The Making of a Manager PDF – Julie Zhuo: I remember the meeting when my manager asked me to become a manager. It was unexpected, like going for your daily run and tripping over a pirate chest. Oh, I thought, how intriguing. We were sitting in a ten-person conference room, kitty-corner from each other. “Our team is growing,” my manager explained.
The Making of a Manager PDF – Julie Zhuo
“We need another manager, and you get along with everyone. What do you think?” I was twenty-five, working at a start-up. All that I knew of management could be neatly summarized into two words: meetings and PROMOTION. I mean, this was a promotion, wasn’t it? Everyone knows this conversation is the equivalent of Harry Potter getting a visit from Hagrid on a dark and stormy night, the first step in an adventurous and fulfilling career.
I wasn’t about to turn down that kind of invitation. So I said yes. It was only later, walking out of the room, that I thought about the details of what she had said. I got along with everyone. Surely there was more to management than that. How much more? I was about to find out. — I remember my first meeting with a direct report.
I arrived five minutes past our scheduled time, in a rush and flustered by my lateness. This is a terrible start, I thought to myself. I could see him through the windowed door of the conference room— the same one I had met my manager in previously—eyes glued to his phone. Just a day earlier, we had both been designers on the same team, sitting in our adjacent pods, working on our respective projects while lobbing rapid-fire design feedback across the aisle.
The Making of a Manager PDF – Julie Zhuo
Then the announcement was made, and now I was his manager. I’m not nervous, I told myself. We’re going to have a great conversation. About what, I wasn’t entirely sure. I just wanted this meeting to feel normal, like it had yesterday and the day before that. If he didn’t love the fact that I was his manager, then at the very least I wanted him to be cool with it. I’m not nervous.
I walked in. He glanced up from his phone, and I’ll never forget the expression on his face. It had all the surliness of a teenager forced to attend his ten-year-old cousin’s Pokémon-themed birthday party. “Hi,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “So, uh, what are you working on right now?” His scowl only deepened, settling in like a bear for the winter.
I could feel the sweat starting to form on my face, the hot rush of blood pounding in my ears. I wasn’t a better designer than this guy. And I wasn’t smarter or more experienced. The look on his face alone was enough to dispel me of any notion that he’d “be cool” with the fact that I was his manager. The message was as clear as if it had been written in giant black Sharpie: You have no idea what you’re doing.
The Making of a Manager PDF – Julie Zhuo
At that moment, I felt he was absolutely right. — By all accounts, the path that led me to managing Facebook’s design team was an unlikely one. I grew up in the dense streets of Shanghai and then the humid suburbs of Houston, an immigrant clueless about the significance of Star Wars, Michael Jackson, and E.T. Growing up, I’d heard the term Silicon Valley a few times but took it literally.
I imagined that nestled between two mountain ranges were neat little rows of factories printing silicon chips like Hershey bars. If you had asked me what designers do, I would have said, “Make nice clothing.” I did know two things, though, even early on, and those were how much I loved drawing and building.
There is a photo of me at eight years old on Christmas morning, a huge grin stretched across my face as I held up the present I’d been begging for all year: a new set of pirate LEGOS—complete with a monkey and a shark! In middle school, my best friend Marie and I passed each other notebooks filled with elaborate doodles between classes.
The Making of a Manager PDF – Julie Zhuo
In high school, we discovered the magic of HTML, which let us combine our hobbies of drawing and building into the perfect pastime: making websites showcasing our illustrations. I could think of no better way to spend spring break than obsessively following the latest online Photoshop tutorials (“How to Achieve Realistic Skin Tones”) or redesigning my website to show off a new JavaScript trick (links that glowed when you moused over them).
When I arrived at Stanford, I knew I wanted to study computer science. So I took classes on algorithms and databases in preparation for a job at seasoned, polished Microsoft or quirky, up-and-coming Google, where many former classmates had gone. But by sophomore year, a new craze was sweeping through Stanford. “Imagine!” we chattered excitedly in hallways and over meals.
“A site where you check out photos of that crush from organic chemistry, or get to know your dorm mates’ favorite bands, or leave cryptic messages on your friends’ ‘Walls’!” I was hooked. Facebook was unlike anything I had used before. It felt like a living thing, a dynamic version of our college selves that extended into the online world and helped us get to know each other in new ways.
The Making of a Manager PDF – Julie Zhuo
I’d heard Facebook was founded by some Harvard dropouts, but I didn’t know much about start-ups until I took a class my senior year about Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. And then I understood: Oh, this was the land of hungry, foolish dreamers who were given the chance to build their version of the future with a little help from venture capitalist fairy godparents.
This was the land of innovations borne from a mix of smart minds, iron resolve, lucky timing, and a whole lot of duct tape. If I were going to do this start-up thing at any point in my life, why not now, when I was young with nothing to lose?
And why not with a product that I used every day and loved? A good friend of mine, Wayne Chang, had joined Facebook six months earlier, and he couldn’t stop talking it up. “Just come check it out,” he cajoled. “At least do an internship and see what the company is like.”
The Making of a Manager PDF – Julie Zhuo