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Julie Zhou

Julie Zhou

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About Julie Zhou

Julie Zhou was VP of Product Design at Facebook for over a decade, leading design for products used by 3 billion people. She wrote "The Making of a Manager" and now runs Sundial, applying her management philosophy to the AI era.

Career Highlights

  • Sundial (2022-present): Co-founder and CEO
  • Facebook/Meta (2006-2019): VP of Product Design
  • The Making of a Manager (2019): Bestselling management book
  • Product design at scale for 3B+ users

Notable Positions

On Everyone Becoming Managers

Her core thesis for the AI era:

"Everyone is becoming a manager now - your direct reports are AI agents. Management is having an outcome and using resources to achieve it. Same framework applies: people, purpose, process. The resources changed from people to models, but the skill is identical."

On the "Builder" Title

Arguing for role dissolution:

"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."

On Not Hiring PMs

A radical org design choice:

"I'm not hiring product managers. When you have a PM and designer, the engineer defaults to delegation. Without PMs, engineers realize: communication is up to me, user experience is my charter."

Key Quotes

  • "Your direct reports are AI agents."
  • "Call ourselves builders, not designers or engineers."
  • "AI gets you to 60-70th percentile in adjacent skills."