Jules Walter: belief

Transcript context

…Coming back to the EQ and IQ buckets, are there other examples of ways you've learned to improve, say, strategy, execution, product sense, things like that? Whether you have a mentor or not, there's other things you kind of have to do. For me, for example, one thing I do is I try to identify what's the best practice for something. For example, let's say strategy. There was a phase where I got feedback, "Hey you need to be better at strategy." Then I'm like, "Okay. Well, can you help me understand what are people at this company that was awhile back, where you think have done a great job at strategy or what are examples of artifacts?" Then I get these artifacts and I reverse engineering them. I try to think, "Okay, what are the top questions, the answer? Maybe I'm not answering all these questions. How do they do it?" And you start seeing the patterns like, "This person did it in a memo, this person did it in a deck." So, it's not about the format, but what is it about? Then this person had a lot of data, this person is quantitative, qualitative. So, that's a big part of what I do as well. It's true for all these things. For execution, it would be things like me attending another PMs meeting. "Oh, I heard this person is amazing at executing. Let me just see how they're on a meeting." And then you're like, "Whoa, things we didn't notice." Or somebody is great at communicating and I'm like, "Okay. Well, did you send this email? It's great. Let me save it. " I'd have docs where I saved templates of things, and a lot of the reason, I think, people don't learn through osmosis that way is because one is you're not at a company where you can see great artifacts sometimes. That's why I mentioned if you can get a better company, do that. The other thing, too, is even if you see the greatness around you, some people don't try to break it down, to understand: "Why is this one great and not that one?" So, I actually do spend a lot of time every week reflecting like, "Oh, I saw these docs that were great or I saw this presentation this person gave." I sometimes crash presentation audits PMs give to executives, just to see how they handle questions or these sort of things. A lot of it is just spending time observing as well. I love this advice, it's so powerful. Just like, "Who is amazing at this skill? And let me just go watch them and learn from them."…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.