Julie Zhuo had a great career at Facebook starting from managing people at 25 to becoming the de-facto head of design for the entire company.

Making of a Manager covers both the autobiographical aspects of how she started as a manager at Facebook, and adds in a few frameworks, learnings and anecdotes from the journey. Like the rest of Silicon Valley, Zhuo assumes a given set of cultural norms, and much of her advice ends up being applicable only to flatter tech-centric organizations. Books like High Output Management and The Lean Startup are better introductory material for how silicon valley likes to operate, whereas this book is more of an operating manual for this specific management niche.

With the theory out of the way, I took away two main frameworks from the book. First is the inputs that a manager is responsible for as a means of adding value to the team:

  1. People - A manager’s first role is to provide feedback and improve the performance of their direct reports. Tips I found valuable include: a. “Positive feedback that is genuine and specific is worth it.” b. “Every disappointment is failure to set expectations.” c. “Feedback as questions is bad.”
  2. Process talks more about the mechanics of running a team within the Facebook environment, focusing on areas like: is it a decision or an information meeting? I didn’t take as much away from this section, but I do wish that everybody who was a manager possessed these skills, alas most do not.
  3. Vision: I liked the framework thinking about the team as a person with strengths and weaknesses, but didn’t have much else that was super valuable from this section.

The second framework was from Chris Cox around measuring outputs of the team as a 50/50 split between results of the team and happiness of its members.

I’m not sure that I would recommend Making of a Manager as the only, or even the first management book to read, even for a new manager at Facebook. Classic tomes like ‘High Output Management’ take that prize. Still, this book introduces enough shorthand frameworks and anecdotes to be worth reading and pondering.