How Julie Zhuo Uses Data in Design: Early Facebook Days, starting Sundial

Our conversation with Julie Zhuo talking Early Facebook, Design Leadership, AI, building data-informed products and leaving Facebook to start Sundial.Julie Zhuo is a highly influential design leader, an early-employee and former VP of Design at Facebook and now, the co-founder of Sundial, a modern analytics tool to help companies understand the story of their data to make better decisions. Before that, she was the VP of Product Design for the Facebook app, where she helped scale the service from 10 million users to over 2 billion during her nearly 14 years there. She is the Author of The Making of a Manager, became an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller, and was selected as one of Amazon's Best Business and Leadership Books of 2019.* Julie’s advice for career development* Early Facebook lessons learnt* How Facebook design in the early days* How Facebook’s design evolved over time* Leaving Facebook to startup * Founding of Sundial * Building Data-informed products* AI’s impact on Design* What most people get wrong about using data on products* Career advice to being successfulSome key takeaways:* "That sense of constantly being on that adventure and not knowing what will happen and taking some risks is one that I grew to seek out, and that is a lot of the reason why I ended up starting a company and trying to dive into the unknown."* Building an experimentation platform and using AB testing at Facebook led to rapid learning and growth, making it a crucial factor for success.* Reflection is key - it's important to take the time to reflect on your actions, whether they were successful or not, in order to learn and improve. Iteration, feedback, and talking to customers always grounds us and pushes the work to be better.* Design and data are unified by a desire for truth, and the struggle lies in interpretation and where we are on a particular use case or metric. The truth of what's happening with users is very complex and multi-dimensional, but we can only see it in two or three dimensions, so we need to be cautious with data and metrics.* The idea of taking risks and pursuing dreams only became a reality for Julie Zhuo when she was no longer too scared to do so, highlighting the impact of fear on decision-making.Watch the full YouTube video today here.Where to find Julie Zhuo:* Julie Zhuo’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/joulee * Julie Zhuo’s Medium: https://joulee.medium.com/* Sundial’s Website: https://www.sundial.so/ * The Making of a Manager Book: Order hereWhere to find more resources:* ADPList’s Website: https://adplist.org/* Subscribe to ADPList YouTube (upcoming Don Norman: https://youtube.com/adplist In this episode, we cover:0:00 - Introduction4:03 - Early Facebook8:15 - Global reach of Facebook12:51 - Unknowns of Design16:25 - Biggest lessons18:38 - Strategies for growth24:46 - Data-informed design34:00 - Data vs Opinion37:08 - Opinion-based experiment43:30 - New startup45:05 - Leaving Meta to startup47:20 - Culture of startup vs Meta51:50 - Silicon Valley and India57:30 - Tech Layoffs1:00:29 - Future of Design with AI1:05:38 - Final Advice— ADPList gives every person the freedom to grow together - by opening doors to mentors worldwide. Join over 195K+ learners and meet your mentor today. We’re on a mission to give the world the freedom to grow together.If you find this post valuable, check out our top posts:* How Duolingo designs product (and why)* A guide to becoming a senior product designer* This is the 1 skill designers will needIf you find this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already.For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]!That’s all! Have a fulfilling and productive week! 🙏 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit adplist.substack.com/subscribe

There are no comments yet.

Please log in to write the first comment.