Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career

Jules Walter, a product leader at YouTube who previously led growth and monetization work at Slack and co-founded the nonprofits CodePath and Black PMs, discusses how he built his PM career. The conversation covers the IQ and EQ skills that matter as PMs advance, how to practice interviewing, and how to find, approach, and sustain relationships with mentors.

01Key learnings

• Build skills one at a time, dedicating a few months to each with weekly practice tied to a concrete outcome rather than just reading articles.
• Create a forcing-function outcome when learning something new, then work backwards to the questions you need answered and seek out the experts who can answer them.
• Practice interviewing with dozens of mock interviews, ideally with people skilled at interviewing, since interviewers rarely give feedback after a loss.
• Reverse-engineer great strategy docs, exec updates, and presentations from your company, noticing patterns in structure, data, and questions answered rather than just format.
• Find your strengths by asking which things people repeatedly praise you for that you consider no big deal, then understand how that strength can become a weakness in certain contexts.
• Make the first ask to a potential mentor as small as possible, such as a specific question answerable by email, then circle back later to show how you applied their advice.
• Bring a specific, current problem to every mentor meeting, take notes, and look for ways to help them in return to build a real relationship.
• Ask for feedback with specific questions, and respond with genuine gratitude when it is given, since that encourages people to keep being candid.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.