, because they're going to have a different set of knowledge. But then go and see if you can find some people outside of your direct team who don't have, you know, as much bias on just knowing exactly how things work, and then show them the user experience. And then go and actually see if you can find like a group of target customers who are actually going to launch, right, and then run some user research sessions and get feedback, right? Like, they all are going to be valuable. They all might

contradict each other to some degree, but the right answer isn't like, because we don't like disagreement, let's just go with like one and then ignore the others, right? Everyone is going to have something to contribute to the product because, you know, everyone has that different perspective. Again, lots of sessions, lots of user review sessions. Awesome. Okay. But then there is an important job, which is the synthesis of all of that feedback and a way of understanding what really matters. And the way that I often think about this is like, we have to be absolutely clear on who is that target audience and what is the most important problem that we're trying to solve for them.

So if you can get every group to align on this is who it is, right, again, go and paint that very clear picture of the person, the problem, you know, what it is that we're trying to help them with. and then what is most important? What is the job? I really love the jobs to be done for it. But what's the job that this particular feature or product is going to fulfill for that person? Then it makes it easier for us to then start to categorize different buckets of feedback, right?

Because the first thing that most important to address is like, well, is this thing actually valuable? Like is it doing something, this is solving the problem? Is it doing the job correctly? And a lot of other stuff below is bad, but this is, you know, like, good, then we can move on to kind of the next most important thing. But if like all the other stuff is maybe even, you know, good or interesting, but this is not there, then we should just actually disregard all the other stuff until we are quite certain that we've gotten kind of the core value. We understand the user, this, you know, in some sense is addressing the core pain, right?

And then once we do that, then let's focus on the next layer, which I will think about as like ease of use, right? So, okay, cool, you know, we've figured out that we validated. This thing is valuable. it does solve the job. Now is it easy to use? Like are people confused? Are they getting hung up somewhere? Or is it just like really slow so like no one can use it because it just takes like 10 seconds to load each time, right? Use of use is just about like can people access the value in a really great manner. And that's the next most important bucket. And then finally, if it is valuable, it's easy to use. And I think we get into like, is it joyful to use? Is it pleasurable? Does it really exceed expectations? Right. And I think that's,

that is the bar that we should aim for whenever we are creating products. And here, you know, you might have debates about like, you know, colors or like aesthetic properties or, you know, animation and delight and all of the other things that just make it that much more enjoyable and surprising and wonderful for the core audience. But you don't want to just focus on that and then lose like, okay, actually this thing wasn't valuable and it like loaded in 10 seconds. It's like, you know, who cares about how great was the animation when, like, the thing doesn't even load? So I think there's, like, a work to do to try and actually help the different pieces of feedback get synthesized. So we understand what bucket they are and we, you know, can have the right order of prioritization to make sure we tackle the most important things first.

And just to be clear, this is kind of an ongoing process. This isn't like one meeting, right, where you go through all these four layers, right? Cool. And then is your advice to focus on it in that sequence generally and not focus on, say, the delight? And so you kind of make it through these other points? Or do you find it's kind of helpful to kind of think about all these things at once? I usually find that if you're going to go and run a design critique or review session, it's helpful to sort of start off front by saying, here's where we are in the process. This is the most important set of things we want to validate. We want to validate whether this actually. solves the problem or want to validate, like we validated sort of problem, but you know, we validate like whether it's easy to use or something along those effects. So being more specific about where you are, what kind of feedback matters the most at that particular phase for the team is valuable, right? Because if you don't do that, sometimes you'll just get all sorts of feedback

and some of it you're not even ready for, right? The team's not even thinking about, you know, some of these additional level details. You're just thinking about the core stuff. And, you know, Usually it follows just from how product development happens, right? Like the first thing that often teams will, you know, come up with when they build a product is like some kind of product brief or some kind of, you know, like understanding of the user and a very high level picture about how the product is. You know, usually there's not like high fidelity mocks or prototypes at that state, right? And so that's great, you know, because, you know, we're using a different fidelity.

We're looking at documents and words and, you know, values and data as a way to understand the opportunity. and that lends itself well to that kind of feedback. But where I find that things get a little confusing, it's like sometimes you will go and just make a prototype, right? And again, the goal of the prototype is to give a feeling of how it works. It's not that the team had already spent a bunch of time on the exact UI decisions or so forth. And so what happens, though, is sometimes the audience

or the people who are giving feedback, they can't always distinguish that. So then, you know, the feedback goes immediately towards like, oh, I don't like that shade of blue or like, you know, maybe we should, you know, put steps, to the fourth step three. And that's not actually where the conversation is, right? Because, you know, we haven't actually gone and have conviction in just like the first core piece of whether this is even the right thing to build or whether it really is solving an important enough

problem. So being very clear about like where you are and what is the feedback that you want to get is important. Now, again, eventually you go and you put stuff in front of customers. It's a little harder for them to just fully, you know, like be able to distinguish between like what's the difference between like the feedback versus, you know, around value versus ease of use. It gets all blended for them. At that point in time, though, so they'll just give whatever feedback. And again, I think that's fine. Just collect it. But then when you go and do the synthesis, when you go and do the prioritization, make sure that you're getting what you need at that stage. As a colleague of the designer, say you're a PM or an engineer,

data scientist or whatever, do you have any advice for just giving feedback to a designer in the critiques? Yes. The most important feedback, I would say, is focus on identifying the problem and making it really clear for the other person, you know, the person you're giving feedback to, what is the problem, right? And the reason I always give that is because sometimes, you know, we're all solvers and builders. And so you often can very much get into like, wait a second, I see the problem. But instead of talking about the problem, I'm just going to give you a solution, you know? So people will say things like, oh, I see this. And it'll be like, why don't we make the logo purple or like, why don't we try and add this feature here, right?

there's a lot of assumptions that are already in place. Like you're giving that because you assume the current thing is insufficient in some way, right? And it's maybe not ideal at being clear or it is forgetting to bring some important value prop or maybe like yellow just makes this whole thing look puky or whatever it is. There's a reason. But instead of actually stating the reason, we go straight to the solution. And like at that point, I don't know, maybe like the solution is good. Maybe it isn't, right?

But honestly, if you have designers, you have other people who are just focused on coming up with the right solution, you're kind of taking that power away from them by going straight to what you think is like the right solution. Again, I'm not saying don't ever propose a solution. It's always good to give a suggestion. But you also have to respect that whoever is actually coming up with the answer and the solution, they're the ones who should be empowered to ultimately, you know, they know the most about the problem. They've thought about it the longest, right? Help them understand what you think the problem. problem is with whatever it is they are proposing. Give examples. Show them where you're getting stuck. Why is it unclear to you? Why do you think that this color is not the right color? Right. And try and paint that because when everyone is aligned on the problem, then we can all collectively come up with better solutions and then we can kind of rate and critique the solutions against each other. But by going straight to brainstorming ideas, you know, sometimes a lot gets lost and people aren't actually following along on, is this really the problem? Do we agree this is a problem? Is this actually the most important problem? I imagine PMs are very guilty of this

of just like, let's just move this button over here and it'll be close off all these problems. Let's move it higher up. And it's kind of ironic because PMs also don't want people coming to them with a solution. And it's funny, you kind of forget that and you just give people, here's what we should just do. Let's move on. We all forget it all the time. I mean, it's a hard one, right? Because, you know, it's fun. It's like we're all solvers to some degree. It's fun to jump in there and do it. But when you don't have extreme clarity on the problem, then that's what happens when you just end up talking past each other. Absolutely. I've been guilty of that myself. I've sucked up an hour of your time. I want to let

you go, but I have two more questions I want to ask in different directions. One is coming back to your book about the making of a manager. By the way, we haven't even mentioned the name of the book yet, the making of a manager available at all of local bookstores in Amazon and every online bookshop. A lot of people want to become managers and oftentimes they struggle for whatever reason. They can't make it to manager. Nobody wants to promote them. They're just kind of struggling there. Do you have any advice for folks that are just like having a hard time getting to that point where they can actually get to be a manager? The first is make sure your manager is aware of those aspirations. You know, bring them in to your hopes and dreams, right? If your manager understands your goals and what you would like to

work towards, then it's much easier for you to be like, okay, can you help me? You know, I really want to be able to do what you do. I want to lead a team. I want to lead a project, etc. Like, help me figure out how to get there. And the first thing you should ask is like, what does it take? You know, where are the skills that I'm going to need to get better at in order, you know, for you to believe that I could be successful in doing so? And just make sure that you hear that, right? And make sure that you can have an honest conversation where your manager can help you be aware of what are the things that you should work on and then work together to just make a plan to be like, okay, cool. You know, one of the things that it seems, you know, that I've got to improve on is

that one of the roles in responsiveness manager is like go in spending a lot of time on recruiting and like, I haven't done that, right? So let's work together for a plan where I can start to learn some of those skills. One of the nice things about, at least that I find about, you know, like what the path to management is like a lot of this stuff you can do even when you're not a manager. Some stuff you can't, right? You probably can't fire someone and learn those skills without actually being a manager and being in that role. But a lot of things like hiring, like mentoring, like working on

process, you know, is all things that you can start to contribute and help out with in the capacity of an IC, right? So if you've identified these different skills, then find opportunities to start to practice and be able to grow those skills. So for example, oftentimes are really great, you know, if you're a part of a company that's growing and has like a summer internship program, awesome. Can you go in and sign up and mentor an intern and manage an intern, right? It's a very, you know, sort of small way of doing that and getting started. Here's another example, you know, if you're a growing company and new people are joining, you know, you might work with your manager to say, hey, let me be this person's onboarding buddy.

You know, let me be responsible for helping them get up to speed over the first one or two weeks. Or if you spot an opportunity, right, and let's say, you know, there's documentation or there's some process that, you know, we had to change the structure of the meeting. Like, ask your manager if you can help out with that. You can volunteer for that, you know, and you help come up with some new process for doing something, right? Or a new way of running the meeting and just take the lead. So a lot of these things you don't need to have the official title to do. You can do a lot of it, you know, in that capacity as an IC.

And again, it's also great for you to then try out, like, do I like doing these things? You know, do these things give me energy? And as well, your manager can see, you know, whether you can be successful in this. respect and then give you more and more responsibility if so. So it's really not binary. It's not all or nothing. There's one other thing, though, which is that sometimes the reason you can't easily become a manager is because your company just isn't growing, right? It isn't a need to have a new manager unless the current manager leaves or unless somebody, you know, departs the company and a new role opens up. And that could be, I mean, you can very well have done all this right things,

have the right skills, but there just isn't the role and opportunity available at your current company. And if that's the case, sometimes that's how it is. And the way that you can further your goals there is to think about moving into a different environment. I did a lot of the things that you recommended. And I 100% agree with everything being really helpful to getting you to manager. And I think basically if you're just sitting there being really upset about not having a chance, clearly there's a lot you can do and all the things you shared. I found to be really helpful to you. So thanks for getting into all the detail there. Last question. For founders or even PMs, a lot of them are struggling to hire designers. There's just like such a shortage of great designers. Do you have any advice I know? I don't know if there's an answer to this, but do you have any advice for founders or PMs trying to hire designers? Yeah, I mean, for hiring anyone,

right? Even engineers too. All of us are looking for really great talent and there is a shortage. So for designers, this is what I often advise for founders. So the first thing is that, you know, designers want to work with people who care about design, right? They don't want to be like, hey, you know, you're going to toss me some spec and then I have to like come up with a thing and then I toss it over the engineers. So the first thing you could do is demonstrate a commitment to design, you know, make yourself out to be someone who cares about design again, not because you just need to fill a box because like everyone says you need a designer for your company to like, you know, get that team, but because you truly care about it. And that, already puts you far ahead of the pack. So what are some ways that you can demonstrate your commitment to design? Well, the first is, even if you don't have a full-time designer, are you working with a good agency or some, you know, are you able, like if you have venture capital funding and, you know, you're thinking about what to invest in,

are you working with someone on a contract basis, on an agent, you know, just to build a really wonderful marketing site or to, you know, focus on even the V1 of your product being something that shows that this is something you want to invest in, right? because, you know, if you're going to hire someone, they're going to go check out your website, and go look at this stuff and they're going to go and, you know, make some judgments about whether you seem like the kind of person that's committed to building a great culture of design at your organization. But I think the second is just being somebody who can speak to and align with a lot of the values of design.

And often what that means is just, again, being really, really people-centric, right? Having good taste, you know, thinking about what it means to have a design organization. Like, if you don't really understand design, you don't understand. the tools designers use, you understand the nomenclature of how designers talk. You know, if that's foreign, then go do the research, right? Go and study it. Go and interview designers that work at companies. Go and try and follow the top designers on Twitter and just immerse herself in a bit of that culture and really get to understand what great designers value, right? And so do the research so that you can, whenever, you know, now you're talking to a designer, you can express that, right? You can

speak to them in a common language and not just, you know, if you say things like, oh, we need a designer, but I don't really understand design. I don't really, you know, like, that's your thing. Like, I'm just here to, you know, do my whatever. That's not often going to make you stand out against a very competitive field. Yeah. So the more that I think you can, you know, have those conferences, and often, as with anything else, right, sometimes when you just ask someone to teach you about their domain or discipline and you form a relationship, that person then maybe sees that you care, maybe has a friend, right,

or maybe later on they decide to get, like there's already a relationship that you're making with people in the community, and that's often, you know, for long term. I mean, again, they might not yield you designers right away, but in the long term, it pays off because you will be considered a team or a company that really does care.

Amazing. I've selected way too much of your time. I need to let you get back to building your company. Where can folks find you online and maybe reach out if they have questions? and then is there any way listeners can be useful to you? Yes. So I am active on Twitter and LinkedIn. My handle is at J-O-U-L-E on Twitter.

I also have a newsletter, although I haven't actually been as active in it on Substack. It's called The Looking Glass. I have a lot of old articles and things on Medium and on Substack as well. And I have my book, The Making Up a Manager. So that's where you can find me online. In terms of, yeah, I mean, you have,

such a wonderful community, Lenny, and I've, you know, very fortunate to be a subscriber, to have gleaned a lot of wisdom and knowledge from, you know, yourself and all of the amazing guests and the community that you've developed as well on Substack. So one of the things, as I mentioned, that we're working on and our startup is just helping companies be able to use data effectively and be able to access it and make great decisions. So if there's anybody who's listening and it's like a growth PM or works on the data team and would be excited to have a conversation where I can interview you, learn more about how your company works, how you guys think about data, and just learn from you. Please reach out. DM me on Twitter. My DMs are open,

and I would gladly take up that invitation. And is there a website people can go to to learn more about what you're building? Yes, my product is called Sundial. The website doesn't give you that much. It's fairly high level, but it is sundial.com. Awesome. We're going to link to that in the show notes. Julie, this was such a treat for me. I so appreciate you making time for this. Thank you so much. This was wonderful. Thank you so much for having me, Lenny. That was awesome. Thank you for listening. If you enjoy the chat, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You could also learn more at Lenny'spodcast.com. I'll see in the next episode.