Co-founder, Sundial · Fmr. VP Design, Facebook · Author, The Making of a Manager
JUN 7 2022
The Origin
Intern → VP Design In 13 Years
"The first seven or eight years at Facebook, every single week I felt like an imposter."
Joined Facebook as an engineering intern when it had 8 million users
Mentor Ruchi told her, "You should go sit next to the designers" — the first time she heard design was a profession
Three chapters: learn to design → learn to manage → learn to scale strategy across disciplines
Left Meta after 13 years to co-found Sundial (product analytics)
Framework
Writing as Self-Therapy
"I approach my writing as letters to myself. It is the advice I need to give myself to go do better."
The trigger: a 360 said she was quiet in rooms of 7+ people, brilliant in rooms of 2 or 3
The resolution: publish 52 times that year, no quality goal, only "hit publish"
The habit from NaNoWriMo: chase a word count, not a time slot; ship the draft, revise later
By year end, meetings got easier. By many years in, the Looking Glass carried her voice further than her calendar ever could
How the book got written
Five nights a week, 500 words a night, for a year. That is a 60–70K word manuscript. Julie applied the NaNoWriMo math to The Making of a Manager.
Framework
The Feedback Ladder
"If the thing isn't valuable, who cares how great the animation was, if it doesn't even load?"
Never one review meeting. Run many, with different audiences: design peers, direct team, outside team, target customers
All opinions are valid. Consensus never works. The manager's job is synthesis
State up front which rung you are testing today, then only accept feedback for that rung
Prototype trap: people give color and layout notes on a prototype meant to prove the concept
Playbook
Intuition vs. Data
Intuition works when you ARE the target user; that is why early Facebook shipped so well on Stanford campuses
It stops working the moment the audience diverges from you; 2008–2009 gave Facebook "a string of spectacular failures"
Building outside your own experience? Do the job yourself, or sit with people who do, before you ship
Use AB tests for causation. Use interviews for the qualitative side. Both, in that order
The Sundial reason
Julie never did the data-analyst job. Now she is building for them, so she spends her time with data scientists, or trying to be one, before designing anything.
Contrarian
Career & Craft Myths Julie Disproves
✗Impostor feeling means you don't belongINSTEAD →✓ New role, new territory. Julie felt it for seven or eight years while running design for the Facebook app. The feeling is the deal.
✗Write when you have something worth sayingINSTEAD →✓ Write to think. Julie's rule was hit publish, not "be good." The clarity comes from the reps, not the polish.
✗Design and data pull in opposite directionsINSTEAD →✓ One validates the other. Quantitative confirms whether the assumptions the design rests on are actually true.
✗Get everyone to agree in one review meetingINSTEAD →✓ Get everyone to disagree across many small ones. Consensus is not a design method. Synthesis is.