"Scaling the design org is what actually creates the career opportunity for designers to grow into senior roles — but growth in headcount must be coupled with growth in individual capability and context."
Evidence from the Archive
Sundial (formerly Facebook)
Facebook's internal culture of product critique and AB testing as a product-sense incubator
Zhuo's own practice of analyzing every app she downloads -- the onboarding, the moment of clarity, the points of confusion
Joined Facebook as one of its first designers, rose to VP of Design overseeing hundreds of designers, and is now building Sundial -- giving her a two-decade arc of watching product sense develop (and fail to develop) across thousands of product people. Their core argument: Product sense is built through deliberate observation and prediction -- study products, observe yourself and others, critique, and validate with data.
The evidence is specific: Zhuo's own practice of analyzing every app she downloads -- the onboarding, the moment of clarity, the points of confusion. Furthermore, facebook's internal culture of product critique and AB testing as a product-sense incubator.
In Julie Zhuo's own words: "The number one advice that I always have for people when talking about product sense or product thinking is it's just really about observation and it's about curiosity and can start by first observing yourself. Every time you're going to go and use something, every time you're going to have a new experience, you download an app, you try something new, it's take the moment to reflect on your emotion or your assumption at every step." (Describing the first layer of her deliberate practice framework for building product sense.)
Facebook
Julie Zhuo rose from IC designer to VP of Design entirely inside Facebook as it scaled from 8 million users to global platform — scale was the training ground
Her argument: scaled, hypergrowth design orgs are the only environments that reliably produce new senior designers, because ICs get thrown into roles they haven't been trained for
Zhuo's perspective is shaped by 13 years watching Facebook scale from 8 million users to global platform, and watching the design team scale alongside. Her argument is less about 'should design be big or small' and more about what scaling actually produces when done right: opportunity.
At a hypergrowth company, new problems appear faster than experienced people can fill them, so ICs get thrown into roles they haven't been trained for and grow by doing. That's a structural feature scaled orgs have that small elite teams cannot replicate. The small-team model concentrates opportunity in a few hands and caps how many senior designers it can produce. She pairs this with a warning: the discomfort of scale is the signal of growth, not a bug.
In Julie's own words: "I was lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. I was at a company that was scaling, and when you're at a company that grows, there's always a lot more opportunity to then be able to try something new, right, to raise your hand, to volunteer for things to be just thrown into because somebody has to do it because it's a growing company." (On why scale — not smallness — is what produces designers who can lead.)