Welcome to the second edition of Weekly Essays in the Form of Twitter Threads.

As Shreyas Doshi, Grandmaster of Wise Product Tweets once told me, Twitter is a great medium for learning! Easy on the eyeballs, quick on the reshareability. And like some kind of chemist, you’re forced to distill what you know into its simplest essence. How to make it not fortune-cookie obvious, but not so complex that you repeatedly slam into the cold stone wall of the 280-character limit while trying to coax out a nuanced discussion until you give up to look at NFT art instead? …

It’s 2021! And I had every intention of writing an ode to the New Year, something warm and comforting with a touch of spice, like a good gumbo.

But then my toddler decided that his favorite thing to do now is open every drawer in the house and bulldoze the contents. Then, there was the insurrection to process, and the sea shanties, and the gamestonks, and what do you know the month is over. Oh, and interspersed in there somewhere is a tale of company building. People used to tell me that company building was all-consuming. They’re absolutely right.

Occasionally…

My first full-length novel, The Shadow Gods, was a story about a modern-day goddess of love who becomes a pawn in a high-stakes political game.

My second, The Chances, was about a cat-mouse-game between a pair of identical high school twins, one a detective and the other a thief.

My third, Neath, was about a forsaken underground kingdom plotting its revenge in the last days of civilization.

And lastly, Game of Chances was a combo concept: a pair of identical high school twins, one a detective and the other a thief, discover they are modern-day gods in a high-stakes political…

Over the years, I’ve encountered my fair share of trolling, and what I’ve learned is that it’s an art. What the finest trolls know is that in order to really get under someone’s skin, the attack must fulfill two conditions: 1) some tiny part of the person believes the message is true; and 2) they’re ashamed of it.

Suppose you tell me you’d rather eat dirt than my cooking. That’s rude, but I’m not going to get defensive. This is because I’m not ashamed of my cooking: I know the insides of my pots are scorched from many a kitchen…

👋 Hi! I’m Julie Zhuo. I help companies scale and build people-centric products informed by data. I’m the author of a popular management book. I used to lead design for the Facebook app. The Looking Glass is my once-a-month-ish musings on products, teams, and our journey as builders.

One glorious thing about having an almost six-year-old is that we’ve started to read some of my favorite childhood books together.

Recently, we read Matilda by Roald Dahl. When I first encountered this story as a wide-eyed immigrant kid, I loved the idea that a smart, resourceful little girl could one-up the…

👋 Hi! I’m Julie Zhuo. I help companies scale and build people-centric products informed by data. I’m the author of a popular management book. I used to lead design for the Facebook app. The Looking Glass is my once-a-month-ish musings on products, teams, and our journey as builders.

One of the great gifts of social media is the way it expands our understanding of the world.

It used to be that our exposure to facts and opinions came from the dozens of people we see regularly in real life — besties, those colleagues we do Taco Tuesdays with, our parents and Uncle Paul and Cousin Maria, those high-school bandmates that we see once a year — along with…

👋 Hi! I’m Julie Zhuo. I help companies scale and build people-centric products informed by data. I’m the author of a popular management book. I used to lead design for the Facebook app. The Looking Glass is my once-a-month-ish musings on products, teams, and our journey as builders.

Once upon a time, I received an important email in my inbox that alerted me to some distressing news.

Every six months, our company ran a wide-scale anonymous satisfaction survey that pretty much every single employee answered. If your team was big enough, you’d get your own breakout of the results for…

👋 Hi! I’m Julie Zhuo. I help companies scale and build people-centric products informed by data. I’m the author of a popular management book. On the side, I’m currently match-making designers to start-ups. I used to lead design for the Facebook app. The Looking Glass is my once-a-month-ish musings on products, teams, and our journey as builders.

I’ve had a number of different essays bouncing around in my head over the past few months, on the topic of personal kryptonite and social media context and product frameworks and some-such.

But the truth is, I’ve found it hard to write about…