Lenny's Podcast• Sep 21, 2025• 1:36:23Interview

From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo

From Lenny's Podcast

Julie Zhuo•Founder, Sundial & Author, 'The Making of a Manager'

Executive Summary

AI is fundamentally reshaping organizational structures, leading to a flattening of hierarchies, the dissolution of traditional job titles, and the rise of smaller, more versatile teams.
The core skills of management—defining outcomes, allocating resources, and setting a vision—are directly transferable to managing AI agents, making every employee a potential manager of technology.
At her startup Sundial, Julie Zhu has eliminated the Product Manager role, finding it encourages engineers to engage directly with customer problems and data, supported by a hybrid "product science" team.
A key concern is that AI's trajectory towards making life overly comfortable could remove the necessary challenges that foster human growth, resilience, and fulfillment.

12 quotes

Concerns Raised

AI and technology may make life overly comfortable, removing the necessary challenges that foster human growth and fulfillment.
Many fast-growing companies are not using data analysis effectively, which will hinder them when initial growth inevitably slows.
The shift to conversational interfaces makes traditional analytics obsolete, requiring new, more complex methods for understanding user behavior.

Opportunities Identified

AI enables smaller, more versatile teams to achieve the output of much larger, traditionally structured organizations.
The skills of management can be directly applied to orchestrating AI agents, empowering every employee to leverage technology more effectively.
Eliminating traditional roles like Product Manager can increase engineers' ownership and direct connection to customer problems.
AI tools can serve as powerful, personalized teachers to accelerate employee skill development.

Key Themes

The AI-Driven Organizational Shift

AI is acting as a catalyst for major changes in how companies are structured. It enables smaller, more agile teams to accomplish what previously required large departments, leading to a flattening of hierarchies and the elimination of roles like middle managers. This shift favors multi-skilled individuals, or "builders," over narrowly defined specialists.

This trend requires leaders to rethink team composition, career paths, and the very definition of roles within their organizations to stay competitive and efficient.

The Evolution of Management

The fundamental principles of management are not becoming obsolete but are being reapplied. Instead of managing only people, leaders and employees will increasingly manage a portfolio of AI agents and models. The skills of setting clear goals, allocating resources effectively, and providing direction are now critical for orchestrating human-AI collaboration.

Professionals must adapt their management skills to this new context, learning to leverage AI as a resource to achieve outcomes, effectively turning every employee into a manager of technology.

Rethinking Product Team Roles

Traditional product development roles are being questioned. At Sundial, the product manager role was eliminated to foster a culture where engineers take direct ownership of customer problems. This is supported by a new "product science" role that blends data analysis, customer success, and product strategy, ensuring decisions are data-informed and customer-centric.

This experimental approach challenges the standard tech industry team structure and suggests that alternative models can increase engineering ownership and accelerate product development.

Data-Driven Product Development in the AI Era

The episode champions the philosophy of "diagnose with data, treat with design." Many fast-growing companies are failing to use data effectively, relying on intuition alone. With the rise of conversational AI, traditional analytics like click-tracking are becoming obsolete, necessitating new methods like using LLMs to analyze and cluster user conversations to find insights.

Product leaders must evolve their analytics stack and methodologies to understand user behavior in AI-native products and ensure that data is used to identify the right problems before jumping to solutions.

The Philosophy of AI and Human Potential

A significant concern is raised about the long-term societal impact of AI. The constant drive to make life easier and more comfortable through technology may inadvertently strip away the meaningful challenges and struggles that are essential for personal growth, resilience, and a sense of accomplishment. The discussion posits that true freedom lies in choosing one's challenges, not eliminating them entirely.

This prompts a deeper reflection for builders and leaders on the kind of future they are creating, emphasizing the need to design technology that augments human potential rather than just providing shortcuts.

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Topics

AI's Impact on Work Organizational Design Team Structure Management Skills Leadership Product Management Product Development Data Analytics AI-powered Tools Startups Future of Work Career Development Sundial Julie Zhuo Conversational Interfaces

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