Review: The Making of a Manager

Julie Zhuo's The Making of a Manager is a great book. Julie was Facebook's first intern grown into VP Product Design across a 13-year tenure — her story alone makes it worth reading.

The chapters progress from "what is management" to "nurturing culture", but have minimal dependencies, so you can read them in any order. Beyond foundational topics like feedback, meetings, hiring and team-building, the book covers a few concepts that stood out to me.

Concept #1: The multiplier factor

Early on, Julie argues that a manager's job is to be a multiplier — to improve the outcomes of the team as a whole. Through a lemonade stand metaphor, she describes how common it is for new managers to resist stepping back from individual contribution because it temporarily slows the team down.

The trade-off is worth it: there is far more to gain by finding what makes the team more efficient — skill gaps, process flaws, coaching opportunities — than by doing the work yourself. A manager who focuses on these levers adds a multiplier to the team's output.

The book frames this as an IC-to-manager transition, but the concept scales to every leadership step. Manager to director, director to VP/CTO — each transition demands less depth, more breadth, and a willingness to repurpose your contribution at a different level.

Concept #2: The critique meeting

Another standout concept is the critique meeting:

• The team meets for 90 minutes weekly to share progress;
• One person presents what they've achieved, then opens up for questions, concerns and suggestions;
• Every other team member raises points, asks questions, proposes alternatives — strategic or tactical;
• The presenter takes notes, agrees on next steps with their peers, and the conversation moves to the next person;
• Repeat until everyone has had their turn.

Every team has different dynamics, and learning how to productively criticise each other's work takes time. A structured session centred on criticism accelerates that learning and builds trust between team members.

Unlike agile retrospectives, which tend to focus on behaviour with sparse attention and less objective feedback, or reviews and demos, which prioritise stakeholder feedback and are shallower technically, the critique meeting produces specific feedback by design — narrow focus, clear next steps, and built-in accountability for progress.

Concept #3: Peg your work back to the mission

Julie tells the story of extending Facebook's iconic Like button. Facebook's mission is "to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together", making the Like button an incredibly strategic feature.

Options were many, including a "dislike button". It sounds reasonable at first, but Julie's team found that "dislike" was an oversimplification — users actually meant a range of emotions: sadness, anger, surprise. More importantly, a dislike button doesn't bring the world closer together. It sets people apart. So the team took a different route.

It is easy to lose sight of the company's mission, especially under pressure to move fast. A great eigenquestion for hard decisions is "how does this fit into the company's mission?" It can reframe the problem, lead to a better solution, and keep you aligned with overarching goals.

Concept #4: Aim to put yourself out of your job

My favourite concept: Julie's delegation strategy is "aiming to put herself out of her job". She works at the intersection of two factors:

• Most important things for the organisation;
• Things I can uniquely do better than anyone in/for the team.

If a task isn't both, delegate it:

1. If someone on your team can do an important thing as well as you or better, delegate it. They grow their impact; you free up time for other opportunities.
2. If you can do something better but it's not the most important work, delegate it to someone interested and coach them. They learn; the team's capability gap shrinks.
3. What remains — high-impact work that leverages your unique strengths — should be your priority. For now.

Over time, as you delegate enough, the team becomes capable of handling work they initially couldn't. You've fulfilled your role as a manager: better team outcomes, built-in succession planning, and — as Julie puts it — you've put yourself out of your job, for the team's growth and your own progression.

Many authors cover delegation mechanics — growing people, managing risk, the spectrum from full abdication to being overly prescriptive. What I love about Julie's approach is its pragmatism: a simple framework with unambiguous criteria you can apply immediately.

In closing, The Making of a Manager was a useful refresher. It reinforced that building strong foundations isn't a one-time exercise but something you revisit at every career stage, and it gave me a pragmatic perspective on subjects that are often discussed but rarely made this simple.