Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.
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Each column is a stretch of time in which the same views came up; a new column starts when one appears or goes quiet. Quiet means nothing on it in our sources for that stretch, which is not the same as a change of mind; Dropped means they said they no longer hold it; tap the card for which claim and when. Revised means the view carries on but one of its claims was dropped. Each row is one view, in the same place all the way along. The number is how many claims in that stretch; we hold 2 in 2020, 0 in 2021, 0 in 2022, 7 in 2023, 0 in 2024, 32 in 2025.
Taste is telling excellent from mediocre; it is more objective, and more exposed to AI, than people assume
Their wordsTaste, that lovely thing, is simply an ability to make a small ripple in the small pond we are familiar with; sometimes, luck takes that ripple and propels it across other ponds and oceans.
Their wordsGood taste: taste is the ability to distinguish excellence from mediocrity. The hand can never consistently produce better than the eye can discern.
Julie ZhuoCo-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product…Design is not the way it looks, or beautiful colors and animations. It's not the brand or the logo. It is how the product works. Designing is the the process of exploring and arriving at a solution. I believe all builders are designers.↗The Looking Glass: What AI Won't Changelg.substack.com · 20 Apr 2023
Their wordsDesign is not the way it looks, or beautiful colors and animations. It's not the brand or the logo. It is how the product works. Designing is the the process of exploring and arriving at a solution. I believe all builders are designers.
Their wordsObviousness comes from conforming to people’s existing mental models. Don’t waste time reinventing common UI patterns or paradigms unless they are at least 2x better, or you have some critical brand reason to do so.
Their wordsSometimes designers will go to great lengths to make a user interface novel, or minimal, or simple. This is the wrong goal. Novelty, minimalism or simplicity are good heuristics for obviousness, but do not mistake the means for the end.
Their wordsThe problem with a blank chat box on a blank page is that it violates the first rule of a high-quality user experience: it isn’t obvious what I can do.
Their wordsThe technology powering ChatGPT had already launched prior to November 30th, 2022. It was just wrapped in a different interface. Very few people paid attention. Why did ChatGPT explode in popularity? Because of its obvious chat interface, which everyone intuitively already knew how to use it.
Julie ZhuoCo-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product…The more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition. Despite having seen thousands of a/b test results for minor design details, I am still regularly surprised and humbled by my intuition being wrong.↗The Looking Glass: What AI Won't Changelg.substack.com · 20 Apr 2023
Their wordsThe more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition. Despite having seen thousands of a/b test results for minor design details, I am still regularly surprised and humbled by my intuition being wrong.
Their wordsSo the other thing I would say that I really support is like you just actually can't make a really great product by thinking you can AB test your way into it.
Their wordsBecause it's like okay we got these numbers and the numbers go up. It's like no, the fact that you still have to choose which things you look at is an art, not a science. And your interpretation of if the number went up 5%, is that good? Is that not good? Is also an interpretation and is an is an art, not a science.
Their wordswhat you really want is you want to diagnose with data and treat with design. So data is not a tool that's going to tell you what you should build or what the solution is or how we're going to, you know, cure the fact that you don't have really great retention. It's just not.
Their wordsIt's easier to even predict whether growth will slow down at a certain point. it's easier to catch these trends earlier. If you don't have good observability over how your business runs and what the company's um key levers are, then you will be scrambling.
Their wordsSo the funny thing, my funny answer to this is I don't actually think a lot of the fast growing companies are using data well at this point. And the main reason why is because traditionally things just didn't grow that fast.
Their wordsused to be let's say in the Google world right I knew you were interested in shopping if you click the shopping tab I know you're interested in maps if you click the maps tab, we can measure clicks. Today, it's just all conversation. And so, it's actually harder for us to tease apart what is the user intent.
Their wordswe often also have this mental model of like oh our managers are a judge and they're going to judge me on whether or not I got it I did well I should get a promotion I should be fired so there's this sometimes fear that people have but I think in the very best relationships the manager is like a guide
Their wordsBut feedback really in my mind ideally should be like a daily practice because the thing that matters for us in the long run as a team is how quickly are we getting better. So a team that just gets 1% better every week compared to a team that gets 1% better a month is even if they start off at a much lower baseline is going to outperform in a very short amount of time the team that doesn't get better.
Their wordsand that's in some ways what allows it to be very sturdy so I Think today management is really about this idea of like be sturdy while being flexible and that is a very hard thing to pull off
Their wordsI think that managing change, it's always been manager's job to manage change and there's always the chaos of what's going on. I just think the rate of change is accelerating and we've seen that over the last couple of decades.
Their wordsI can tell you right now, every single manager I've ever managed where they're like, I don't really think this is a good idea. The there's no case where I can think of where the project somehow turned out to be like wildly successful.
Their wordsSay goodbye to cycles of mock and doc feedback, and say hello to code-first prototypes with constant iteration (on prompts, models, etc) to answer three key questions.
Their wordsI find that sometimes when you have like a designer or product manager and let's say I'm an engineer, then when I have a problem like, oh, I need to figure out the product definition, my default will be, well, I've got these people and that's kind of their job description, so I'm just going to delegate that to them.
Their wordsAnd so the main thing that I felt so excited about and this is something I tell my team all the time is we need to dissolve the boundaries of these traditional roles.
Their wordsmanagement is just about in my mind having an outcome. So you want to get something done. That's the thing. You have a northstar. 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.
Their wordsif you're really unclear about what success looks like the prompt, you're probably not going to get the most amazing work. Um I think that's true for managing teams and it's very much true for managing AIs.
Their wordsAnd you have to understand the strengths of of you know used to be people but now it's basically models and different models have different strengths. So it's like they have different personalities
Their wordsYou can shortcut like hard feelings because now you can just watch TikTok instead of actually dealing with the very difficult emotion or tension that you had with a colleague or with your partner or with your children.
Their wordsSo yes, the tools are great. We can use cursor. It helps us. It autocompletes. It writes a bunch of things. But the acceleration of learning I think is another maybe underutilized tool in all of our arsenals
Their wordsbut if I was, you know, at the zero or 10th percentile, it can certainly get me even today very quickly up to like the 60th 70th in terms of um what the state of the art is.