Julie Zhuo on accelerating your career, impostor syndrome, writing, building product sense, using intuition vs. data, hiring designers, and moving into management
with Julie Zhuo · Jun 2022
Instead of aiming for quality, Julie set a word count goal (500 words in 30-45 minutes) to force herself past the blank page. This removes the perfectionism barrier that prevents people from shipping. The hardest part is getting started; quality comes in revision, not in the first draft.
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Julie Zhuo on accelerating your career, impostor syndrome, writing, building product sense, using intuition vs. data, hiring designers, and moving into management
Jun 2022Julie switched from long-form essays to Twitter threads to work on being more concise and clear. Constraints force you to strip away ornamentation and focus on the core idea. The medium you choose can be a tool for developing a specific skill, not just a channel for distribution.
Julie Zhuo on accelerating your career, impostor syndrome, writing, building product sense, using intuition vs. data, hiring designers, and moving into management
Jun 2022Don't write for your audience or for likes—write because you're working on a specific skill you want to develop. If you write to solve a problem you have (clarity, vulnerability, conciseness), the intrinsic motivation sustains the habit far better than external validation ever could.
Julie Zhuo on accelerating your career, impostor syndrome, writing, building product sense, using intuition vs. data, hiring designers, and moving into management
Jun 2022Julie approaches her writing as 'letters to myself'—advice she needs to give herself. The act of writing clarifies her thinking and organizes threads of thought running through her head. The primary audience for her writing is herself; the fact that others resonate with it is a secondary benefit.
Where Great Product Roadmap Ideas Come From
Jun 2019Working backwards from your long-term vision generates better ideas than working forward from current state. This reversal—starting with where you want to go rather than where you are—fundamentally changes which ideas feel like natural next steps versus distractions.
What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Business
Jun 2019Instead of micro-optimizing a broken funnel, envision the perfect user experience and work backward. Airbnb's instant booking feature seemed impossible (only 5% of bookings were instant), but starting from the ideal state and breaking it into 'can' problems and 'want' problems made it tractable. Constraints should inform strategy, not limit vision.
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