Something to readWorking with your manager
A User Guide To Working With You
An essay that shows how to write a short guide to how you work, so colleagues don't have to learn it the hard way
Why it’s worth your time
People who work with you can spend months decoding things you could tell them on a page, and this essay shows how to write that page. Julie Zhuo, who led design for the Facebook app and wrote a popular book on management, shares a template and her own guide, including the unflattering parts. She argues those honest parts are what make it useful.
How to write a user guide to working with you
The essay · 14 min · Free
Opens their site. We don’t copy it here; we’d rather they get the read.
- Read the essay.
It opens with the survey result that stopped her in her tracks, then gives a fill-in template and her own full guide as an example. Notice how specific her quirks are; that specificity is the lesson.
- Draft two sections of your own guide.
Write a few honest lines on how you communicate and on one or two habits of yours that can frustrate colleagues. Share them with your manager or a close teammate, and ask what they'd add or change.
Good moments for this: when you start a new jobwhen you get a new managerwhen someone new joins your team
Keep going with Truest
Small actions add up. Truest helps you find the next thing worth doing, make the space to do it, and keep a record of your progress. It’s a private place to work on your career, and it’s yours, not your employer’s.
- It actually happensWe’ll put it on your calendar and remind you before it starts.
- How you work, written downTruest turns how you work into a page of your own.
- It’s yours to keepEach thing you do is saved to your private record, there when your next review or job search comes around.
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
From a manager, it can come across as rules for everyone below; from a newer team member, as a list of demands. Offering it as a starting point, and asking for theirs in return, keeps it two-way.
What might make this harder
Skip the document and bring two or three points to a 1:1 instead: how you like to get feedback, how quickly you usually reply, what helps when you're stuck.
Questions people ask
What is a user guide to working with you?
A short document describing how you work: how you communicate, what you value, what builds or loses your trust, your strengths and your growth areas. You share it with your manager, close colleagues or new reports.
What should I include in a personal user manual at work?
Zhuo's template covers why you're writing it, how you view success, how you communicate, things you do that may annoy people, what gains and loses your trust, strengths and growth areas, with optional sections on how you give and receive feedback and, for managers, what you expect from your reports.
Are manager READMEs a good idea?
They can help, with limits you can see in the format itself: a document can't stand in for time together, and one written by a boss can read as instructions. Writing it, sharing it and then talking it through tends to get the benefit without the downside.
Who is Julie Zhuo?
A former design leader who headed design for the Facebook app, the author of a popular management book, and the writer of The Looking Glass newsletter, where this essay appeared in 2020.
What it says, and how it holds up
The essay opens with a bruising moment from Julie Zhuo's years as a manager: her team's internal survey suggested most of them didn't feel she showed care for them, though she cared a great deal. A friend asked whether she had ever told them, or asked how they'd like to be cared for. The care she meant and the care her team felt had drifted far apart.
Her fix, which she likens to the booklet that comes with a new camera, is a short user guide to yourself: how you see success, how you communicate, what earns and loses your trust, where you're strong and where you're still growing. The best advice is about tone. Generic virtues are useless; the lines that help are specific and a little exposing, like admitting you run late to meetings or that you answer feelings with solutions. Zhuo treats her own as a living document, revised as people tell her where it's off.
Versions of this, sometimes called manager READMEs, show up on some tech teams, and the format's limits are easy to see in the piece itself. Zhuo writes from a senior leader's seat, and several of her trust rules describe what she expects from the people who report to her. A guide also records how you'd like to be, which may not match how you come across.
If you and your manager already disagree about how your work is going, a user guide can feel like a way around the real conversation; start instead with what success looks like in your role. And if you're unsure how you come across, ask a few people before you write, so the guide reflects more than your own view.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.