Management is a different job, not a promotion of the old one

Zhuo's opening insight, learned the hard way, is that becoming a manager isn't a reward for being a great individual contributor — it's a career change into an almost entirely different craft, one that happens to share a job title's proximity with the old one. The skills that got her promoted (great design instincts, personal execution) had almost no overlap with the skills the new job actually required.

Her working definition: a manager's purpose is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together, which mostly means getting their team to a shared vision, motivating them to work hard toward it, and clearing obstacles so they can execute well — none of which is about doing the work yourself, however tempting that remains.

She's candid that this reframing took her a genuinely long time to internalize; her early instinct, like most new managers, was to keep proving her own competence rather than developing her team's.

Takeaway: the question changes from "how good is my work?" to "how good is my team's work, and did I make that possible?"