Lenny's PodcastLeveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack)
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Mentors, feedback, and focus: how PMs accelerate real career growth
- Product leader Jules Walter (YouTube, ex-Slack) shares the specific skills that matter most for product managers and how he systematically built them over his career. He splits PM skills into IQ (execution, product sense, strategy, interviewing) and EQ (communication, leadership, self-awareness, management), and explains why each becomes critical at different stages. A recurring theme is using clear outcomes, deliberate practice, and strong mentors to rapidly level up, including how he learned growth at Slack and later deeper leadership skills. Jules also details how to find mentors, earn their help, get honest feedback, and why doubling down on your strengths is often more powerful than “fixing” every weakness.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasTreat interviewing as a core PM skill, not an afterthought.
Breaking into great companies unlocks better learning environments, but most candidates rarely do mock interviews. Jules recommends doing dozens of mocks—ideally with strong interviewers or community peers—and practicing enough that even your ‘bad day’ performance is good enough to pass.
Learn skills by setting a concrete outcome and working backwards.
When Jules joined Slack as the first growth PM, his goal was to materially increase activation within six months. He then worked backwards: studied basic frameworks, found top experts (e.g., Facebook growth leaders), asked targeted questions, and immediately applied what he learned via experiments.
Build PM IQ first, then increasingly invest in EQ as scope grows.
Early in your career, execution, product sense, and strategy matter most. As you get promoted and your scope expands, ambiguous situations, cross-functional influence, communication, and leadership become the main bottlenecks—and are much harder and slower to develop.
Observe and reverse-engineer ‘great’ artifacts and behaviors around you.
Use access to strong companies to study real strategy docs, exec updates, and meetings. Save great emails, attend top PMs’ meetings, watch their exec reviews, and ask: what questions are they answering, how do they structure arguments, what patterns show up repeatedly?
Ask for feedback specifically, frequently, and enthusiastically.
Generic “How did that go?” rarely yields useful input. Instead, ask focused questions (e.g., “How was my executive presence in that meeting?”), sometimes pre-critique yourself to open the door, and always respond with visible gratitude—so people feel safe sharing more candid, EQ-related feedback.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesYou want to basically practice so much that even at your worst you’re good enough.
— Jules Walter
It’s better sometimes to be wrong but clear than the other way around.
— Jules Walter
A lot of learning happens through the iterations, not by seeing the final product.
— Jules Walter
What is something that a lot of people say you’re good at, but you think is not a big deal? That’s how you know it’s a strength.
— Jules Walter (paraphrasing advice from his mentor, Lawrence Ripsher)
If you give me feedback, I’ll be like, ‘Hey, thank you so much. This is super helpful.’ Now inside, my heart might be melting… but externally I mean it. And that’s the key most people don’t focus on.
— Jules Walter
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