Something to readWorking with your manager
The Making of a Manager
A first-time manager's field guide, from a tech design leader who started at 25
Why it’s worth your time
Julie Zhuo's The Making of a Manager is for the stretch when you have the title and nobody has explained the job. She became a manager at Facebook at 25 and built the book around a short answer: a manager is there to help a group get better results together than it would otherwise. She writes about her own early mistakes, which can help on the days you feel like you're faking it.
How to start out as a first-time manager
The book · About 6 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
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- Read the opening chapters first.
The early chapters, on what management is and your first three months, set up the rest. Later chapters on feedback, meetings, hiring and growing a team can wait until you need them.
- Ask three people what the team is for.
In your next one-on-ones, ask three people separately to say in a sentence or two what the team is trying to achieve. Write the answers side by side and notice where they differ.
Good moments for this: in your first month managing peoplewhen you start managing people who used to be your peersbefore a round of performance reviews
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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
Zhuo's signs of a trusting relationship include reports bringing you their biggest problems and both of you giving each other critical feedback without taking it personally. Knowing what each person needs, and telling them what you need from them, tends to help build it.
What might make this harder
Say the awkward part out loud in your first one-on-ones: the relationship has changed, and you'd like to hear how they want to work together now. Zhuo describes several kinds of new manager, each with different early challenges, so it helps to find the one that's yours.
Questions people ask
What is The Making of a Manager about?
Julie Zhuo's 2019 guide for new managers, drawn from her years leading product design teams at Facebook after becoming a manager at 25. It covers what management is, the first three months, feedback, meetings, hiring, delegation and culture, with original comics by Pablo Stanley.
What does Julie Zhuo say a manager's job is?
To help a group working together get better results than it otherwise would. She sorts the work into purpose, people and process: why the team exists, who's on it, and how they work together.
Is The Making of a Manager good for experienced managers?
It's written mainly for new ones. One reviewer, Yevgeniy Brikman, called it concise and practical, with little business jargon.
What it says, and how it holds up
The first weeks as a manager can feel strange. Your calendar fills with meetings, your own work slips, and it isn't obvious what a good day even looks like. Zhuo judges the job by two things: what your team achieves and how healthy it is. She sorts a manager's work into purpose, people and process, and much of the book is about working on each.
If you're still deciding whether to manage at all, a guide to doing it well may not be the right first read. Zhuo poses a few of the deciding questions herself early on, such as whether you'd rather work toward an outcome than in a particular role, and how you'd feel about spending most of your day in meetings. If the honest answer is no, a strong individual track may suit you better, and Charity Majors's essay 17 Reasons Not to Be a Manager sets out the costs of the job before you take it.
Zhuo writes about getting it wrong as a 25-year-old manager. Trust shows when people bring you their hardest problems. Feedback is heard when the listener feels safe, so she suggests sharing what's going well alongside the problem and asking whether the feedback rings true. A vision is clear when several people on the team would describe it the same way.
It's very much a book from inside a fast-growing tech giant. Brikman's main complaint was that it leans too hard on Facebook and companies like it: not every manager works at a hypergrowth tech company, so not every lesson will apply. Advice on hiring and scaling a team tends to travel less well to a small or slow-growing one than advice on trust and feedback.
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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.