From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo

(tense music) We're seeing this kind of flattening of orgs. Everyone's becoming an IC again.

It used to be, okay, I don't have the skills to do 10 different jobs, but now with AI, it allows me to do many of those jobs myself. We need to dissolve the boundaries of these traditional roles and call ourselves builders. I'd love first to get to a world where that's the title.

I also just saw a stat, Google let go of so many of their middle managers.

Management is still really critical. You have a North Star, you have a vision, and you're just trying to figure out how to use the resources that you have to get that thing done. It used to be people, but now it's basically models, and different models have different strengths. You kind of have to assemble the Avengers so that you can use the right tools for the right purposes.

What do you feel is the biggest change in the role in life of a manager these days?

It's always been manager's job to manage change. I just think the rate of change is accelerating. Today, management is really about this idea of be sturdy while being flexible. So I think about this metaphor a lot of the willow tree. It can survive a lot of storms, disasters, et cetera, but it's also very flexible.

You have such an interesting trajectory from being head of design to now being obsessed with data and analytics.

You want to diagnose with data and treat with design. Data is not a tool that's going to tell you what you should build. I don't actually think a lot of the fast-growing companies are using data well at this point. Traditionally, things just didn't grow that fast. These companies are totally getting by on just good instincts and good vibes, but what always happens is eventually, things stop growing.

(instrumental music) Today, my guest is Julie Zhuo. Julie was my first ever guest on this podcast, which I recorded over three years ago, so this is a very special conversation. As I've shared many times before in other places, Julie's newsletter, The Looking Glass, was the inspiration for my newsletter, and basically led to everything that I do now. If you're not familiar with Julie, she was the longtime head of design for the Facebook app used by over three billion people. She's also the author of the bestselling and very important book, The Making of a Manager. And most recently, she started her own company, Sundial, which is an AI-powered analyst used by companies like OpenAI, Gamma, and Character.AI. Julie is one of the most thoughtful and insightful product leaders that I've ever come across, and she's also got one of the most interesting perspectives on product building. Having worked at a mega large corp like Meta as head of design and now as a founder at a tiny startup that's all about using data to help you make decisions, it's really rare for someone to have this spectrum of experiences. In our conversation, we talk about how learning to be a great manager directly translates to learning how to use AI tools extremely well, which specific skills will become more valuable in the next couple of years, her most valuable and timeless advice for new managers, why she's not hiring product managers at her startup, her simple heuristic for knowing when to use data and when to use intuition in making decisions. There's something in this episode for everyone. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get 15 incredible products for free for an entire year, including Lovable, Replit, Bolt, N8n, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, WhisperFlow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatBRD, and Mobben. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Julie Zhuo. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. I've been banking with Mercury for years, and honestly, I can't imagine banking any other way at this point. I switched from Chase and holy moly, what a difference. Sending wires, tracking spend, giving people on my team access to move money around, so freaking easy. Where most traditional banking websites and apps are clunky and hard to use, Mercury is meticulously designed to be an intuitive and simple experience. And Mercury brings all the ways that you use money into a single product, including credit cards, invoicing, bill pay, reimbursements for your teammates, and capital. Whether you're a funded tech startup looking for ways to pay contractors and earn yield on your idle cash or an agency that needs to invoice customers and keep them current or an e-commerce brand that needs to stay on top of cash flow and access capital, Mercury can be tailored to help your business perform at its highest level. See what over 200,000 entrepreneurs love about Mercury. Visit mercury.com to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services provided through Mercury's FDIC-insured partner banks. For more details, check out the show notes. Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly, but many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like, which tools are working? How are they being used? What's actually driving value? DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift. With DX, companies like Dropbox, Booking.com, Adyen, and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity. To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny. That's getdx.com/lenny. (instrumental music) Julie, thank you so much for being here, and welcome back to the podcast.