Jules Walter: preference

Transcript context

…This touches on the stuff that I want to spend most of our time on our chat, which is around mentorship and just generally becoming a stronger product manager through all the ways you can become a stronger product manager. You mentioned you had a lot of great mentors. I've heard from other people, you've been a great mentor to them and you've also just been really successful at a number of really world-class companies. What I want to chat about is just, what have you found to be the most important skills to develop as a PM as you advance in your career, and then how to actually build those skills partly with mentorship, partly other ways? Maybe just to start, what have you found to be the most important skills in your career that have most helped you advance in your career and other PMs around you? In terms of skills, I think of it in terms of two buckets. One are IQ skills, intellectual skills, like what sometimes people call hard skills. And then the other things are the EQ skills, oftentimes called soft skills. What I've seen in my career is that early on, I leaned more into the hard skills, the IQ stuff. That was what was most helpful to me. And then later on, I spent more time getting better at the EQ skills. The reality with PMs is that within each of these buckets, there's so many skills and then you can feel overwhelmed, so my advice is really just start skill by skill. What I did specifically is I joined Slack, I was in ICPM. When you join a new company, especially if you're earlier in the mid-career, you really want to get good at things like execution, IQ skills, execution, product sense, strategy. So, those were critical for me, especially my first year at Slack. The other skill that I'll also call out, which nobody talks about for some reason, is interview skills, because so much of what gives you a chance to become better as a PM is working at a great company. How you get that job beyond networking is actually becoming good at interviewing. If you think about my career, getting into Slack changed my trajectory and I was able to do that because I got slightly somewhat good enough at interviewing. I barely got the job and then I was really good at execution and got better at these other things, product sense, strategy, et cetera. In that phase, the things that I was working on, as I mentioned earlier, were things like improving user activation. So, it relies on those skills: identifying the opportunities, running experiments, executing quickly, and so on. That's the first set of skills. Before we move on, and the second set is EQ, right? Is that where you're going?…

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