Julie Zhuo is a Chinese-American businesswoman and computer scientist. She was the vice president of product design at Facebook and now co-founder at Sundial. Zhuo is the author of The Making of a Manager (2019).
I think about marketing as telling the story of what you're doing and why it might be valuable for someone. I think both [marketing and design] influence the other because, at the end of the day, the constituent is that you're thinking about the customer.”
“You're trying to empathize with [the customers to] get in their heads understand what their psychology is. What do they want? What do they need? You want to know that so that you can tell them the compelling story about why your product might be a great fit for what they need.”
“I always love this practice to write the press release or marketing brief because you want to know before building something how you will talk about it. If your story or brief isn’t compelling and doesn’t get people excited, then maybe you shouldn't build this thing.”
A lot of marketing's work is trying to help us understand. What is that narrative? We're telling what’s going to be compelling so that customers become directly influenced by the product.”
Julie Zhuo Collision Conf 2018 02“The brand is the impression that people have of your product and service. Whether they love it or whether they don't, you want people to know how they feel about your brand.”
“Product designers will say, ‘I'm not a brand person.’ No, the product that you're building is going to be 80% of what people take away as the brand. They have to be completely linked in that manner.”
“If we're successful, we’ll be enabling many other companies across the world to fulfill their mission and make better decisions for their business. Hopefully, build better products for people because ultimately [that’s] the thing that matters.”
I can easily tell if this is the kind of person who goes [and] approaches new opportunities with a growth mindset,” she says. “Are they excited to learn? Are they introspective, and do they take lessons from what’s happened in the past?”
Well, if you can go back to the very beginning and change anything about how you went through it, what would you do differently?”
“Hey, tell me about a hard situation — something really challenging that you went through in the last year or last two years.”
