i think about product and feedback as is kind of just you know the more the better right again everyone especially with design like has an opinion to some degree right and so all opinions are valid because they are a true opinion the question is how do you then prioritize how do you figure out what it is that you should do because it isn't
successful to try and you know do things by consensus you're never going to get a group of people smart people to agree about what is absolutely the best design welcome to our very first episode with julie zoo julie spent 13 years at facebook where she was the head of design for the facebook app she actually joined as an
ic designer and worked her way up to vp of design she's also an incredible writer having written the best-selling book the making of a manager she's also the author of a newsletter called looking glass which was a huge inspiration to me throughout my entire career since leaving meta she started her own
company called sundial which you'll hear a bit about and in our chat we cover career advice imposter syndrome product review meetings hiring designers giving feedback to designers and so much more i hope you enjoy this chat as much as i did this episode is brought to you by amplitude the number one product analytics solution
amplitude helps product teams growth teams marketing and data teams build winning products faster and turn products into revenue amplitude has everything you need including an integrated cdp self-service analytics and even an experimentation platform to help you better understand your users drive conversions and increase engagement
growth and revenue amplitude is built for teams that want to learn as fast as they ship and ship as fast as they learn ditch your vanity metrics trust your data work smarter and grow your business with over 1700 customers like atlassian instacart and hbo amplitude is helping companies build better products
try amplitude for free visit amplitude.com to get started [Music] this episode is brought to you by product board product leaders trust product board to help their teams build products that matter from startups to industry titans over six thousand companies rely on product board to get the right products to market faster
including companies like zoom volkswagen uipath and vanguard product board can help you create a scalable transparent and standardized process so your pms understand what their customers really need and then prioritize the right features to build next stakeholders feel the love too with an easy to view roadmap that automatically
updates so everyone knows what you're building and why make data-driven product decisions that result in higher revenue and user adoption and empower your product teams to create delightful customer experiences visit productboard.com to learn more [Music] julie i am so excited to be chatting you've been such an inspiration to me
both in my pm career and in my writing i think i mentioned that your newsletter inspired my newsletter and so i'm really excited to be chatting and i'm really thankful that you're joining me on this podcast thank you lenny it is a pleasure to be here i think it's going to be a super fun conversation for listeners who maybe
aren't familiar with you in your career could you just kind of briefly walk us through your journey in design and then a little bit about what you're up to these days okay so let's see i'm a first generation immigrant to the united states and so with asian parents there were really only three options that i had for a
career from like the time i was six years old i was told i could either be a doctor a lawyer or an engineer nothing else was really in the realm of possibilities unfortunately you know i was really scared of blood so i couldn't be a doctor and i only liked reading fiction growing up so i was like i could never
really be a lawyer so i was always like okay quite this engineering thing but actually it was during middle school and high school that i discovered what i love to do is drawing and in particular digital art and the reason for that is because i actually have a very shaky hands and so whenever i draw a line it
never looks good i have to erase it start over you know and so by the time the art was done it was like a mess it was like here's like 20 000 eraser marks but when i discovered ms paint and i kid you not that was my very first design application i was like oh my gosh i can draw a line and even if it looks crummy
which it always does because you have to use a mouse in those early days i can just control z goes away and just keep trying over and over again no one ever has to know how often i i tried to get to this to be what i wanted and so ms payne became paint shop pro and then one summer i finagled my way into a pirated
copy of photoshop because you know i couldn't actually afford real photoshop and i was off to the races in my digital art career and it was actually through digital art that i realized okay i've actually amassed all this collection of art what should i do and i was like well let me go and actually build a website and it's all all these
artists that i admire on the internet did that like so i'm gonna learn how to write html and put together a website and that's essentially what i did on the side in my middle and high school years so that's kind of how i got into like design but i didn't know it was design because i really still thought of myself
as an artist and i thought that the only thing i could be was an engineer but i went in and studied computer science in college where i always had this like vision okay if i like building websites maybe you know computer engineering is is the closest thing to that and i had this idea that maybe i could go work for one of these big tech
companies and it was really after i took a class my senior year that taught me you know what is silicon valley what is entrepreneurship by the way here's like all these stories of two people in a garage and then they went and built something big and i totally just was so into that i was like all right i do not
want to work for a big company i want to figure out if i can do this startup thing and you know make something small into something big and i just happened to be very lucky at the time i was you know there was a startup down the street from my university it's a product i had been using for two or three years it was facebook
it was still a high school and college social networking product at the time eight million users they were doing a lot of recruitment at stanford and so that's how i decided to go and join for an internship and on my first day i remember my mentor aruchi she said you know what kind of engineering do you like to do and i was like the stuff that
people see of course you know i want to like be able to it's the stuff that i'd always done right and she was oh i see you should go sit next to the designers and that was the first time i heard that design was a profession that it was actually a job it was like a thing that people did and back in those days you
know all of all of the design team was technical so we were both the front-end engineers as well as the designers but i felt like i'd found my tribe i had found people who kind of had always been passionate about this thing that i did that i didn't really realize was a job and so i realized though as well that i had a
lot to learn about design i was never really formally trained in it right i'd only ever designed for myself for me to express my creative artistic side so there was a lot in those first three years i would think of my time at facebook as chapter one learn how to be a designer you know learn about usability learn about the actual
language nomenclature of design you know learn how to think about the user as somebody separate than just me and my own work then because facebook was always scaling i got the opportunity to eventually manage a team of designers totally unprepared for that no idea what i was doing kind of jumped in and and just you know started
to manage but there was a huge amount of learning around you know recruiting process like what even is good design what is the the way that we want to design at this company in our team and so tons of learnings there and then i think the third chapter is just sort of thinking about scale right learning how to scale and management
learning how to build a wide diversity of products learning more about strategy and how design fits into you know working with all of these other disciplines to build something great so that's kind of how i think about my time at facebook and the various chapters and the latest chapter is you know i
eventually i left facebook about two years ago and now i am a startup founder so it's something that i've always wanted to do so go back to that the early phases of figuring out how to build something from zero to one and i'm working on a product in product analytics i'm really passionate about the idea of making data accessible about
i've seen the power first hand from working at facebook of what data can do to help us make better products especially for people at scale to help us reduce the bias in our intuitions and how we think about what is the way that we should prioritize and i'm really passionate about the idea of making that such that every single
company every single business in the world can properly use data know how to interpret it correctly know how to use it to influence roadmap strategy and prioritization decisions and make better decisions as a result i feel like this idea that you're working on has such intense founder market fit and i can't
wait to hear more about it when you're ready to go deeper and and for people to use it but going back to your time on facebook you kind of like made it sound like you just kind of like i joined as a designer figured out design became a manager and then like somehow you became vp of design and it sounded too easy and i'm curious what
that's like an insane trajectory for someone to follow do you have any thoughts or advice on what contributed to your success rising through the ranks that quickly for folks that are kind of just early in their career maybe absolutely and i want to make it really clear i would say that like the first
seven or eight years that i was at facebook every single week i felt like an imposter i had no idea really what i was doing you know the constant refrain in my head is like well do you really deserve to be here do you really know what's happening you know you don't you're not really prepared for this job you've never done
this before like what right do you have to be put in this situation and and get to do what you do right and that was really a constant refrain in my head but looking back you know i i think it probably took me about yeah seven or eight years until i became a little bit more comfortable with that you know after seven or eight years i
could look back i could see all of the things that i got to work on i could see all the ways that i had grown and learned in that experience and something clicked for me where i realized you know it's kind of two sides of the same coin right being in an uncomfortable situation being in a position where you
feel like hey you know do i really know how to do this i've not prepared for it it's kind of coincides with the fastest and and most intense periods of growth in in you know in one's career and i started to realize well maybe it's not so much of a bad thing right maybe if i constantly putting myself in a situation
where i haven't seen this problem before that's also what's going to push me to grow and learn right and so yes your last first physical advice i think there's two things the first is well i was lucky i was in the right place at the right time i was at a company that was scaling and when you're at a company that grows there's always a
lot more opportunity to then be able to try something new right to raise your hand to volunteer for things to be just thrown into because somebody has to do it because it's a growing company and there aren't a lot of other people so so the first piece of advice i would have would be like you know if you want those
types of opportunities sometimes you just have to be at a smaller place and you have to be at a place that is going through that that rate of growth the second thing is you know embrace the fact that it's okay to be in a position where maybe you don't know what to do you haven't been trained for it right it it does coincide with that
intense learning maybe approach it with that sense of curiosity and that sense of you know yes it's hard yes i might be an imposter and i might feel that way for a while but this is also what's going to help me get there it's going to it's going to be what forces me to do the work and in that process learn and become better
it's amazing to hear that you had imposter syndrome for such a long period of time and you you basically ran design for like the facebook app right yeah it's kind of an empowering inspiring insight that someone that at your level went through that for so long and made it through that do you have any other advice or thoughts on just like for
folks that are going through that because i had that too for a number of years just like what the hell am i doing here people are gonna see i don't really know what i'm doing and it's all gonna crumble as soon as i make my next mistake do you have any other advice there for folks going through that themselves
i think that's so much of the you know just exactly what you said lenny right i think so much of it that helped me was realizing that everyone feels this way to some extent and and that's also why i i always want to talk about that right because i feel like sometimes you can see from the outside you're like oh this
person has this title they have this position they have these responsibilities clearly they've made it they know what they're doing but that's never the case and i mean logically let's think about it right if you're going to do anything new for the first time how are you ever going to feel totally comfortable you know totally
prepared right every time there's something new that you hadn't encountered before you know it's always going to be a little bit rough you're never going to feel like perfectly at ease it's only upon doing something multiple times that you start to see the patterns you start to realize okay it's going to be all right and even you know
now the people that i talk to the people i really look up to the people who i think are role models and mentors for me i mean they regularly also share with me that it's the same it's like they you know they still encounter things that are unprecedented right and if we work in tech i mean the rate of
change the rate of you know the industry and companies and kind of these new experiences that we have that never goes away right that's just par for the course and so i think that feeling always exists what i have learned is that there are better you know tools in your toolkit for dealing with it one of them is of course
me just reminding myself that if i feel uncomfortable it's okay other people feel that way too everyone does it's totally natural but then to also find other pieces in that toolkit right one is i am much better at asking for help now than i was earlier in my career you know i used to actually just try and
hold it all in i was like hey i better fake it until i make it you know if no one thinks that i if everyone thinks that maybe i'm coming to the table like i know it then then you know then then i can fool them and now i realize i was really just i was preventing myself from from being able to get that support and that
empathy and that camaraderie and that advice that would have helped me actually grow faster and maybe with a little bit less pain in the process and so one of the things i've learned is it's okay to ask for help it's okay to reach out to people who both may be going through the same things you're going or maybe are a step or two ahead
of you in the journey right who have actually gone through that and have lived to tell the tale and can tell you it's going to be okay because often that's just what you need you know you just need people to tell you it's going to be fine you're fine you're good you've got this and that you know that's
so meaningful right whenever you know we sometimes feel down about ourselves so that's another you know i would say tool in the toolkit right asking for help finding groups of support and then i think the third is it's also okay to just be vulnerable and just talk to people about right like you know i i found that some of the most
meaningful conversations i had whether with people at managers or whether with my own reports is when we can you know be much more open about what it is that we find hard what are we struggling with and in that way you know it you actually form deeper connections and and people are more able to help out right they're able
we can we can spread the load a little bit you know we can put our heads together and brainstorm a better way to solve the problem and i i find that too even as like you know the head of a department right or like a founder it's like i'm not gonna solve everything myself i'm never gonna have all the answers sometimes by just sharing what
the problem is by sharing the load we're all going to collectively come up with with a better solution i love that advice it's so simple and so effective reminds me of advice a coach once told me that when you're in a new role you like you are an imposter you're doing something you've never done
before and that's normal and don't feel like that's unusual so speaking of being uncomfortable and being vulnerable and doing hard things you you now have a startup that you've started and i'm curious what you've experienced what's kind of different from the experience of being a leader at meta versus being a founder especially things
that are maybe are surprising good or bad i will say it is definitely a very humbling experience but it's also the exactly the journey that i wanted and a lot of it is just going back to kind of this like base layer you know when you're at a large company a lot is taken care of for you right you know if i have a question
about i don't know like finance or how to deal with the people situation right they're experts there's like experts in every single field and i just go and you know reach out to them and talk to them and then you know they can kind of uh handle that and help me you know when you get back to it it's like okay it's
it's in the beginning it was myself and my founder chandra it's like just the two of us and it was like all sorts of stuff you know that we've talked about being imposter it's like figuring out taxes or just like figuring out how to incorporate or just you know random little a thousand little decisions right a thousand little things
that were that were new and different so there's a huge amount of learning there's a huge amount of just like having to do it all yourself and realizing in a lot of ways just like how many things you're bad at or don't really like to do or then because you don't like to do them it's like hard to get them done right so it's humbling
that way of just like helping you realize these things about about who you are i think the other thing is you know for me it's going back to the idea of like being much more focused on doing working with people who are at different stages in their career you know when i was leading design for let's say the last
five or seven years right i was often directly managing senior people you know either senior designers or managers or directors and and so forth and going back to working with folks at various stages right including new grads right early career folks i was actually both me realizing i had i had to kind of like really change a lot of how i managed so
it was again also very humbling in that respect i had to change a lot of like what good management looks like in that context which was different from a lot of the habits that i had built up but it was also so rewarding and i realized like i actually really love working with people you know who are in that early
phase of their career it's it's totally different right and and what they need and how to best support them is really different than what you would do with a director or you know a very senior person but it's also just a whole lot of fun so that was you know something that that is really new and then of course so
much of it is again putting putting that ic hat back on right and it's been years since i've actually sat down and designed and you know often as a manager the thing i develop right is you know i've developed my eye but not my hand so i learned to be a good critiquer of design but actually because i stopped
practicing design you know i'm definitely the limits of like what i can actually make and what i can produce myself become really evident right and so again back in this like new company setting well i have to put on a bit of that icy hat you know i have to like learn how to be a kind of an icpm learn how to be an ic designer realize that
there's so much that you know i'm actually really bad at as well and and in that way but develop and grow some of my muscles and those skills again the first point you made about having to kind of do everything again i remember the reverse of that when we sold our startup i was so happy just to like okay here's a one goal we're gonna
focus on we don't have to think about everything in the company all the time i'm just gonna hit this one goal this one product it's gonna be so so much easier and that was really fun for a while but then and then gets itchy and hard again and you kind of wanna you wanna have more responsibility and more
more challenge i wanna transition a little bit to talking about your writing and writing in general i think i mentioned that your newsletter looking glass inspired my writing in a big way i basically modeled your newsletter and focused it on growth and product and that's like that was the idea let me just do what julie's doing
and i'll do it around a different vertical and so first of all i just want to thank you for writing all the writing that you've done over the years because it was really impactful to me and so so first of all thank you for doing that well thank you for sharing that it's really meaningful for me to hear as well and it's still i can still go back to a
lot of your writing even though you know i know you've slowed down to focus on on the startup which makes a lot of sense and we'll chat a little bit about that but i'm curious what got you to kind of start the writing and broadly what impact have you seen it have on your career and just anything in life what actually started me on this
writing journey was a piece of feedback i got during a performance review cycle i remember i was talking to my manager and you know he shared that hey one of the pieces of something you should work on an area of growth is that you know you have a lot of really great ideas and you're always really engaged
whenever discussions happen in a small forum right one-on-one or there's like two or three people in the room but whenever there's a large room you know we're talking about like seven people 10 people 15 people no one ever hears from you right you're just sort of quiet you know and you're not really telling
your perspective you're not really contributing to these larger conversations and that's something for you to think about and work on and it was really good feedback because you know i absolutely felt it i definitely felt that barrier of speaking up in a large room i think the fear could be summarized as i don't want to
look stupid in front of a lot of people and and so i had all these like barriers i was like okay am i sure that what i'm going to say what comes out of my mouth is absolutely brilliant and that was really you know just this motion right that was that was getting in the way and i was like okay i really want to work on
this like i want to figure out how to get that to be less and less of a friction for me and so it was around i think the january time frame right so when the new year came i was like okay here's an idea what if i just did something that at the time seemed really scary to me which was put my opinion out there on the internet
and just just do it just do it for a year okay just my goal was post one thing every single week and it seemed terrifying right like i you know i'm not sure what people are going to say again maybe all my ideas are stupid but i just want to get better at doing that and hopefully through that year get more comfortable with that so
that's how this whole writing thing began it came with this kind of you know new year's resolution of just 52 times i was going to click publish on something some opinion piece and i was like you know it doesn't have to be like it doesn't matter what the opinion is right just like put something out there and
just you know expose yourself a little bit in that manner so that's what i did and i tried this you know i tried to not have any goals around like well i don't you know maybe people will read it maybe it'll be considered high quality not right those are all just again additional barriers that i was putting that would make it be
even harder for me right the only goal was to hit the publish button and so i the first couple weeks were actually quite excruciating i remember i just spent like hours on this piece and i just kept editing it and i was like you know i don't know if this is any good like should i actually publish it but eventually i did it right and and
again little by little it started to just become easier as anything does when you just do it a lot so by week 10 by week 15 i had gotten into a bit of a cadence and i realized something that that was having an impact on my work i realized that it became much more clarifying for me to have that space to be able to write and
it almost became a kind of self therapy because you know through the week i would have all these thoughts running around my head you know things i wanted to get better at pieces of product that i was mulling on and the act of writing allowed me some quiet time to just sit down and try and organize those
different threads of thoughts right and i i always approach my writing then and i still do now as letters to myself you know this is the framework this is the advice that i need to give myself that i need to go and and really you know do better and that is what my writing became for me and it was hugely helpful for clarifying
my train of thought it was hugely helpful for me to then be able to do a better job of expressing myself and by the end of that year i saw a huge difference in my ability than in large meetings to speak up and to become more comfortable but even after that year because i had seen all of these advantages and and what it did for my
clarity of thinking i just decided to continue and i just decided to continue in it became also a really i think a wonderful side effect that other people started to resonate with the writing you know they were like oh this is actually helpful for me or i was feeling the same thing or you know this this gave me a little bit of
additional structure to think about the problem right and that was also extremely motivating but i will say that what i think helped me continue the writing habit it's like i always did it for me and i always did it because i felt that there was a lot that i had to gain from it and it's been obviously a
wonderful experience to connect with readers and other people in the community about it it definitely made me feel less alone it definitely confirmed a lot of you know the the the ideas that i had about you know is this the right way to think about something it led to a lot of really rich discussions with my
colleagues and and with people you know who just emailed or or responded about the about the writing so that was a wonderful side benefit as well but but yeah i i really credit my ability to think better through the process and the practice of writing that's such a such a cool story i love that it was kind of driven by a manager
but kind of led to so many externalities one thing i wanted to ask you is how did you find time to this writing you know people always want to write and very few people do or find time to how did you actually make the time and keep that up i actually had this practice of writing even before i did this you know more
publicly with a blog and it was because i i had this i heart for this dream back when i was a teenager and and well into my my college years of of one day writing the next great american novel and uh so i wrote a lot of fiction and i wrote a lot of you know i have like kind of four unpublished novels just like collecting dust they are not very good i
can say that now you know with a lot more objectivity but i did that and i would participate in this program called nanowrimo every year which later i was fortunate enough to to kind of be on the board of for a number of years but what nanowrimo was is this idea of like it stands for national novel writing month
in november so it's exactly what it sounds like in the month of november the goal is to write a 50 000 word novel in 30 days and the whole purpose and the whole point of nanowrimo and again i did it for a number of years in my early 20s is that it's all about just getting the words out right it's not about like hey are
you you know does every paragraph is every sentence pristine or do you have like the right beginning middle end it was like no it was like you're going to write a novel every single day you need to write 1667 words and you just do that over 30 days you'll have 50 000 words and the whole premise was like yeah no those 50
000 words they're definitely going to be junk they're not going to be really good but at the end you'll have something that you can then edit and then you can shape and you refine right and the hardest part is just getting started you know it's just getting past like the blank screen and the first page and so
because i'd gone through that experience i had really internalized that writing for me is just get the words out right it is just about the sit your butt and the seat and just do it get the word count goal out or get like a time goal i actually like word count goal even better than time goal because sometimes you can spend 30
minutes and then still just produce a sentence and so that was always how i approached my writing i was like i'm going to sit my butt down you know i'm going to write for 30 or 45 minutes but it's going to be whatever like 250 words it's going to be 500 words it's going to be this number of words and that just gave me the discipline to
just get it out and then think about revising think about quality think about all that later and when i got into writing my book that was exactly how i approached the first draft i was like okay i'm gonna divide up it needs to be you know 67 that or 60 or 70 000 words i have like you know a year i'm gonna divide it up into like the number of
days and weeks and i think what it came down to for me was like five nights a week i needed to write 500 words each each day and i eventually got that down to it was like 30 or 45 minutes right let me have some days a little longer other days a little shorter but it was about that and i just kept that weekly
goal up until the book was written speaking in the book i definitely wanted to chat about that briefly did you always know you wanted to write a book or is this kind of thing that emerged from people just asking the same questions again and again and then similarly what impact have you seen from from that book which i own many copies
and have gifted many copies thank you you know it really i mean i still i had this dream that i would write the great american novel i still want to do that someday you know one day i really do want to sit down and hopefully write a fiction book so i always had that on my mind i don't think i ever thought that i
would write like a non-fiction book i never thought i would write like a business book right that really came about organically and it came about because i was writing this blog and i was publishing these letters to myself right that i was again putting on the internet and then even occasionally i would have
you know publishers or various folks reach out and say oh you know like this was a really great article have you ever thought about developing that into a book and my answer for the longest time was always like no because i don't think i have the stamina to like you know make this one topic into like this huge thing i'm not i
don't think about myself as kind of like a a career writer and you know i honestly just there wasn't necessarily anything that i felt was uh that differentiated or maybe a unique angle right and often you know i also felt that most books that i read there was always like a huge amount of research that went into it and i was
like i'm just i'm actually like i know this about myself i don't love research i'm not great at it you know i don't want to like sit there and compile a bunch of stats and and whatnot to make an argument but one day a publisher reached out and they were like you know we had some ideas about about the fact that you know you're you're writing
really especially the the the part about for new managers right your advice for new managers or for people new to leadership like it really seems like it strikes a chord for that particular audience and we have some ideas like why don't you know we get on the phone to discuss and i took that call and it actually
really was that call just did change my perspective because it gave me a particular angle on something that i felt was missing in the market right you know again most of the stuff that i'm writing again they're they're letters of their advice to myself but i i was brought back to when i first became a manager and i went back you know i went
to the bookstore one day i was looking for resources on what it means to manage and you know just stuff that would help me become a better manager and not a lot of it spoke to me because it seemed like most management books were written by ceos who had been you know leading their company for years and years or it was by
management consultants who didn't really seem like they had you know been in the situation of just like hey i was an ic on the team and now next week i have four reports that i'm going to be working with there just wasn't that much for like the completely new manager who didn't have an mba wasn't on some sort
of ladder and just like one day got dropped and asked to kind of go and support a couple people who are starting next week and i was brought back to that moment in time and realizing you know there really isn't that much that is great out there it's particularly geared for new managers and i felt that i had to really
learn and make a lot of these mistakes on my own and even very fundamentally i don't think that you know people ever really explained to me like what is a manager like what does it mean to do a good job you know again as a as a manager of a handful of people right and so it sparked this idea that like this was
something that was somewhat missing in the market that there was an opportunity to just you know really write something that could speak to people like me and people you know again similar to me who maybe weren't on this like ladder for 10 or 12 years especially in tech right i knew many people who had gone through that and i
realized like here the second thing for me is i realized that i would likely also become a better manager through this process because it would force me to think about management a lot every single day it would force me to reflect on my frameworks for management and whenever you think about something all the time in the back of
your head you just you know it it's just more top of mind right i was looking to become a better manager myself at that point and and that was the that was the additional boost that i needed to kind of commit to the project is that last piece bit me in the butt at all when you maybe make a mistake as a
manager and people like julie you wrote this book on management what the hell is going on i always tell people i tell my own reports as well i was like you might come in and you might have read my book and you might think that somehow i am you know a really great manager and an expert in management and i always try to
like you know like i'm gonna lower your expectations i'm still learning there's a lot of things that you know i'm i'm still working on right that that i know i'm not uh perfect at but that's that's what i think it is right i think so much about for me at least learning to be a better manager and i know i'll probably
be on this journey for the rest of my life is that you can know often times the theory because like the theory is it makes sense right it's like okay we all you know been in that situation we can feel it is so hard to just actually put it in practice you know it's so hard to do some of these things every single day because they're
sort of counter-intuitive and it is so hard to apply it to the appropriate context right just even the example i gave earlier you know managing early career right new grads is just completely different than managing really senior people and and you know being able to tailor to each individual person or each specific group of people which is yeah
again because humans are like we're all different we're all unique right we're you know there's no no two people are the same no groups of people are the same so it is it's you know an art as anything else and and a lot of it too is about learning about who i am right what am i good at what am i not good at how
can i be more honest and more authentic to to my own strengths and weaknesses and then be able to you know pair that up with the person that i'm talking to or the group of people that i'm working with so yeah so definitely you know not by any means today still consider myself great or an expert or whatnot i think like everyone
else i'm still i'm still trying to get better that's a little bit how i feel where people think that i've got it all figured out i'd be like the most amazing product manager they've ever worked with and i feel like i could never get a regular job again because the hype the bar the expectations would be
way too high people forget that i have time to like think research process right and that kind of thing and so i can never get her pm drop again this is basically the problem i think you'd be a pretty great pm lenny it's a it's a little an illusion but i appreciate it this episode is brought to you by sprig
if you've been a member of my community for a while you know my user fan and investor in sprig sprig is a user research platform that makes getting user insights from your product as easy and fast as getting analytics the best product and research teams at companies like loom open door and dropbox use sprig's in-product surveys to target
specific users start collecting insights and identify issues and opportunities related to activation onboarding engagement and more talk about a platform that pays for itself but i'm perhaps most excited about sprig's newest launch which extends the power of the platform pre-launch and makes it possible to test mockups and prototypes
with your own users in minutes the testing interface is super slick and doesn't require any of the typical plugins that make testing with your own users unappealing and with unlimited seats you're able to invite anyone from your company to view and use insights generated by spring if you want to get
started head over to sprig.com lenny and mention that i sent you the other piece is that you pointed this out that like a lot of people don't realize when folks like us write it's like us figuring it out it's not like we have the answer we're just like okay here i'm just gonna write down the answer already have in my head
it's the process of writing is how we learn a lot about these sorts of things and a lot of people don't realize that yeah yeah i i absolutely agree like i said it's it's about reminding ourselves right like we're you know i always often say i'm like the number one audience for my own writing because i'm the person who
needs to really hear it the most that's exactly how i feel a lot of times and i go back to my own pieces like oh yeah okay that's that's what i that's what i wanted to remember on the on the writing something i wanted to ask about is you've you've kind of slowed down for a good reason you have a startup to run
and you've started doing more tweeting than uh newslettering and blogging how do you think about that just like is that intentional how do you think about i don't know twitter versus newsletters and other things yeah it was very much you know this is another new year's resolution that came up later right and one of the things that you know i
recognize myself about myself is like i kind of have a tendency to ramble you know and i've gotten this feedback as well in 360s where i'm not always the clearest communicator i can be a pretty good storyteller and i am clear in writing often than i am in person but this was another area that i wanted to get better at right i
wanted to get better at in the moment communicating more clearly and being just a little bit sharper a little bit crisper and the points that i had to make and i remember i worked with a number of colleagues who were just so good at this right there will be some really complex topic this big product
thing that we're trying to figure out and in the moment you know it would go and they would say okay i see this is what the problem is the problem is one blah blah blah blah two blah blah blah three like right everybody like yeah you know that's amazing like you know that's so crystal clear like this huge thing we're all talking past each other now
became boiled to something so sharp and so beautiful right and i always had so much respect and admiration for the people who could do that and that wasn't me but i was like okay well as anything if i have a have a thing i like and want and admire and respect i could at least get better at it right maybe i'll never
be at that level but i can work towards it and one of the ways i saw of working towards that is well let's just change it up you know i've been doing long form right which again it works really well for these stories and this kind of like you know more meandering prose but what if i just push myself to communicate in a much shorter
form which is going to force me to really strip away all that ornamentation and focus on the core idea and i was like i'm just going to go and publish threads on twitter for a year again same thing right one once a week a little thread just take whatever is that you know the advice i needed to give myself
and then boil that down to a tweet form so it's also it has helped me it has helped me to get better at enumerating things right i think more naturally now sometimes it's like one two three and that has you know helped me as well in just again the the the day job and the way that i communicate still a long ways to go but that was i think twitter is
really great at that it's really great at trying to boil it down to the essence of what it is that one wants to communicate i love that they use you that use these tools to help work on a very specific skill that you're hoping to develop is that so you said that worked is that something you'd recommend to folks that
are working on something like this and have a challenge there too i do you know i talk to a lot of people who want to write more because they they feel like there is a lot of benefits or maybe it's because you know writers often talk about like all of the benefits but you know a lot of people do help to to maybe find it as you were saying
earlier hard to get started right and my number one advice is like try to find an angle that's going to work for you because if you find yourself writing for your audience you know if you find yourself writing because you want likes or you want a certain number of views that actually is a really hard barrier
to overcome because you don't have control over all of that right but if you write because you're trying to work on a particular key skill you know whether it is clarity of thinking whether it's you know again helping you work through some stuff that's complicated in your mind whether it's just again you know
working on being more comfortable putting your voice out there then make it a goal but make it a action goal right make it like a word count goal you know if you're gonna go i really i saw this on twitter i think it was like last year the idea of like i forget who it was like the 30 days of just you know writing a thing
every day or tweeting a thing every day right and you see this in design too there's like inktober which is like you just draw a thing every single day in the month of october and i love those types of you know kind of structures and programs i think that they're a way to go and get into the habit of that and
you know everyone can feel like they can do anything for 30 days right you can do anything you know for for like three months if you just commit to doing it once a week it doesn't have to be forever it doesn't have to be some sort of like five-year thing and the commitment that's like a huge milestone you just have to do it for a little bit
and then reflect on it is it really helping you right is it actually helping you get close to that goal and that's usually the easiest way i've found to get started i love that just creating a little bit of structure for yourself so you don't have to think about it you just do it and i don't care what i do on
that day but i'm doing it and maybe one time something will come out really great and that that reminds me of something i wanted to plus one the point that especially on twitter i find whenever you're trying to like go viral it just comes across often as just like okay they're just trying to go viral so like lean this person just
wants a lot of likes versus like i just want to share a thing that's interesting to me quickly or here's how i want to think about it or here's just like a thing i want to remember in the future i find those end up being a lot more successful that's right yeah that's totally right i think it's what
what really gets you interested in it is likely this the the thread that you want to enroll and to continue to explore right if you just try and like you know say what you think people want to hear it just comes across not that genuine and personally not that interesting yeah like the thing i've kind of learned is if i find something
interesting other people will find it interesting and so i'll just share that in some form and often ends up being really helpful to a lot of people speaking of twitter one of your one of the threads i've liked best that you've written about and i think you've done this a couple of times is around product thinking and
product sense and how to build that muscle and so i'd love to just hear your advice for folks that are thinking about how do i get better at product sense and product thinking what are ways that people can get better at these things the number one advice that i always have for people when talking about product sense or product thinking is
it's just really about observation and it's about curiosity all right and you can start by first observing yourself you know like every time you're going to go and use something right every time you're going to have a new experience you download an app you try something new it's like take the moment of you know
reflect on on kind of your emotion or your your assumption at every step right like what was the new user experience like what moment did it become clear to you what was going on when were you confused what did you do how many times did you tap something and then had to like exit because you like went down a wrong
pathway right and even before that it's like what even led you to trying this service in the first place to downloading the app you know what was was it word of mouth did a friend did you see something on the internet did somebody that you respect pitch it right but these are all ways in which we're learning about how
things work how products work and it always starts by just if you first observe yourself then you'll make a lot of progress right and oftentimes you know it's hard to do that right because sometimes we're just we're going through the motions or we're not necessarily sitting down and and analyzing every step of it but the first
step i think is just to get you know really good comfortable familiar habitual with just that first that personal observation the second step is then okay cool you do that for yourself well that's not enough because you're not the world right you don't necessarily present everyone but now it's to just sort of con to build on
those circles so the next thing you do is like you go and actually observe and share those observations with somebody else right and so how that often looks is like discussions about products so you download this why did you download this you know like what made you decide that this was a great app do you think
it's a great app you know what was compelling about it and and to just really you know find the curiosity of thinking through which decisions did the builders or the creators of something make and what was the impact of it on you know us users as customers and so forth right so often it goes into then the next step which is spending a lot of
time sharing those observations and critiquing right i mean a rule of thumb is like you know if you really want to get better how often are you having a conversation with somebody about products you know dissecting something right and and really you know you know sharing yeah like what did you think was
good or bad about it and engaging that because if you aren't it's going to be harder for you to actually learn about you know all of those different micro decisions and and what its impact is and then you can go a little broader than that right like there's lots of really great resources there's amazing folks on
the internet right who who will go down and really dissect something you know like i love eugene wade's writing i love like kevin kwok you know like i always learn something because they take these apps like figma or tick-tock or whatever it is and then they really go very very deep with their own observations like
what works what doesn't what patterns do we see across different apps that are successful and that aren't right and this is all helping us to understand what are these again the key decisions and what impact does it lead to that helps us become better at than making those intentional decisions in the product so that's a huge part of it i
think another thing then is of course you have to try and validate right so one thing we can do is of course we look at opinions we look at reactions that's data right that's the qualitative side i think the other side is is quantitative so so often you know if you are building products and you have the opportunity to
run experiments to do a b tests or if you you know again you're working on one team but lots of other people in all lots of other teams are also doing a b test it's so interesting to them be able to like you know ask people right like ask the product manager on the other team about what they're learning about their products and to
really be able to uh look at you know specific decisions and what causally happened as a result that's what i love about a b test and i think being really deep in the data and really going back to like you know can we infer some sort of causal relationship because we're you know correlation or causation but with causation with a b
test can we actually pick up some of these learnings can we look at patterns and can we take some insights away you know that helps validate and confirm a lot of the hypotheses that that we had about product and just ingesting as much of that as you can also helps develop your instinct for what works and what doesn't
right people often have this like oh you know design and user experience is on the other side of the coin you know it's like it's a totally different industry and they're at odds with each other right being data informed and being quantitative versus like being very designery and and and subjective and you know caring
about those aesthetics and i just think that's totally wrong like i think that one helps confirm the assumptions for the other right no it is true that you know looking at a bunch of numbers isn't often going to tell you exactly the leaps of faith that you need to make to start something new but they surely can
help you validate whether a number of your assumptions about how people work or or the way the world works are true or not right and so i know a lot of really brilliant product thinkers who got that way not necessarily because they came through the route of like subjective um observation but because they they went and they were so you know
disciplined about always studying what happened right what was the impact in the numbers and people and so forth and then eventually you marry that of course with you know well why might that be the case you know and you get into the qualitative side and the observation but these two are are both support each
other and helping to build a really great product sense that's awesome there's so much there's so much material there that we could go on and on uh on that last point i wanted to kind of double click on it a little bit so say say you're a founder and you're like man i have all these really clear vision and ideas of where i want
to go with my product and in other teams like i don't know if this is right what if we do a little more user research or run some experiments do you have any advice to the founder of just like when to rely on their gut and experience and just go with that versus doing more research getting more data that is a really great question because
you know i think one of the most common pieces of advice for founders right and i actually also had to like remind myself constantly of this one is like you just the more you know your customers the more you can really like close your eyes and just like imagine everything about their life and what they're doing on
almost like a minute to minute basis probably the better you're going to do in terms of coming up with something that's going to meaningfully solve a problem for them right and so that comes from a couple of different places so the first is like look if you're the you're the person you're building for and
you're the target audience awesome you know you probably do have a lot of stuff that is instinctively you know known to you right and and maybe in those cases you know your team doesn't have that experience and they they maybe can't feel the same level of conviction you do and they might you know be asking you hey well can we
validate and all of that right it's not it's always good advice but sometimes you know you just actually you're so deep in it and you're this person or you know this person or you did this job that that you know you probably can trust your instincts and and your gut quite a bit right and i remember early
days at facebook where that was us like everybody who worked at the company was either a college dropout or recent college grad and we were building a product for college students i mean we're the perfect you know it was like for us by us right we understood exactly what this audience wanted if we didn't we would call up some friends i mean
this was just you know pure target demographic for what we were building but eventually if that's not true and this was you know it evolved at facebook right it evolves for for companies you know you might start out that way but eventually you know we started to open up to the world we started to add people in different
countries like the percentage of people that were like college grads who were like us who were using the product started to shrink became a smaller and smaller percentage of actually you know all core facebook users so therefore our intuitions started to become less and less reliable right and i remember in
spectacular fashion i think this was like in 2000 and not eight or nine we had like a string of failures you know big kind of launches that were that were failures and i think it was because we reached the end of our our our intuition for the user base at that particular moment right and that's true for founders as well like sometimes
you know you're building a product in a domain where you're you weren't the target audience right and i feel this right now for myself you know building an analytics product i was never a data analyst i understand you know from the outside the value of data but i never did the job and and therefore what i really needed to do
was just spend a lot of time you know with data scientists and mercy i'm actually just trying to do the job myself you know because the better that i understand what it is and what it's like and what the company context is and i think for sas companies in particular you might have done the job at one company but you probably didn't do it at
like you know 20 or 50 companies and you're probably selling to like a lot of companies so it's just way more critical for you to spend a lot of time interviewing customers because your intuition is likely not going to carry you nearly as far as if you're building again a very consumer product for a very
consumer audience of which yourself are part of right so i do think that yeah you know it doesn't matter that you need to really understand your customers do you have to go out and do the work have the conversations you know teach yourself the the things that they do yeah uh it depends a bit on the context depends
on where you are but it's never bad advice the better you understand your customers i think the better you're going to be able to build a product i really like that advice of just like this model of the more time the founder spends with their customers the more you can trust that they're going to have the right search of instincts
and the less they start to spend time there maybe start running more experiments and doing more research research as a team around the founder or the larger the larger your user base becomes the less reliable any one or 10 or even 100 people are in terms of understanding the whole right it's just
that the numbers get too big and luckily in theory you have a lot more data at that point and so you can actually run experiments and start relying on data that's right yeah something i also wanted to get your advice on and something that a lot of founders especially and even pms that come to me around is product review meetings and
designer room meetings and i know you've run many and so i wanted to get your thoughts of just how should companies structure product review meetings or designer room meetings who should be in the room how should they be set up any advice for folks that are trying to figure that out i really believe that it's never a bad
thing it's always a better thing to have more feedback right and so often you know i think you don't necessarily want to be like oh you know we have like the one review meeting and that's the one in which we like get everyone's opinions out and we make all these decisions and then we're done i think about product and feedback
as is kind of just you know the more the better right and most people again everyone especially with design like has an opinion to some degree right and so all opinions are valid because they are a true opinion the question is how do you then prioritize how do you figure out what it is that you should do because it isn't
successful to try and you know do things by consensus you're never going to get a group of people smart people to agree about what is absolutely the best design so one principle is okay great you know if you're going to have feedback on the product more is better try and have let's you know like different sessions right with different
groups of people you know often i would advise a designer hey go and actually do a critique with a design audience but go and then you know show this to the people who are most directly working on the product right because they're going to have a different set of knowledge but then go and see if you can find some people
outside of your direct team who don't have you know as much bias on just knowing exactly how things work and then show them the user experience and then go and actually see if you can find like a group of target customers for you know who are actually going to launch right and then run some user research sessions
and get feedback right like they all are going to be valuable they all might contradict each other to some degree but you know it's the right answer isn't like let's just because we don't like disagreement let's just go with like one and then ignore the others right everyone is going to have something to
contribute to the product because you know everyone has that different perspective so again lots of sessions lots of user review sessions awesome okay but then there is an important job which is the synthesis of like all of that feedback and a way of understanding what really matters and and the way that i often think about this is like
we have to be absolutely clear on who is that target audience and what is the most important problem that we're trying to solve for them right so if you can get every group you know to align on this is the value this is who it is right again go and paint that very clear picture of the person the problem you know what it
is that that we're trying to help them with and then what is most important and what is the job you know i really like the jobs to be done but like what's the job that this particular feature or product is going to fulfill for that person right then it makes it easier for us to then start to categorize different
buckets of feedback right because the first thing that you know that's most important to address is like well is this thing actually valuable like is it you know doing something this is solving the problem is it doing the job correctly and you know if if a lot of other stuff below is bad but this is like
good then you know we can move on to kind of the next most important thing but if like all the other stuff is is maybe even you know good or interesting but this is not there then we should just actually disregard all the other stuff until we are quite certain that we've gotten kind of the core value we understand the user this this you know
in some sense is addressing the the core pane right and then once we do that then let's focus on the next layer which i i'll think about as like ease of use right so okay cool you know we've figured out that we validated this thing is valuable it does solve the drop now is it easy to use like are people
confused are they getting hung up somewhere you know or is it just like really slow so like no one can use it because it just takes like 10 seconds to load each time right ease of use is just about like can people access the value in a really great manner and that's the next most important bucket right and then finally
if it is very valuable it's easy to use and i think we get into like is it joyful to use is it pleasurable does it really exceed expectations right and i think that is the bar that we should aim for whenever we are creating products and you know here you might have debates about like you know colors or like aesthetic properties or animation and
delight and all of the other things that just make it that much more enjoyable and and surprising and wonderful for the core audience but you don't want to just focus on that and then lose like okay actually this thing wasn't valuable and it like loaded in 10 seconds like you know who cares about like how great was
the animation when like the thing doesn't even load so so i think there's like a work to do to try and actually help the different pieces of feedback get synthesized so we understand what bucket they are and we you know can have the right order of prioritization to make sure we tackle the most important
things first and just to be clear this is kind of an ongoing process this isn't like one meeting right where you go through all these four layers right cool and then is your advice to focus on it in that sequence generally and like not focus on say the delight until you kind of make it through these other points or do you
find it's kind of helpful to kind of think about all these things at once i usually find that if you're going to go in and have run a you know a design critique or review session it's helpful to sort of start off front by saying here is where we are in the process this is the most important set of things we want to
validate right we want to validate whether this actually solves the problem or want to validate like we've validated sort of a problem but you know we validate like whether it's easy to use or or something along those effects so so being more specific about where you are what matters most for you to what kind of feedback matters the most at
that particular phase for the team is valuable right because if you don't do that sometimes you'll just get all sorts of feedback and some of it is you're not even ready for right you're not even thinking the team's not even thinking about some of these additional level details or just thinking about the core stuff and you know usually it
follows just from how product development happens right like the first thing that often teams will you know come up with when they build a product is like some kind of product brief or some kind of you know like understanding of the user and a very high level picture about how the product is you know usually there's not like high
fidelity mocks or prototypes at that stage right and so so that's great you know because you know we're using a different fidelity we're looking at documents and words and you know values and data as a way to understand the opportunity and then you know and and that lends itself well to that kind of feedback but but where i find
that things get a little confusing it's like sometimes you will go and just make a prototype right and again the goal of the prototype is to give a feeling of how it works it's not that the team had already spent a bunch of time on the exact ui decisions or so forth and so what that might have what happens though
is sometimes the audience or the people who are giving feedback they can't always distinguish that so then you know you the the feedback goes immediately towards like oh i don't like that shade of blue or like you know maybe we should you know put step two again before step three and and that's not actually where
the conversation is right because you know we haven't actually gone and and um have conviction and just like the first core piece of of whether this is even the right thing to build or whether it really is solving an important enough problem so so being very clear about like where you are and what is the feedback that you want to get is
important now again eventually you go and you put stuff in front of customers it's a little harder for them to just fully you know like be able to distinguish between like wait um like what's the difference between like the feedback versus you know around value versus ease of use it gets all blended
for them at that point in time though so they'll just give whatever feedback and again i think that's fine just collect it but then when you go and do the synthesis when you go and do the prioritization make sure that you're you're getting what you need at that stage as a colleague of the designer so you're a pm or an engineer data
scientist or whatever do you have any advice for just giving feedback to a designer in the critiques yes the most important feedback i would say is focus on identifying a problem and making it really clear for the other person you know the person you're giving feedback to what is the problem right and
the reason it i always give that is because sometimes you know we're all solvers and builders and so you often can very much get into like wait a second i see the problem but instead of talking about the problem i'm just going to give you a solution you know so you'll you'll people will say things like oh i see this and they'll be like
why don't we make the logo purple or like why don't we try and add this feature here right and there's a lot of assumptions that are already in place like you're giving that because you assume the current thing is insufficient in some way right and it's you know it's it's maybe not ideal at being clear or it is forgetting like to to bring some
important value prop or you know maybe like yellow just makes this whole thing look like pukey or whatever it is right there's like there's a reason but instead of actually stating the reason we go straight to the solution and like at that point like i don't know maybe maybe like the solution is good maybe it
isn't right but but honestly you know if you have designers you have other people who are just focused on coming up with the right solution you're kind of taking that power away from them by going straight to what you think is like the the right solution right again i'm not saying it's don't ever propose a solution it's
always good to give a suggestion but you also have to respect that whoever is actually coming up with the answer and the solution they're the ones who should be empowered to ultimately you know they know the most about the problem they thought about it the longest right help them understand what you think the
problem is with whatever it is they are proposing you know give examples show them where you're getting stuck why is it unclear to you why do you think that this color is is uh you know not the right color right and and try and paint that because when everyone is aligned on the problem then we can all collectively
come up with better solutions and then we can kind of rate and and critique the solutions against each other but by going straight to brainstorming ideas you know sometimes a lot gets lost and people aren't actually following along on is this really the problem do we agree this is a problem is this actually the most important problem i imagine pms
are very guilty of this of just like let's just move this button over here and it'll be we'll solve all these problems let's move it higher up and it's that it's kind of ironic because pms also don't want people coming to them with a solution and it's funny you kind of forget that and you just give
people here's what we should just do let's move on we all we all forget it all the time i mean it's a hard one right because you know again like it's it's fun it's like we're all solvers to some degree right it's fun to jump in there and do it but when you don't have extreme clarity on the problem then you know then that's
what happens when you just end up talking past each other absolutely i've i've been guilty about myself okay so i've sucked up an hour of your time i want to let you go but i have two more questions i want to ask in different directions one is coming back to your book about the making of a manager by the way
we haven't even mentioned the name of the book yet the making of a manager available at all of local bookstores and amazon and every online shop bookshop so a lot of people want to become managers and oftentimes they struggle for whatever reason they can't make it to manager nobody wants to promote them they're just kind of struggling there
give any advice for folks that are just like having a hard time getting to that point where they can actually get to be a manager the first is make sure your manager is aware of those aspirations bring them in to your hopes and dreams right if you if your manager understands your goals and what you would like to work towards then
it's much easier for you to be like okay can you help me you know i really want to be able to do what you do i want to lead a team i want to lead a project etc like help me figure out how to how to get there and the first thing you should ask is like what does it take you know what where are the skills that i'm going to need to
get better at in order to you know for you to believe that i could be successful in doing so and just make sure that you hear that right and make sure that you can have an honest conversation where your manager can help you be aware of what are the things that you should work on and then work
together to just make a plan to be like okay cool you know one of the things that it seems like you know that i've got to improve on is that i you know like one of the roles in responsibility manager is like going spending a lot of time on recruiting and like i haven't done that right so let's see let's work together for a plan
where i can start to learn some of those skills one of the nice things about at least that i find about you know like what the path to management is like a lot of this stuff you can do even when you're not a manager some stuff you can't right you probably can't fire someone and learn those skills without
actually being a manager and being in that role but a lot of things like hiring like mentoring like working on process you know like is all things that you can start to contribute and help out with in the capacity of an ic right so if that is you know if you've identified these different skills then find opportunities to start to practice and
be able to grow those skills so for example oftentimes a really great you know if you're a part of a company that's growing and has like a summer internship program awesome can you go in and sign up and mentor and intern and manage an intern right it's a very you know sort of small way of of doing that
and getting started here's another example you know if you're a growing company and new people are joining and you know you might work with your manager and say hey let me be this person's onboarding buddy you know let me be responsible for helping them get up to speed over the first one or two weeks or if you want to if you spot an
opportunity right and let's say there's documentation or there's some process that you know we have to change the structure of the meeting like ask your manager if you can help out with that you can volunteer for that you know and you help come up with some new process for doing something right or a new way of of running the meeting and
just take the lead so a lot of these things you don't need to have the official title to do you can do a lot of it you know in that capacity as an ic and again it's also great for you to then try out like do i like doing these things you know do these things give me energy and as well your manager can see
you know whether you can be successful in this respect and then give you more and more responsibility if so so it's really not binary it's not all or nothing i also want to point there's one other thing though which is that sometimes the reason you know there you can't easily become a manager is because
your your company just isn't growing right it isn't a need to have a new manager unless the current manager leaves or unless somebody you know departs the company and a new role opens up and that could be i mean you can very well have done all the right things have the right skills but there just isn't the role and opportunity available at
your current company and if that's the case sometimes that's how it is and and the way that you can further your goals there is to think about you know moving into a different environment i did a lot of the things that you recommended and i 100 agree with everything being really helpful to getting you to manager
i think basically if you're just sitting there being really upset about not having a chance clearly there's a lot you can do and all the things you shared i found to be really helpful to you so thanks for getting into all the detail there last question for founders or even pms a lot of them are struggling to hire designers
they're just like such a shortage of great designers do you have any advice i know i don't know if there's an answer to this but do you have any advice for founders or pms trying to hire designers yeah this is i mean it is definitely i mean for hiring anyone right even engineers too it's all of us are looking
for really great talent and there is a shortage so for designers this is what i often advise for founders so the first thing is that you know designers want to work with people who who care about design right they don't want to be like hey you know you're going to toss me some spec and then i have to like come up with the thing and then i toss it
over the engineer so the first thing you could do is demonstrate a commitment to design you know make yourself out to be someone who cares about design again not because you just need to fill a box because like everyone says you need a designer for your company to like you know get that team but because you truly care about it and that
already puts you far ahead of the pack right so what are some ways that you can demonstrate your commitment to design well the first is even if you don't have a full-time designer are you committed are you working with like a a good agency or something you know are you able to like if you have venture capital funding and
you know you're thinking about what to invest in are you working with someone on a contract basis on a you know just to build a really wonderful marketing site or to you know focus on even the v1 of your product being something that shows that this is something you want to invest in right because you know if you're going to hire someone they're
going to go check out your website i'm going to look at this stuff and they're going to go and and you know make some judgments about whether you seem like the kind of person that's committed to building a great culture of design at your organization but i think the second is just being somebody who can speak to
and align with a lot of the values of design and often what that means is just again being really really people-centric right having good taste you know thinking about what it means to have a design organization like if you don't really understand design you don't understand the tools designers use you
understand the nomenclature of how designers talk you know you know if that's foreign then go do the research right go in and study it go and interview designers that work at companies go and try and follow the top designers on twitter and just immerse yourself in a bit of that culture and the um you know and really get to understand
what great designers value right and whenever you know now you're talking to a designer you can express that right you can speak to them and in a common language and not just you know if you say things like oh we need a designer but i don't really understand design really you know like that's your thing
like i'm just here to you know do my whatever that's not often going to make you stand out against a very competitive field and often as with anything else right sometimes when you just ask someone to teach you about their domain or discipline and you form a relationship that person then maybe you know sees that you care sees that maybe
has a friend right or maybe you know later on they decide to get like there's already a relationship that you're making with people in the community and that's often you know for long term i mean again it might not yield you designers right away but in the long term it it pays off because you will be considered a team or a company that
really does care amazing i've sucked up way too much of your time i need to let you get back to building your company where can where can folks find you online and maybe reach out if they have questions and then is there any way listeners can be useful to you yes so i am active on twitter and linkedin my
handle is at j-o-u-l-e-e on twitter i also have a newsletter although i haven't actually been as active in it on substance it's called the looking glass i have a lot of old articles and things on medium and on sub stack as well and i have my book the making of a manager so that's where you can find me online and
then in terms of yeah i mean you have such a wonderful community lenny and i've you know very fortunate to be a subscriber to have gleaned a lot of wisdom and knowledge from you know yourself and all of the amazing guests and the community that you've developed as well on substance so one of the things as i mentioned that
we're working on and our startup is just helping companies uh be able to use data effectively and be able to access it and make great decisions so if there's anybody in your list who's listening and it's like a growth pm or works on the data team and would be excited to have a conversation where i can you know
interview you learn more about how your company works how you guys think about data and just learn from you like please reach out dm me on twitter my dms are open and i would gladly take up that invitation and is there a website people can go to to learn more about what you're building yes my product is called a sundial the website doesn't give you
that much it's fairly high level but it is sundial dot so awesome we're going to link to that in the show notes julie this was such a treat for me i so appreciate you making time for this thank you so much this was wonderful thank you so much for having me lenny thank you so much for listening if you
found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on apple podcast spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com see you in the next episode