- Julie Zhuo recently stepped down as the position of vice president of product design at Facebook to launch a company called
Julie Zhuo recently stepped down as the position of vice president of product design at Facebook after spending nearly 14 years at the social network company. In a blog post on Medium, Zhuo said that she is launching a company called Inspirit with her friend Chandra Narayanan. Inspirit is an advisory firm that will help tech companies scale products.
Zhuo was recruited to Facebook right after she finished at Stanford University. She had joined the company as a product designer in May 2006. Then she was promoted to manager of product design in October 2008 and director of product design in 2012. Zhuo assumed her latest role in February 2016.
Narayanan previously worked with Zhuo between March 2010 and March 2017. And at Facebook, Narayanan served as director of analytics at Facebook before joining Sequoia Capital as a chief data scientist in September 2017.
“Our company’s name is Inspirit because its definition—to embolden; to enliven—really spoke to us. Chandra was one of my favorite people to work with at Facebook because even though we came from very different places (data and design!), our core values shared the same language. I’ve learned so much about the power and nuance of data-informed product building from him, and we both believe that data and design together can unlock some pretty wonderful outcomes,” wrote Zhuo.
Zhuo has also written a book called Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You:
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