Hard Skills, Soft Skills and Mentors: Jules Walter's Playbook for Growing as a PM

Walter grew up in Haiti, studied computer science, went to business school and began his career in medical devices, serving as a general manager for a French company and overseeing its West Africa business. After a failed startup of his own, he moved to the Bay Area about eight years before the recording and found product management very hard to break into. He became one of the first PMs at a Series A startup, then joined Slack as its first growth PM in early 2016.

Slack's revenue was around $50 million when he joined and roughly ten times that when he left about four years earlier. He now leads Primetime Channels at YouTube, which brings streaming services into the app. When Lenny asks about routes into the profession, Walter says there is no set path. The two typical ones are joining a startup and earning a PM title, or moving into the role inside a company where you have built domain expertise.

He knew nothing about growth when he took the Slack job, but saw it as his way into a great company. He took a learning mindset and leaned on mentors, particularly Bangaly Kaba. Within six months he had shipped new-user changes, especially on mobile, that moved activation by double-digit percentages.

Outside work, Walter co-founded two nonprofits focused on diversity in tech. CodePath trains over 5,000 students a year at universities with strong underrepresented populations and helps them find internships and jobs at top companies. The Black Product Managers Network has a community of more than a thousand PMs and aspiring PMs and helps them build community and skills.

He says he didn't set out to build either organization: he needed that kind of support himself and wished he'd had it earlier in his career. Black PMs began around 2016 at a barbecue, where he and another Black PM at Facebook realized they could list roughly 15 Black PMs between them and decided to bring them together. Now he mostly sits on the boards, with strong teams running both organizations. He notes how much it matters for underrepresented people to see themselves on conference stages and to realize they are not alone.

Walter groups PM skills into two buckets: IQ or hard skills, and EQ or soft skills. Early on he leaned on IQ skills like execution, product sense and strategy, which were critical in his first year at Slack, where he worked on improving activation by identifying opportunities and running experiments. His advice is to avoid being overwhelmed by the long list and to pick skills one at a time.

He also calls out interview skills as a skill nobody talks about, because working at a great company is such a lever for learning. He barely got into Slack and credits being slightly good enough at interviewing. He recommends doing dozens of mock interviews, ideally with people who interview well, since most people have done zero and only practiced in their head.

Walter had interviewed at Google and other companies since his internship days after MIT without success. Unlike most activities, interviews give you no feedback, which he sees as a barrier for underrepresented candidates. He adds that panels where nobody looks like you add self-doubt on top of a high-stress, ambiguous task, so he helps people form small practice groups of three to five. The goal is to practice until even your worst performance is good enough to pass.

As Walter was promoted, managed people and took on larger scope, ambiguity and stress rose, and EQ skills became decisive. These include communication with cross-functional partners and executives, leadership across multiple teams and company-level OKRs, and managing a team. He says these are much harder to learn than IQ skills, which often need only a mental model and some practice, and that what to work on differs for each person, so self-awareness is required.

His own communication evolved from clarity and conciseness to storytelling and empathy, adjusting the same presentation for the CEO, the CFO and other audiences. A mentor, Lawrence Ripsher, then head of product at Pinterest, gave him a mirror: when Walter went quiet to think, others read it as disinterest. Knowing that pattern, he now verbalizes his thinking under stress.

Another blind spot took months to spot and months more to fix. Walter was fine at writing and presenting but crumbled under questions, because he heard curiosity as disagreement. He has since learned to respond with a follow-up, or to say he'll get back to the person, instead of spiraling into negative self-talk.

Walter's method for learning something new is to define an outcome that would prove he improved. At Slack it was shipping enough successful experiments within six months to lift activation by a set percentage. Then he works backwards: he asks questions, reads a little to sharpen them, and finds the best people in the field to talk to, like Bangaly Kaba and Adriel Frederick, whom he had met at random events.

From them he got frameworks such as understand, identify, execute, and the advice to spend more time understanding why people weren't staying on Slack. He then asked a user researcher for studies of signups and a data analyst what correlated with activation. After seeing results, good or bad, he returns to the mentor, reports back and moves on to the next problem. He used the same loop later for monetization and for structuring a growth organization.

Lenny notes this creates a forcing function and reminds people that others know these things and are happy to help. Walter agrees that mentors can be a mix of long-term relationships and new experts for new topics, and that the approach lets him learn much faster.

When Walter got feedback that he needed to be better at strategy, he asked for strong examples and reverse-engineered them. He looked at which questions each document answered and noticed that the format, memo or deck, didn't matter. For execution he attends other PMs' meetings, and he saves great emails and templates in a special folder. He also reflects weekly on what made a document or presentation great, and sometimes sits in on PM presentations to executives to see how questions are handled.

Lenny adds that a big benefit of working at a large company is access to real strategy and vision documents that are rarely shared publicly. Walter says people are flattered when you read their doc and ask about it. He also asks PMs to let him watch the process behind the output, such as outlining a strategy or writing an exec update, because learning happens in the iterations and feedback loops rather than in the final product.

For communication Walter read Minto's Pyramid Principle, asks for feedback constantly, and tracks patterns: he writes long sentences, and early on he wasn't clear enough, though he says it is better to be wrong but clear. He also uses a coach and group coaching. IQ progress shows within three to six months, he says, but EQ work has taken years and, like lifting weights, atrophies if you stop.

His practice is to give himself three to six months on one skill, doing something related to it every week and practicing on his own work for roughly an hour a day. He contrasts this with reading an article, taking an insight and going back to usual. Right now he is working on listening, specifically creating space and making people feel heard, rather than only seeking information to solve a problem.

To get honest feedback, Walter asks about specific things, such as whether someone saw executive presence in a talk, or offers his own critique first and invites them to agree or disagree. When someone takes the risk, he responds with enthusiastic gratitude, even if his heart is melting. He values subjective feedback most, such as sounding junior when asking questions without context, because nobody says those things outside calibration rooms.

Trusted people give him raw feedback because he has told them not to translate it, and he tries to be vulnerable himself so they feel safe.

Lenny is a believer in focusing on strengths, and Walter credits Lawrence Ripsher with the simple question that revealed his: what do many people say you're good at that you think is no big deal? Walter heard that he is good at networking and at asking great questions, both of which he had dismissed. He compares it to a fish asked about swimming: "doesn't everybody swim?"

He lists his strengths as being thoughtful, asking great questions and simplifying complex problems, resting on curiosity (his mother recalls him unscrewing toys as a child). Once you know a strength, he says, understand its shadow side. His questions can sound less knowledgeable when asked without context, and while he builds a simple mental model he stays quiet in meetings.

The key breakthrough was that strength and weakness are one trait on a dial rather than a binary. Knowing this, he feels empowered to dial it up or down by context while still keeping the thing that serves him.

When Walter arrived in the Bay Area he knew no one, and he has since built a large set of mentors. Kaba helped with growth frameworks, Ripsher with strengths, Aaron Teague brought him to Google, Bradley Horowitz (a former VP of Google Photos) shaped his thinking on leadership, and Nikhyl Singhal helped with his PM career. He looks for two things in a mentor: are they good at the specific thing, and can they explain how they do it.

He met them at a recruiting event, dinners, a fundraiser and through an email intro, so he says finding people isn't the hard part. The hard part is choosing the right person, who is not too senior or out of date on the topic, and getting a foot in the door. Most people ask for a call, which is a big ask. He prefers the smallest possible question, like emailing a speaker one two-minute question about an example of the approach he had described.

The crucial step, he says, is circling back later to show you made good use of the advice, which he calls the thing nobody does. He gave the example of a top tech CEO who advised him on his nonprofit's mission statement by email. He later reported the result, and only afterward asked for 15 minutes on a more nuanced problem. Lenny compares it to Tim Ferriss's advice not to ask someone to be your mentor, and notes you don't need one perfect mentor, just the right person per skill.

Walter says attending events is a foundation, but introductions and cold outreach work too, provided you show you will use the person's time well. He had a chat with Shishir through a very clear cold email question, and Shishir later offered to speak at Black PMs. Lenny agrees that a specific question he can answer quickly beats a request for a 15-minute call.

In ongoing meetings Walter brings something specific, such as a decision among three companies and his thought process, rather than asking about someone's path to PM. He takes notes and brings up older conversations so it feels like a continuing relationship rather than a transaction. He also asks whether he can help, and says even senior or wealthy people often have needs, such as honest information about how their team is really doing or help hiring.

In closing, Walter says learning to be a PM is difficult and rewarding, and he asks people early in their career to expect frustration given the dozen or so skills involved. Differences take a while to appear, but once they do you set yourself apart. He warns that reading a few top articles for two hours isn't enough: you need to apply them, get feedback on the result, reread, and find mentors.

Lenny adds that progress often comes with one step forward and two back, and that failed attempts at, say, strategy are how you learn. In the lightning round, Walter recommends *Never Split the Difference* and *Connect* by Carole Robin, which he finds helpful for EQ. His favorite interview question is what work-related thing a candidate is trying to get better at, since it reveals self-awareness, growth mindset and honesty, though he values the follow-ups most.