Julie Zhou: Your Direct Reports Are Now AI Agents

Why Management Skills Matter More Than Ever

This is Julie Zhou - longtime head of design for the Facebook app (3 billion users), author of The Making of a Manager, now founder of Sundial - explaining why everyone needs to learn management skills. Not because they'll manage people, but because they'll manage AI agents.

"Management is having an outcome and using resources to achieve it." The classic framework: people, purpose, process. Same framework applies to agents. You still need the right mix of capabilities. You still need clarity on the goal. You still need process for how things come together. The resources changed from people to models, but the skill is identical.

She's not hiring product managers. When you have a PM and designer, the engineer defaults to delegation: "That's their job, I'll let them handle it." Without PMs, engineers realize: "Communication is up to me. User experience is my charter." Short-term slower (people learning new skills), long-term massive payoff. Everyone becomes more well-rounded.

"We need to dissolve traditional role boundaries and call ourselves builders." Designer, engineer, PM, data scientist - these distinctions made sense when skills were siloed. Now AI lets anyone reach 60-70th percentile in adjacent skills. Frontend/backend separation dissolving too. The title should just be "builder."

ChatGPT is a better teacher than humans. Julie feeds curricula into ChatGPT and asks it to customize for her learning style (examples, analogies, explain-like-I'm-five). Different teammates have different learning preferences. Personalized AI learning accelerates skill acquisition faster than asking a colleague to explain everything.

The willow tree metaphor for management in AI era. Be sturdy while being flexible. A willow survives storms and disasters, but it bends. Management has always been about managing change - the rate of change is just accelerating.

10 Insights From Julie Zhou on Managing AI Agents

• Everyone becomes a manager - Direct reports are agents, not people
• Same framework: people, purpose, process - Resources change, skills transfer
• Not hiring PMs - Forces engineers to own communication, user experience
• "Builder" as universal title - Dissolve PM/designer/engineer boundaries
• 60-70th percentile in adjacent skills - AI gets you from 0 to competent
• Frontend/backend dissolving too - One person can span the stack with AI
• ChatGPT as personalized teacher - Customize curricula to learning style
• Accelerated learning - 30 minutes with AI beats hours with colleagues
• Willow tree management - Sturdy but flexible; rate of change accelerating
• Smaller teams, broader scope - Two people can now cover multiple disciplines

What This Means for Future Tech Careers

The most valuable professional skill of the next decade isn't coding or design - it's management. Not managing people, but managing AI agents. The same framework applies: people, purpose, process. Your direct reports just happen to be models instead of humans.