The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You

by Julie Zhuo

Because we were a start-up, nobody thought it was weird that I was suddenly showing my own design proposals for new features. We were all wearing many hats then, tackling problems as we saw them, diving in and out of code and pixels and back to code again. And so, rather by accident than by any masterful plan, I added a new hat to my rotation: designer. Three years later, after that fateful conversation with my manager, my role shifted again. Our design team had almost doubled in size since I’d started. Having made it through my first few years at a hyper-growth start-up, I thought I was used to change. I was no stranger to dealing with the firsts or rolling with the punches. Still, I was unprepared for just how much the new manager role would stretch me. For one thing, I was managing product designers, a discipline I didn’t even know existed before I arrived at the company. For another, the responsibilities of managing people and the way they worked together felt like an enormous leap from creating user interfaces or writing code. In those early months and years, everything felt new and uncomfortable.