Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.