YouSaid · the spoken record

Jules Walter

lines on the record: 83
first: 2023-01-05
most recent: 2023-01-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“We're the people that I can reach out to that do grow at Facebook. And one of them was Bengali Kaba and also Atriel, Frederick, who spoke at your podcast. And I had met both of them at a random event. So then I'm like, I need to find a way to have a chat with these folks and to help answer those questions with them, you know. So that's why I did with Bengali in particular and also Adriel, to a certain extent. I then learned, okay, here are frameworks to use for growth. For example, understand, identify, execute, spend a lot more of your time understanding why people aren't staying on Slack versus anything else. So then I had like pointers. And once I have the pointers, then I try to go through the thing. I'm like, okay, now let me, I call the user researcher. Hey, can we do research on like people who are signing up for Slack? You know, data analysts, let's look at the data, what correlates with activation, you know, those sort of things.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things we can talk about later when we talk about strength is that for me, I'm really good at asking questions. So what I do then is I start asking questions like, okay, I'm trying to drive activation for Slack. What are some frameworks that I should use to drive activation? What are best practices? Like what are examples? So I have a sense of the kind of question. Like if I were to answer them, I'd be able to drive the outcome. And then what I do is I read a little bit, not a lot about the topic just to make sure I'm asking the right questions so that then I refine my questions. And then I find the best people in the field and I just go talk to them. And that's where we'll talk later about the mentor part, the mentorship part. So in the case of activation, I was like, I was like, okay, what's the company that defined growth at the time Facebook?”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will share my approach. It might not work for everyone, and later when we talk about strength. So, what I do specifically is when I'm trying to learn something new, I try to think about what is an outcome that I could drive. And if I drive this outcome, it will be proof that I'm better at this thing. So if we go back to this story of like when I joined Slack, I didn't know anything, literally anything about growth. And I was telling myself, I hope they don't fire me. But then the outcome I wanted is within six months, I wanted to ship enough experiments that were successful that drove activation by SAX%. So that's very concrete. So then once I had this outcome, I worked backwards to figure out how am I going to do that.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it might come from a police of curiosity. You're just like, hey, I don't know. Can you tell me why you have more context, right? In my head, I would hear, I don't agree with this. You know? And that would be my self-dog. Oh, this person doesn't agree with this. Instead of being present and trying to understand where are they coming from and maybe asking follow-ups like, hey, thanks for asking the question. Like, is your concern more about, I don't know, scalability of this approach, or is it more that you don't think it's effective, even if it's not scalable? You know what I mean? For someone else, it might be the easiest thing. But for me, it took me like months and months to first of all figure out that I had this pattern. And then once I figured out the pattern, it took also a while to now actually act on it. So now I'm comfortable. If you ask me a question, sometimes I don't know and I'll say, hey, let me get back to you. Sometimes I don't know. And I'll say, hey, I don't know. But here's what I'm thinking. This little thing that...”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which, by the way, it was terrible a long time ago. And it took me years, maybe decades, to get better at. But then when it was time to present, I was fine at presenting. But then if you ask me questions, things would crumble. And that even happened to me once at an interview where I did well presenting and then they asked me a question. And then I just gave it and answered that wasn't good. So then the self-awareness part helped me figure out what was going on. And for me specifically, I realized whenever people ask me questions, if I didn't know the answer, I would have like all this negative self-doc. And I basically'd ask me a question. And question could be something like, why are we doing it this way? Right.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High level, I think those buckets, you know, are pretty broad, right? Comes leadership management. Within each of them, there are various skills like, you know, setting vision, you know, strategy, like listening to learn, those sort of things. It's actually the type of things that Matt Muchari talked about. When he came to speak at your podcast. So I mentioned communications was one thing, right? So what happened was When I was like, you know, I was pretty good at writing.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't work at the same company. When I was at Slack, he was head of product at Pinterest. We met at a dinner. And then from there, over time he became a mentor. And then we started meeting. And then when I would hit difficult situations, sometimes I would call him and ask for advice. And then through those interactions, he's helped me identify some of my blind spots.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So sometimes it's like you hire a coach, you know, they talk to you and they see patterns. I've done group coaching too. And in this case specifically, it was a mentor. His name is Lawrence Ripscher. He was head of product at Pinterest. And became a mentor and now a close friend. And one day I was preparing for, I think an individual representation. And he was like, hey, I've noticed that when you're thinking, you're just quiet. And let me tell you what's going on in my own head when I see that. And then he was like, hey, I'm telling myself that he's not interested in what we're doing. And I'm like, really, that's like the least thing. And then I realized that's a pattern I have. And over time, through him and others, I've also observed other patterns.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your context, you might be like, oh, does this person even want to work here? You know, so then once you know these patterns, you know, okay, I'm stressed right now, but I need to say something so that people see that I'm actually interested in this problem. I'm just thinking through it. Or let me verbalize my thought process. So that's me as an example. For you, it might be the opposite. So the self-worth SPS piece has been really helpful and it's something I'm continuing to work on.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what happened for me is early in my career, it was more about clarity and inconciseness. And then later it became more about how do you tell a story? And also like, how do you communicate in an empathetic way? So specifically, like you're telling the same story or presentation, but to different audiences, and each time you have to adjust it because, you know, the CEO will care about this part. The CFO will care about this other part and so on. So I think that's one area where I spend a lot of time. And then the other thing also that has been helpful is the self-awareness part that I mentioned, where it took through mentorship, especially mentors were very honest and helped me see my blind spots, I was able to see my own patterns, right? When I'm under stress, like, for example, I tend to withdraw and not see anything. So then you might think I'm disengaged. And by the way, like in any”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if there is one that's single handedly was the most important. I've had to develop on many of these things. So I can tell you, for example, like communication is like something that is helpful, especially as you become more senior.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you deal with the ambiguity stress? How do you influence various people? So these are the EQ skills. And what I've seen is, number one, it's much harder to learn these skills than the IQ stuff. The IQ store is very intellectual. Sometimes you just need a mental model, practice a bit. The EQ, I'm still learning these things. It's just like every I'm trying to get better. And then the other thing beyond it being hard to learn is at the EQ stuff what you need to focus on is specific to you. So you learn you probably work on something different than what I would work on. Versus if we're both trying to be better at strategy or execution, there's a lot more overlap. So there's a lot of self-awareness that you need to have to know even what to work on. And then you need to continuously practice it.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the IQ already talked about those are the skills that help me, especially in my first year at Slack, you know, drive good experiments, design good product experiences, and then drive results. But then what happened is as I get promoted, you know, managed people and then start having larger scope, then there's a lot of ambiguity and stress that comes in. With that increase in scope, and that's where the EQ stuff shows up a lot. And specifically things like communications, because it's no longer my team, it's like cross-functional partners, other teams, executives. So you have to communicate all the time to different people. And then the other thing is things like leadership. Now I'm driving initiatives that involve multiple teams, basically company level OKRs. And then the other thing too is beyond leadership is just managing your team as well. Like how do you be a good manager?”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you want to basically practice so much that even at your worst, you're good enough. And I've always felt like most interviews, like I literally did my worst. It's just that it was good enough to pass. Know you so stressed out, you don't relate to the birth and etc.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm into a company. I've gone into companies like an interview. And then the whole panel, nobody looks like me I walk into the cafeteria, nobody looks like me, you know, and then you're interviewing and you have all this self-talk about like, hey, do I even want to work there? Will I belong while you're trying to solve like complex problems? So that's also the other part companies don't think about. So what I do like folks like Black PMs that I coach is really help them find groups of people, like small groups, let's say three of us, et cetera, three to five. And then you practice with that group who are going through the process. And because you like the people, then it makes it a bit more fun. And it also can help you prep for your own nerves in those interviews.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mentor a bunch of people who talk about various communities that exist out there. I can follow up. On some of those, but there are large communities of people prepping for these companies. The key is really just being a part of a community and doing the most. And then the last thing I'll say on this is interviewing is hard and especially, I think, hard for underrepresented folk because there's also like, it's high pressure, right? It's like high stress, it's high ambiguity.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's harder at smaller companies. However, I think interviewing even at bigger companies will help you with the smart companies. A lot of the times the bigger companies have more rigorous processes. So if you can do well there, then it's a bit easier elsewhere. But the key is really that practice part, which people rogue.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I graduated from IT. I think even since internship times, you know, 07, I'd interviewed for roles at Google and I didn't get those Yeah, or Meta, or various other companies. And it's because I wasn't good at interviewing. And I didn't know people at those companies. And by the way, most things you do, people give you some feedback so you can get better at it. But interviewing, you never get any feedback. So that's the thing people don't talk about, but it's actually an important skill or a barrier to underrepresented folks.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When people tell me, hey, I'm going to interview this. And the ends are typically zero. It's, oh, I read a bunch of stuff. You know, I practiced in my head. But I'm like, how many actual mock injuries have you done? And I would recommend people to do dozens of those mock interviews. Now, the other thing about practice is it's always better if you do deliberate practice. So if you mark interview with somebody who's actually good at interviewing, then you'll get better faster. But even if you don't do that, just going from zero marks to practicing your head to actually doing mocks with peers and others is going to get you to another level. And then the other thing I'll say is interviewing can be quite traumatic and difficult for a lot of people. Even me, I mean, before I got this job, I had interviewed at Google. I don't know how many times over the last decade or two.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strategy. So those were critical for me, especially in my first year at Slack. The other skill that I'll also call out, which nobody talks about for some reason, is interview skills. You know, because so much of what gives you a chance to become better as a PM is working at a great company. And how do you get that job beyond networking is actually becoming good at interviewing? You know, so if you think about my career, like getting into Slack changed my trajectory and I was able to do that because I got slightly somewhat good enough at like interviewing. I barely got the job. And then I was really good at execution and got better at these other things, you know, product sense, strategy, et cetera. In that phase, you know, the things that I was working on, as I mentioned earlier, were things like improving news or activation. So it relies on those skills, identifying the”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of skills, I think of it in terms of two buckets. One or IQ skills, intellectual skills, like what sometimes people call hard skills. And then the other things are the EQ skills, like oftentimes called soft skills. And what I've seen in my career is that early on, I leaned more into the hard skills, you know, 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. And 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 like start skill by skill. So what I did specifically is, you know, I joined, I was an ICPM. So when you join a new company, especially if you're, you know, like earlier in the mid-career, you really want to get good at things like execution, right? Like IQ skills, like execution, you know, product sense.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so now I'm mostly on the board of these organizations. We have really solid teams for both Black PMs and CodePath. And the teams are just really amazing.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a room, and then to have community. And then from there, I started helping each other. And that grew from 15 to now over 1,000.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now we have a really good team at Black PMs, the CEO Brittany Banks then, and the team, Benin Safu and others have helped put together that amazing conference that I was able to attend. And it's amazing in that it's hard for underrepresented community to see themselves, you know, in podcasts, at conferences, at speakers, you know, that sort of thing. So it gave that opportunity. And it also enables us to realize that you're not alone. Because part of why I created Black PMs with my co-founders is, actually, I'll tell you the story. I think it was around 2016. I was at a barbecue. I met another Black PM, Mariana Quigless. I didn't know her. And I was like, oh, you're a black PM at Facebook. How many of you are there at the company, you know? And we're joking. And we're like, hey, I bet we can list all the black PMs we know. And we had basically roughly 15 between the two of us. We're like, hey, let's bring them all together.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are nonprofits that I wasn't actually setting out to build them. It's more like I had the need myself or I wish I had those sort of support when I was earlier in my career. And then I started helping folks. And then one thing led to the other, especially my co-founders. And then these became big.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outside of my work at YouTube now, and also my family and young kids, I'm also involved with two nonprofits that I co-founded. Both of them are actually about improving diversity in tech, which is something I'm really passionate about. The first one is called CodePath, and it's improving diversity for software engineers. And the second one is Black PM's focused on product management. So we've code past specifically. What we do is we train over 5,000 students every year at universities. Typically the university strong underrepresented populations. And we help them find internships and jobs at top tech companies. And with Black PMs, we have a community of over 1,000 PMs and aspiring PMs. And then we help them find community and also grow their skills. So both of them”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's many, many stories. My experience was I got in, didn't know much about growth, and then through mentorship in particular, one mentor Bengali Kaba, sort of learned how to apply growth frameworks to my work. And when I did that within six months, I was able to ship changes in the news or experience, especially on mobile, that moved the needle by a lot, like double digit percentages within July Sigmund. And we're talking about top line metrics like activation. So it was just interesting, like being able to have such impact very quickly at a company. And then the company itself went through all these milestones. You know, we started, you know, I mentioned I joined at 50 million. The next thing, you know, it's 100, you know, anything keep doubling, going through a public offering. So there's just so many stories that are unique to hypergrowth.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I joined Slot early twenty sixteen and the role that was available at the time was growth. I did not know anything about growth, but I was like, hey, you know, this is my way in at such a great company. So that's what I joined to do. And then what I did there was really take a learning mindset and lean on mentors. And we can talk about that to really learn the, you know, the practice of growth and apply it for Slack.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's really, really hard to get into product. And there isn't a really set path to do that. So, what I've seen is that we just talked about join a startup. And then from there go into different companies. And then the other path is that Estipois being at a company and then switching to product management. Especially if you develop domain expertise and there's a need for APM. So that's even more frequent. Of course, there's also acquisitions, you know, that sort of thing. But making that initial transition is really hard.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And then over time, we're adding more exciting content onto the product. We just recently announced that we're adding NFL Sunday ticket in 2023 to primetime channels and also to YouTube TV. So it's been a really exciting project.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where I'm driving a product called Primetime Channels, which actually recently launched in November in the US. And in that product, we're bringing streaming services to YouTube so that users can watch their favorite movies, shows, and sports content.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, happy too. So, some quick background. Grew up in Haiti, studied computer science in college, went to business school. My first career was actually not in tech. It was in medical devices. I was a GM for a company based out of friends and also overseeing West Africa business for them. After doing that, I moved back to the US, launched my own startup, which didn't work out. And then I moved to the Bay Area roughly eight years ago. And in the Bay Area, I wanted to become a PM, which was really hard to get into. So at first, I joined a startup, Series A company, became head of product for them, and then joined Slack as the first PM on their growth team. And then from there, I helped scale the growth team at Slack. When I joined Revenue was around 50 million, when I left, roughly four years ago was 10x da. And then after Slack, I recently joined YouTube, Google about two years ago. And at Google, I'm a product leader at YouTube.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you give me feedback, I'll be like, hey, thank you so much. This is super helpful because people are like, oh, he actually likes the feedback. Now, inside, my heart might be melting. You know what I'm like, I thought I got better at this. You know what I mean? Externally, I'm like, hey, thank you. And I mean it. And I think that's the key that most people don't focus on. And if you get more feedback, then you'll just get better at the things.”
2023-01-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career | Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source