Book Reviews
The Making of a Manager Summary & Review: Your First Leadership Playbook
The Making of a Manager summary and review — Julie Zhuo's framework for new managers covering feedback, meetings, hiring, and scaling teams.…
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Julie Zhuo
"Facebook's youngest manager at 25, who wrote the guide she wished she'd had when she was suddenly in charge of a team."
Julie Zhuo is an American author and former design executive who became one of Facebook's youngest managers at 25, eventually rising to Vice President of Product Design before writing "The Making of a Manager." Drawing on more than a decade of leading design teams as the company scaled from a few hundred to tens of thousands of employees, Zhuo wrote the book to be the practical, no-nonsense guide she wished she'd had when she was thrust into management with little formal training. "The Making of a Manager" became a go-to resource for first-time managers across the tech industry, covering everything from running effective one-on-ones to giving difficult feedback, grounded in Zhuo's own early mistakes and lessons learned on the job.
1 book featured·Former VP of Product Design, Facebook·Became a manager at age 25
Books by Julie Zhuo
Our in-depth summaries and reviews of his work
Key Ideas & Recurring Themes
A manager's job is to multiply the team's output
Zhuo argues a manager's role isn't to do the work themselves, even if they're the best at it, but to improve the purpose, people, and process that make the whole team more effective.
People remember how you made them feel
Zhuo emphasizes emotional intelligence in management, noting that specific words and actions fade but the feeling a manager creates tends to stick.
Find what's unique about each person
Great managers, Zhuo argues, discover each team member's distinct strengths and build roles and opportunities around them rather than applying one generic approach.
Notable Quotes
"Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will only take you so far."— The Making of a Manager
"This is the crux of management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone."— The Making of a Manager
"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."— The Making of a Manager
"There is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: they discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it."— The Making of a Manager
Related Authors
Book Author Julie Zhuo
The Making of a Manager Summary & Review: Your First Leadership Playbook
The Making of a Manager summary and review — Julie Zhuo's framework for new managers covering feedback, meetings, hiring, and scaling teams. Rated 4.5/5.