design 16
- Excellence in design is not just craft quality; it is whether a designer is both willing and allowed to create impact.
- Okay design improves what is put in front of it; excellent design changes what is possible.
Julie Zhuo
Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.
Julie Zhuo did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
What Julie Zhuo says most about
management 8
- In the best working relationships the manager is a guide, not a judge deciding whether you deserve a promotion or a firing.
- Managing change has always been the manager's whole job; the only thing AI changed is how fast the change now arrives.
taste 8
- You cannot A/B test your way into a really great product.
- Great taste is more objective than people assume.
chat interfaces 3
- ChatGPT exploded because of its obvious chat interface, not its technology, which had launched earlier in a different wrapper that few noticed.
- A blank chat box is lazy: it violates the first rule of a good user experience, that it is obvious what you can do.
product management 3
- AI has made individuals capable enough that the boundaries between engineer, designer, researcher and product manager should be dissolved.
- You cannot A/B test your way into a really great product.
LLMs 2
- Models have personalities the way people do, and using them well means developing an intuition for which one to reach for.
- The most underused thing AI does is teach you: people reach for it to write their code and forget it can take them through a curriculum in an hour.
motivation 2
- People are unhappy in their careers when the thing they want and the work it takes to get it are out of sync, not because they climbed the wrong ladder.
- Boredom is a missing skill rather than a property of the situation: there is infinity in every direction, including a blank wall.
simplicity 2
- The most powerful rule for an exceptional interface is that it feels obvious to use; novelty, minimalism and simplicity are means to that, not the end.
- Better design does not mean more design: the most obvious designs are often invisible.
startups 2
- The fastest-growing companies are not using data well, because they reached enormous scale before they had time to build any of the instrumentation.
- Growth always stops eventually, and only a company that instrumented its business beforehand gets to find out why instead of scrambling.